Timothy McLean’s speech in Suzhou

“Lean for SME Manufacturing Enterprises” Workshop, co-hosted by TXM Lean Solutions and Jingshanghui – Lean Academy, has been a great success with the Managing Director of TXM, Tim McLean who talked about “Lean Manufacturing As a Lever for Growth for Small and Medium Sized Manufacturers” on November 11th, 2015. The Consulting Director of TXM China, Justin Tao, also attended the workshop and interpreted the speech into Chinese.

Tim McLean has spent over 25 years leading and assisting more than 100 small and medium sized manufacturing operations. In the beginning of the workshop, Tim explained that Small Medium Enterprises’ management mode is different from big corporations’. SME manufacturers are usually focused on growth, while suffering diseconomies of scale, which means profit margin and cash flow goes down when sales go up. After seeing so many SMEs stall because of poor process that leads to rising costs, Tim started to think how SMEs could benefit from Lean and change this paradigm.

Tim got the attendees to think about the driving costs in their business, the key levers on costs and how business growth impacts costs. After that, he provided the keys to Lean success in SME with global case studies of SME Lean implementation.

• Have clear strategic goals
• Align the management team
• Map value streams
• Set and maintain high standards
• Develop the front line leaders
• Simple solutions are the best
• Establish simple and relevant measures

In the end, statistics showed an increase in productivity of all TXM clients that leads to higher margins, lower inventory and more cash to support growth of their business. The key factor to improve SME competitiveness is to apply Lean. Lean is hard – but stick with it – IT WORKS.

Tim delivered the presentation to an audience of nearly 70 attendees and got a very warm applause in the end. After the workshop, Tim gave away his book “Grow Your Factory – Grow Your Profit: Lean for Small and Medium Sized Manufacturing Enterprises”. Justin also gave away “The Machine That Changed The World – The Story of Lean Production”, the Lean book that he translated into Chinese.

If you want to learn more about lean for SME, please contact our TXM lean consultants directly by email to [email protected]. If you want to know more about lean events, please follow TXM’s Wechat (ID: txmchina). We will post the latest lean activities, blogs, news and videos for you.