Where assembly plants build things like automobiles, cell phones, refrigerators, and medical instruments, process plants transform materials from one form or concentration to another using chemical and physical processing. These transforming processes result in consumer products like house paint, toothpaste, salad dressing, shampoo, carpeting, and breakfast cereal, or materials like plastic pellets and synthetic fibers which become inputs to other processes.
Peter King, founder and president of Lean Dynamics, has forty years experience applying systems engineering and industrial engineering concepts to a wide variety of process operations, the last twenty of that specializing in Lean applications.
To help you better understand the unique characteristic that define the process industries and how they can be optimized using adapted Lean concepts and tools, free copies of the following Powerpoint presentations are available by contacting us:
The Process Industries – A different Kind of Manufacturing – the characteristics that make process operations different from assembly operations, and why Lean concepts must be adapted to be successful.
SMED for the Process Industries - improving product changeovers using a version of SMED (Single Minute Exchange of Dies) expanded for process changeovers.
Cellular Manufacturing in the Process Industries - the application of Cellular Manufacturing to process plant operations.
Heijunka By Product Wheels – Production Leveling in the Process Industries - how production leveling and Heijunka methods can be successfully applied to process operations using a concept called Product Wheels.
