Lean Dynamics LLC                                                                            

Product Wheels are a way of scheduling the manufacture of the number of product types that must be made on any asset in a high mix environment.   Wheel design creates standard production sequences and frequencies in a way that eliminates frequent repetition of low volume products and simplifies changeovers so that throughput increases, inventory decreases, and customer delivery performance increases.  The stability and predictability offered by wheels lower the chaos levels frequently found in manufacturing scheduling.  The standard patterns and predictable inventory requirements dramatically reduce the number of rush jobs to be scheduled, and provide the schedulers more bandwidth to manage the rush orders that do come in.

Product Wheels offer so much benefit that they are one of Lean Dynamics’ most requested offerings.



All of the optimization done by wheels is guided by whatever the business objectives and priorities are, be they very short cycles to enhance agility and responsiveness or longer cycles to better balance changeover costs with inventory costs.

Product wheels can be considered a very effective way to achieve the Lean goal of Heijunka (production leveling).  Wheels are operated by Lean Pull Replenishment (Kanban) principles which is one key factor in the inventory improvement achieved with wheels.

TheProductWheel.com is a collaboration between Improvium in Europe and Lean Dynamics in the US to advance Product Wheel thinking, strategies, and applications.



  Wheels were recently applied to a nutraceutical operation with 10 packaging lines and almost a thousand packaged SKUs.  The wheels simplified changeovers enough to improve OEE by 12 – 14 points, with the resulting throughput improvement allowing all packaging to be done on two fewer lines.  Annual, on-going savings were $1.5 million, with NO capital expenditures required.  Product Wheels are now being stabilized and fine-tuned at three additional packaging operations, with a total expected savings in excess of $4 million. 

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Lean Dynamics offers coaching in

• Wheel strategy – where in the process to put wheels
• Wheel design
• Wheel start-up and operation
• Integrating wheels with the ERP system

Lean Dynamics offers a three-day course covering all of the above, where students learn the principles and then design a wheel for a real chemical process.

The wheel design process collects and assembles a significant amount of process data, and then organizes it in a way that facilitates better mid-range planning of resource, material, and component needs.  Lean Dynamics offers services to help client make best use of this capability.

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