November 11, 2014. Yekaterinburg-based Plant 9 (a member enterprise of Uralvagonzavod Corporation) is switching to lean manufacturing, the corporation’s press service reports.

This is the corporation’s fourth enterprise to go lean. Plant 9 placed its Development Department experts in charge of supervising the implementation of the system and coordination of employee training and involvement. These experts will also come up with reports, implementation stages schedules, and guidelines on meeting deadlines and budgets.

Lean manufacturing proved quite an efficient business concept at the corporation’s member enterprises. Lean was first introduced at Uralvagonzavod’s Volchansky subsidiary in 2011 and then at Omsktransmash in 2013. In the summer of 2014, one of the corporation’s Chelyabinsk-based plants, Electromachine, went lean as well. Results were not long in coming: all the enterprises report their work discipline has improved, labor productivity increased, the time spent on treatment and distribution of parts has been reduced, and product quality grew higher.

Lean manufacturing is a management philosophy for the coordination of product development, technological processes, and customer and supplier relations that allows the producer to make goods of the best possible quality and reduce labor, space, capital, and time costs.