Lean webinar
7. Energy Webinar
Given food is a soft product how fully can lean practices be applied? Submitted by Brian Guagliardo.
Jeremy Praud: “Classic Lean is derived from observations of Toyota’s approach to making improvement. Automotive and FMCG have very different financial ratios – be that asset cost to direct labour, or product cost to raw material cost. The fundamental thinking of lean is sound, but these ratios do have an impact on many of the implicit assumptions that have been used to develop lean implementation programmes.
“As such, understanding these differences, and using an implementation approach that is tailored for FMCG (be that food, beverage, or household) is crucial. Classic lean can then be discarded in favour of Rapid lean (which uses a different improvement toolkit), but the end results are the same. It is just a different manner of getting there”