lean manufacturing

Since when is purchasing parts from half-way around the world a "Lean manufacturing practice"? Toyota and Honda do import parts into the US from Japan, but they have been working steadily to increase the domestic content of the cars they build in the US. 

In a Lean supply chain, you use as many local suppliers as possible and  only buy from afar if you can't help it. And local suppliers are subject to the same disasters as you, and inventory in the pipeline is just one more asset that can be destroyed in the earthquake or tsunami. 

In the late 1930s, the German aircraft industry organized its supply chain in a system called "ABC," which involved frequent deliveries from nearby suppliers and almost no inventory at the assembly site. It was in anticipation of a man-made disaster: enemy air raids. Allied bombs could not destroy components that had yet to be made. 

The article just reiterates the old belief that you can protect yourself against shortages by holding inventory. It may work for crude oil, but not for the 30,000 items needed to build a car. To protect against a Fukushima type event, you would have to keep weeks of safety stocks of all the items all the time, which is not a practical idea. 

Based on the article, it boils down to 5S.

While not a story about manufacturing, it is a cautionary tale that manufacturing professionals who use Excel should ponder.

It is about two economists from a prestigious institution whose sweeping conclusions have been leading foreign governments to adopt disastrous policies and fueled the argument in favor of the same policies in the US. 

Reviewing the Harvard paper, researchers Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin have discovered that Reinhart and Rogoff had selectively excluded data, calculated averages in "unusual ways," and made a mistake in an Excel calculation. 

On the face of it, the general sloppiness of the work would be forgivable in a summer intern, but the Excel error should give us pause. When inputting the range of a sum, they didn't drag the cursor down far enough and left five rows out.

With Excel, this kind of error is easy to make and difficult to detect. In spreadsheets generated by others, I have found products with no sales showing positive revenues, and formulas with exponents applied to the wrong parameters. And I suspect others may have found errors in my own. 

Following are a few recommendations that may protect you from egg on your face:

1. Use meaningful names for cells and ranges. Refer to cells as "GDP" or "Viscosity" rather than "A3" or "RR1." It will be easier to validate formulas, as they will more closely resemble their mathematical forms and errors will stand out. 

2. Break down complex formulas into simple ones, with additional cells or columns for intermediate results. 

3. Include comments explaining your calculations.

4. Whenever possible, use built-in functions or pre-existing templates from a trusted source. 

5. Explain the innards of your spreadsheet to a colleague for validation, and return the favor. 

6. Use Excel for calculations and graphic displays, but NOT as a database management system (DBMS). Use a real DBMS for data storage and retrieval. 

Perhaps, Mr, Nakagawa has not heard of Google Nose, the app announced on April 1. 

More details about Chrysler's training academy.

If you have been wondering about the specifics of Lean in the Australian bottle cap industry, the article will disappoint you.

It is a generic discussion about management, strategy, training, and metrics, with arguable points that could be made about any business, from car making to slaughtering pigs and selling insurance. All you would need to do is change the title and the picture. 

Without setting foot in an bottle cap plant in Australia, however, it is not difficult to imagine some of the specific challenges the industry faces, like a market of only 23 million consumers spread over an area almost as large as the US.

Given that resin pellets and pigments are less bulky than caps, they are easier to truck around and you might wonder whether this leads the industry to set up many small plants near customers rather than a few large plants. 

You might also wonder whether they are delivered to customers as heaps in bins or in sleeves with a controlled orientiation for easy feeding into capping machines... 

These are just a few of the questions the article does NOT answer. So why clip it? To successfully implement Lean in a new industry, you need these answers and many others about its management and its technology.

Then you need to work with managers and engineers to not only copy approaches and tools from other indusries, but also adapt them and invent new ones as needed. The article's authors may have done this, but it is not what they are sharing. 

Would my top 10 list be exactly the same? Probably not, but there would be extensive overlap. 

In the current issue of Reliable Plant, Darren Dolcemascolo explains the concept and the value of one-piece flow in simple terms, including the prerequisites for it to work. 

A well-documented case of Lean implementation at a just-in-sequence supplier ot seats to Toyota's plant in San Antonio, TX. An oddity of this case is that they lump under the "5S" label all sorts of changes that are well beyond it, such as redesigning part presentation at assembly to make frequently used items easily accessible, or kitting parts. 

Of course, as long as it works for them, they can call it whatever they want. For communication with the rest of us, however, as Jeffrey found, it is confusing. 

Insightful comments. Keep up the good work.

This blog post by the CEO of Virginia Mason sheds some light on the specifics of the "Virginia Mason Production System." He confirms that the focus has been on administrative tasks to allow doctors and nurses to spend more time with patients, rather than on what happens while the doctor or the nurse is with the patient.

What he describes involves breaking down communications and administrative transactions in "small lots," organizing groups of contiguous rooms into "cells," and reassigning tasks to better leverage available skills.