Lean management : an essential and transversal approach in our factories

The lean management approach implemented in our factories is fundamental and cross-cutting. It helps to optimize our industrial performance and strengthen our management systems on a daily basis.

It is a way of making our processes more streamlined and agile in terms of both production and support activities. Specifically, using this strategy has enabled us to shorten lead times for the goods manufactured in our factories and to boost our processes, allowing us to meet our customers’ ever-growing Time-to-Market concerns.

To support us in this process, we rely on a systematization of Kaizen approaches. Which means, at all levels, our employees receive training in the methods used so that they can lead the way in future areas for continuous improvement. Being supported through the change is essential for making lean management a pillar of our corporate culture.

Our Smart Industry strategy

Supported by managers, our teams first carried out “Value Stream Mapping” on our production flows and “Swimlanes” on our support services. These two steps serve to analyze our value chain in order to gain an overview of flows and sources of waste. They enabled the targets, aims and action plans for each improvement area to be established.

Our project teams have drawn up transformation plans and set up task forces to prepare for the future with a customer-oriented organization. The aim is to develop our production processes into self-contained, “One-Piece-Flow” cells with pull system production.

Thanks to the LACROIX Daily Meeting performance management system, each member involved in the process is able to contribute so that sources of improvement can be shared across all levels.

This approach has vastly increased team involvement and thus strengthened our organization:

• 241 projects completed by 2021
• Significant reduction of waste and stock
• Optimization of product transit times in the plant: over 50% time saved for certain products, with a significant improvement in customer service
• Continuous improvement of our industrial performance
• Enhanced customer satisfaction

Team involvement and daily management of these improvement areas have enabled us to implement many effective solutions, and many more to come!

This way, continuous improvement allows our teams to keep a sharp eye on how to optimize their work and improve industrial performance at every stage of the production. With this approach, we are able to take a look at the future and evolve with our environment. It is one of the many key to help us stay a leader of the electronic sector.

Dive deeper into our lean management approach with our next article : Lean Management 4.0 has come to LACROIX!

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