The Selma Times-Journal

Bush Hog is on schedule to complete the nearly $12 million renovation and consolidation that has been ongoing for several months.

Bush Hog President and CEO Dennis Webster said the company has spent nearly half the funds allocated to complete the project, and said the project is likely to finish on budget. Renovations are scheduled to be finished in either May or June, Webster said.

The company is still in the process of working through possible street closings at Plant and Vine Streets.

Webster said the initial training for employees to learn the lean manufacturing process is 90 percent complete. The lean manufacturing process is the same process Toyota uses to manufacture cars, Webster said. Equipment is built-to-order instead of built-to-batch and works to eliminate waste.

Webster said Bush Hog will be working with a couple of basic models that deal with materials handling, inventory, root-cause analysis, and elimination of waste. The terms used to describe the process have ranged from &8220;just-in-time&8221; manufacturing, &8220;demand-flow&8221; technology, and now lean manufacturing.

The Toyota Production system identifies three categories of waste in the production process, described by the Japanese words &8220;muda,&8221; &8220;mura,&8221; and &8220;muri.&8221; Under the umbrella of &8220;moda,&8221; seven steps in the production process are identified as the most commonly wasteful: overproduction, transportation, inventory, the managing of handling waiting time between steps, overprocessing equipment, and the handling of defective products.

Michael Goss, spokesman for Toyota Motor Engineering and Manufacturing North America, said the method contributes to safety and leads to higher quality.