5. Lean Management tools

5.1 Grouped by product family

As we've just seen, a lean transformation is not going to be carried out on the company as a whole, but on a specific product family. It is therefore essential to identify this family before starting anything.

A product family can be defined as a set of products that undergo essentially the same operations in their overall transformation process. A product family in the lean sense of the term does not necessarily correspond to the commercial families in the catalog, which may take account of commercial and marketing considerations.

To identify product families, we need to analyze their processing ranges and compare them in a matrix, with products in rows and resources in columns (figure