Building a "Lean" Kitty

Lean manufacturing is a strategy. Essentially, it's about reducing waste wherever it occurs in the organization. Lean wastes include excess inventory, excessive movement, over-production, and the list goes on... The goal of "Lean" is ridding the system of these wastes, along with the costs associated with those wastes.

During these tough economic times, and skyrocketing commodities costs it's essential to begin the journey of being lean, especially in the boat industry. It's what allows us to hold price increases to a minimum while operating profitably, and most importantly stay in business while others are not.

At World Cat we are committed to running a lean organization, and that includes our product development process too! The goals of eliminating waste are especially important in PD and is what has made companies such as Toyota not good but great!

The results of a lean PD process are getting the product right the first time, less rework and engineering changes, shorter lead times and most importantly designing and building with the customer in mind up front. Customer value drives the PD process from start to finish... if we don't build what the customer wants, then why are we building it at all?

I receive many questions on how we take products from concept to production from readers of this blog. I've tried to detail the steps of what we do in this blog and will continue to do so in the future. Additionally, I'm going to widen the scope of this blog to talk about our manufacturing and lean initiatives as well.

The next 6-18 months will be an exciting journey for us as a company, hopefully you'll come meets us for a factory tour and learn firsthand about the journey we're taking to be not just good, but great!