Lean management:
Almost 20 years of experience in reducing waste

Lean management involves organising all processes at the company in such a way as to eliminate any activities that do not create value for our customers. This includes, for instance, superfluous movement, unnecessary waiting times, unneeded warehousing and redundant transport.

Alongside the usual strategies, our lean approach is based on two important pillars:

• Continual improvement: At Ringele, we implement more than 4,000 improvements every year – thanks to our continual optimisation process. For our employees, it is a matter of daily routine to scrutinise all workflows at the company on an ongoing basis, identify opportunities for improvement, suggest solutions and put these into practice – e.g. to make a workflow more efficient, to introduce a new material or to further optimise order in the workplace.
• Flowing production: Our production activities are driven by the flow principle and one-piece flow. The aim of the flow principle is to harmonise the individual production steps in such a way that a product can be processed continuously, without intermediate storage. With one-piece flow, all parts pass through the entire production process individually, one immediately after the other. Thus, employees only process one workpiece at a time and accompany it through the individual processing steps.

Specifically, leanness helps us:

• Avoid waste, for instance in the form of overproduction, waiting times, transport and storage.
• Provide the right parts at the right place and time within the process chain.
• Produce in close contact with our customers and provide continual flow within their supply chains.
• Reconfigure our machines quickly and switch between different batch sizes flexibly.
• Identify and rectify problems automatically and promptly.

For our customers, this not only means that innovations reach the market faster, but also that better and cheaper solutions are created, which is an immediate financial advantage of lean management.