Lean Manufacturing

Best Practices Mini-Assessment

Great companies strive to reduce waste, increase flexibility, and decrease lead times while still providing their customers with high-quality products by employing a variety of lean manufacturing techniques. How does your company compare against the best? Take our mini-assessment to find out!

  • Our company's sales per employee (total sales divided by number of full time employees)
  • The number of times our inventory turns over per year
  • Our percent of on-time deliveries
  • Our product passes quality checks the first time through this percentage of the time
  • The time to change-over our key process measured from last good piece
    to first good piece of next product
  • The percentage of unplanned downtime of key equipment
  • The percentage of product lines that are set up to manufacture product
    with minimal WIP between steps
  • Our workstations contain posted and updated standard work procedures
  • Our operators are cross-trained
  • Reduction in throughput time during the last year on our key product(s)
  • Our scrap rate
  • We have visual controls (signs, pictures, procedures, etc.)
    in place at this percentage of our workstations
  • The number of suggestions implemented per employee per year
  • Dedicated continuous improvement (Kaizen) events held per year
  • The percentage of on-time delivery from our major suppliers
  • Equipment currently covered by a Total Productive Maintenance program
  • The percent of product families for which the value stream has been mapped
  • The percent of plant areas that have a sustainable program
    for cleaning, sorting, and removing unused items/equipment and organizing remaining items
    using the 5S Methodology
  • Our workforce is organized in empowered teams to address performance, quality, or safety issues
  • Team meetings are held


Assessment courtesy of our NIST/MEP partner, the GENEDGE Alliance.

Purdue University’s Technical Assistance Program is the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) center for the State of Indiana.