LeanPlus bags L&T order

Chennai: The American consulting firm, LeanPlus, has been selected by L&T in Chennai to advise on lean manufacturing. Speaking about the deal, LeanPlus president Michael T Wader said the assignment is for a week to train the employees on lean practices, negotiations are on for longer term.

Earlier, LeanPlus has provided consultancy to Indian organisations like GlaxoSmithKline Ltd's tablet unit in Mysore, Vijaya Wires and Filaments, Confederation of Indian Industry (CII). "At GlaxoSmithKline, loss of raw materials and energy were reduced by 75 per cent and 20 per cent respectively. "The savings equals over 3 per cent of the units annual sales," he claims.

"Our approach is to provide hands-on training but first we will do what is called `lean assessment' where we look for over-production, wasted motion, defects and rework, transportation waste, excess inventory and over processing." The assessment provides the opportunities for cost reduction. The firm also does value stream mapping to spot value adding and non value adding processes.

The consulting firm has twelve full time consultants. In India, Wader formally launched LeanPlus' operations on March 7, 2005. The Indian operations will be headquartered in Chennai. A pocket-sized book titled, Lean Tools authored by Wader was also released.