The food industry is vast and serves hundreds of millions of people each year, more than any other industry. The complex industry includes:
Partially because of its complex nature and because it has arguably the largest consumer base, the food industry is taxed with keeping up with trends, like gluten free and organic products. To make things more difficult, consumers expect products to be fresh, free from defects, and safe for consumption.
To meet these challenges, the food industry has turned to lean manufacturing tools like Value Stream Mapping (VSM) and 5S to keep pace with the needs of consumers as well as improve quality.
VSM is a visual lean tool that helps organizations optimize manufacturing and production. Using these maps, you can analyze your current process, highlight problems, and develop complete solutions to best serve your customers. This is accomplished by mapping out the relationship between all aspects of the process and then identifying problems like waste, defects, and so on. The visual map makes it easier to find problems as well as track improvements as they are implemented.
VSM can help make the needs of consumers obvious. According to an article from the United States National Library of Medicine, VSM helped companies in the food industry identify issues in production, processing, storage, distribution, and food service that resulted in significant waste. For one company, this waste was not simply the loss of goods. It also caused them to lose customers, reducing sales. Using VSM, this company identified production processes that reduced the foods' nutritional value. It became clear that what consumers wanted was changing. Consumers were becoming more health-conscious and valued highly nutritious food. The company saw the need for change and improved their production process to provide a higher quality product-improving their sales by meeting the needs of their customers.
Another benefit of lean manufacturing is that it can help eliminate contamination in the food industry. Contamination can come from many places, including:
To help eliminate food contamination, lean tools like 5S provide a systematic method for improving organization, creating a cleaner environment, and improving how work is done through process improvement.
Request the Best Practice Guide to the 5S System and begin improving your facility's efficiency, organization, and cleanliness. This helpful guide includes checklists, training material and much more to get you started.
There are many ways you can get started with lean and many tools that you can choose to start with. The 5S system is often selected as the first tool a company implements because of its five powerful steps, which are implemented sequentially:
Give your 5S program a boost by implementing labeling and floor marking. Some common uses include:
Reduce your costs, improve quality, and make your workplace more efficient with a free Best Practice Guide to 5S by Duralabel. Download your free copy below.