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In Lean, paying attention to shop floor details is a strategy, a point that is often lost in "high-level" discussions. This story is a concrete kaizen case study and a good reminder: it is about eliminating overspray and time lost changing drums of coating material.
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Michel Baudin shared this post on WordPress. (February 10, 12:33 PM) |
lean manufacturing
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The author of this PDF document, Greg Lane, "learned this simple method while working for Toyota. There is nothing profound in these simple ideas..."
OSKKK stands for the following: 1. Observe 2. Standardize materials, motions, tasks and management. 3. Kaizen 1 - Improve information and materials flow and process 4. Kaizen 2 - Improve equipment 5. Kaizen 3 - Improve layout 
An article on how Tesla is reviving the shuttered NUMMI plant in Fremont, CA, with a production line designed by Toyota Alumnus Gilbert Passin.
When demand dropped off a cliff -- only to bounce back dramatically a year later -- a lean overhaul helped the truck-trailer manufacturer diversify and create the flexibility it needed to survive. 
This article is a critical review of a book called Lean Startup that I have not read yet and won't comment about. The review itself, however, contains some surprising statements, about, for example, ISO-9000 being a technique that emerged as part of Lean, or a about Lean being "a system designed to produce a million identical, high-quality Corollas, Camrys, and Siennas." I am used to thinking of ISO-9000 as the product of an international body that is unrelated to Lean, and whose implementation is centered on compliance with generic procedures rather than effectiveness. This is not exactly the Lean approach to quality. The reviewer also appears to be confusing Lean with the system developed by Ford for Model Ts 100 years ago. Lean actually includes approaches to production for Low-Volume/High-Mix as well as High-Volume/Low-Mix environments. 
A case study, presented by the plant manager. 
I don't agree with everything this blogger says, particularly when he describes the establishment of the Roman empire as a "short term" fix. In my book, 400 years of peace and prosperity is beyond the short term...
On the other hand, I think he is right when he says that "Kaizen event" are not performing continuous improvement. As an oxymoron, "Kaizen Blitz" is even better: it mixes Japanese and German in a concoction that literally means "lightning strike of continuous improvement." The so-called "Kaizen event" is a good tool when applied to the right opportunities, but there are two problems with it: 1. Its promise of instant gratification has made it popular in the US that all other means of implementing change are forgotten. It is a problem because it leads organizations to ignore opportunities that are too small or too large. Wrapping the feet of a welding fixture with aluminum foil to make it easier to clean is too small; redesigning the layout of a machine shop, too large. 2. It has misled particularly Americans about the meaning of Kaizen, about which there is an abundant Japanese literature that makes no reference to anything resembling Kaizen Events. In fact, the improvements that are called Kaizen are too small for Kaizen events and the two implementation methods for them are individual suggestions and small-group/circle activity. As a consequence, there is no Kaizen activity going on even in plants that run dozens of "Kaizen events" every year, and it is a lost opportunity. The French did even worse by calling the same method "Hoshin Events," literally meaning "compass needle event." The equally unfortunate consequence is that it makes it impossible to discuss Hoshin Planning with them. 
This guest post on Mark Graban's blog treats an important but often neglected subject. It forgets, however, what I see as the number one problem with tool cribs: operators leaving their work stations to fetch tools. In some machine shops, you see a line of machinists waiting in line at the tool crib while machines and work pieces stand idle.
This article quotes Paul Myerson as saying that manufacturers preferred to "lean out within their four walls before working heavily with customers and suppliers." While I have heard this from many sources, I do not believe it is true. Having worked both within the four walls of plants and on their supply chains, I have repeatedly seen manufacturing managers conclude that their manufacturing needed no improvement, and that all the problems were with suppliers. Before Paul Myerson, I also wrote a book on Lean Logistics (http://amzn.to/wdy2Be). In 2005, it was the first on this subject. But I also wrote books on Lean Assembly (http://amzn.to/IR61YV) and Working with Machines (http://amzn.to/HTbzBj), both of which deal with what happens "within the four walls." Guess what? Lean Logistics sells more copies than the other two combined, and I don't think it is a better book. To me, it just means that its subject is getting more attention. Actually, it is getting a disproportionate amount of attention, and too early. Manufacturers SHOULD focus on what happens within their walls first, and fix it. The vast majority, including many claiming to be Lean, have not. Until they do, they have no credibility with their suppliers and no business telling them how to improve.
A Honeywell plant in Lincolnshire, Illinois,, went from being one of the most messed up to one of the best. ....The Economist
Via Karen Wilhelm 
This article asserts the opposite. According to it, "Lean principles are based on Western ideas and methods." I never thought Japan was part of the West. And Lean is supposed to be incompatible with "the teachings of Confucius," that are at least as influential in Japan as in China. According to the author, China has been confucianist for 3,000 years, which puts it at 1,000 BCE. It is interesting, considering that Confucius wasn't born for another 500 years. It is like making Steve Jobs a contemporary of da Vinci.
It might have occurred to the author that there might be more immediate reasons for her problems implementing Lean in the Pearl River Delta. For one, a labor structure that is similar to that of the maquiladoras of the US-Mexico border: girls from the hinterland coming to work in factories for a year or two. For another, in management, the lingering influence of Maoism. All the factories in the world draw their work forces from societies with their own cultural idiosyncrasies. This is equally true in the US, France, Russia, or China. However, once on the shop floor, dealing with machines and production lines, the national culture is little more than background noise. You have to pay attention to the local etiquette, but that is not a show stopper. 
This article includes interesting details about Ohno's background and early life, from someone who has actually met him. 
The floods in Thailand are the latest. Before, there was the Fukushima earthquake and, going back further in time, the Aisin Seiki fire of 1997 in Japan and the Mississippi flood of 1993...
Each time, the press has faulted Lean for making the economic disruptions caused by theses events worse. The actual record is that the vigilance inherent in Lean Logistics and the strength of customer-supplier relationships in a Lean Supply Chain are in fact key to a rapid recovery.
In 1993, Toyota logisticians in Chicago reserved all the trucking available in the area a few days before the flood cut off the rail lines to California, thereby allowing the NUMMI plant to keep working during the flood.
In 1997, when the Aisin Seiki fire deprived Toyota in Japan of its single source of proportioning valves, other suppliers came to the rescue in what the Wall Street Journal a few months later called the business equivalent of an Amish barn raising.
You can, and should protect production against routine fluctuations. That is what tools like Kanbans are countermeasures for. But there is no way you can afford to protect your business against all possible, rare catastrophic events. What you can and must do instead is be vigilant and prepared to respond quickly and creatively to whatever nature or society might throw at you. |
A detailed account of Lean Logistics tools as used by an Indian car manufacturer.
"Amidst all the doom-and-gloom about the death of American manufacturing, the one, simple fact that’s usually forgotten is that we’re still the world’s No. 1 manufacturer. No joke, and not a typo: We produce one fifth of the world’s total manufacturing output.The difference between how Americans once made stuff and how that stuff is made today is that manufacturing in the U.S. has reached a stunning level of efficiency that can be hard to really comprehend. Unless, of course, you visit a factory like the one that makes Herman Miller’s Aeron chair. We recently did, and saw a process which has yielded a 500% increase in productivity and a 1,000% increase in quality since 1998,..." 
A leading multi-brand, multi-channel distributor and retailer of mobile telecommunications devices, accessories and telecom services in the Middle East, Axiom Telecom was recognized for its commitment to customer service and implementation of several globally acclaimed corporate practices such as the Toyota Production System (TPS), 5s, Kaizen, A3 philosophy and customized all of these into its own approach which is the ' Axiom Improvement Management System (AIMS)' program. 
Supplier factories that adopted lean principles showed defect rates 50 per cent lower than those that didn’t. It also revealed delivery lead times from lean factories were, on average, 40 per cent quicker. Productivity increases of 10 to 20 per cent and a reduction in the time taken to introduce a new model by 30 per cent were also reported from lean factories. 
Who else is shocked by a phrase like "Six Sigma, Kaizen, Lean, and other variations on continuous improvement..."?
Since when is Lean a variation on continuous improvement? Instead, continuous improvement is a component of Lean, which includes many features that are not continuous improvement.
Kaizen does not belong in a list in parallel with Lean. It literally means "improvement" and is used in Japan to mean continuous improvement.
Six Sigma is a method developed at Motorola to solve process capability issues and is not related to continuous improvement. 
Focus on lean and get those cost reductions, and more. Every time a natural or human-made disaster occurs, there are journalists and bloggers to see in the resulting supply chain disruption evidence that just-in-time (JIT) is wrong and should be abandoned as an objective. This is based primarily on the perception that JIT means zero inventories. Since zero inventories means zero production, it is obvious that not all inventory is waste. What is waste is unnecessary inventory, which is a bit more subtle because it requires you to tell what is necessary from what is not. There are telltale signs, like thickness of dust or the inability of anyone to tell you what materials are for, but that is the easy part. Beyond that, you have to figure out experimentally what you really need. What JIT really is about is protecting yourself against shortages by vigilance rather than inventory. This means keeping accurate inventory data, monitoring the in- and out-flows, monitoring the discruptions that can be anticipated, and responding quickly to events. The reason to pursue this strategy is that , while protecting yourself against shortages by inventories works with crude oil, it does not when you are dealing with thousands of items. If you try, you end up with full warehouses that happen not to contain the item you need today. When a disaster hits your supply chain, the quick response cannot be yours alone. You need your suppliers' help, and that is why you cannot be in adversarial relationships with them. Long-term, single-source agreements, the regular exchange of business and technical information, and collaborative problem-solving are all necessary to cement the relationships that make a joint emergency response possible.
Komori Press Installation in Maine Celebrated by Governor LePageWhat They Think"By staying two steps ahead with our technology and focusing upon lean manufacturing principles," says Rick Tardiff, President of JS McCarthy, "we have become a leading... 
More about GE's conversion from Six Sigma to Lean: General Electric is able to bring jobs back to America after adopting lean manufacturing to improve efficiency. 
An important topic, but the five skills in the article don't match what I have seen in factories. Requiring supervisors to know how to do every job is tentamount to restricting that position to people who have come up from the ranks of operators. Many effective supervisors do have this background, but it takes them so long to become supervisors that it is usually as far as they go. In many companies, you also encounter supervisors who are recent college grads with an engineering degree and sometimes an MBA, who then move on to other jobs. They obviously can't know the details of every operation, but can be effective if they have team leaders who do.
In knowledge of responsibilities, the article mentions codes and union contracts, but omits the execution of the production plan. In ability to Kaizen, I would broaden this to the ability to lead improvement projects, and the background required for this goes beyond 5S and problem-solving to include line design concepts and some understanding of SMED, cells, heijunka, kanbans, etc. 
The plant is described as a "Toyota-style, lean, manufacturing line." Current GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt does not once mention his predecessor's flagship initiative, Six Sigma. According to Nigeria's Daily Sun, Lean is new there, and we can assume that the version that arrived is the result of a long chain of steps in the telephone game. This is how they describe it: "The Lean programme, [...] was first used as a term in quality improvement system when it was applied to the Toyota Production System (TPS) in the 1980s. Presently it is used by at least 25 percent of Fortune 500 companies in America. When it was first used by GE in 1997, over $400million was gained in the company’s operating income." |
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