Orbit charts, and why you should use them
This “respect for people stuff”
Metrics in Lean – Chart junk in performance boards and presentations
Lean implementers: don’t forget engineering!
Presenting “Lean, TQM, Six Sigma, TOC, Agile and BPR” to the ISPI in Reno, NV
Lean is from Toyota, not Ford, and not 15th-century Venice boat builders
New assembly methods at Toyota
MIT article comparing Lean, TQM, Six Sigma, “and related enterprise process improvement methods”
Deming’s Point 10 of 14 – Eliminate slogans and exhortations
Deming’s Point 9 of 14 – Break down barriers between departments
Takt time – More about origins in German aircraft manufacturing
Deming’s Point 7 of 14 – Institute Leadership
Deming’s Point 5 of 14 – Improve Constantly and Forever the System of Production and Service
Safety Stocks: More about the formula
Metrics in Lean – Part 5 – Lead times and inventory
Lean and national cultures: interview in Russia’s Business Excellence magazine
Why “Smart” part numbers should be replaced with keys and property lists
Metrics in Lean – Part 4 – Gaming and how to prevent it
Just-in-time and disasters
Metrics in Lean – Part 1 – Requirements
More musings on “Muda” (Waste)
Improvement in a silo
Having just bought and assembled an Ikea office chair, I couldn’t help but marvel at the clarity off their assembly instructions all in the form of sparse, black-and-white line drawings, without a single word. They are easy to follow, almost mistake-proof, cheap to print, and usable worldwide.
They should be a source of inspiration for operator instructions in a manufacturing setting, with the understanding that additional instructions are needed, like torque specs on the bolts.
My fellow consultant and author Euclides Coimbra has only written two reviews on Amazon, both on July 3, 2006, giving five stars to my books Lean Assembly and Lean Logistics, and commenting as follows:
A few months later, I went to work for him, and grew to appreciate his consulting talents. We parted later on good terms and I considered him a friend.
I just received a copy of his 2013 book, Kaizen in Logistics & Supply Chains, and found much overlap in subject matter with the two books of mine that he previously considered a “wonderful contribution” and a “must have.” I assume he changed his mind because they are not in the bibliography, and I couldn’t find my name anywhere in his book.
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
“Lean manufacturing practices can create efficiency and reduce waste, but smaller inventories put companies at risk for major supply chain disruptions. Many organizations are reconsidering their procurement strategies for emergency preparedness after discovering their operational vulnerability in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, as well as the flooding in Thailand, according to Lloyd’s.”
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 tp 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.
See on www.strategicsourceror.com
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
Dakkota Systems’ instrument panel factory is joined at the hip to Chrysler’s Windsor minivan assembly plant.
See on www.autonews.com
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
Pete Selleck
“…It’s brand image,” he explained. “There is tremendous value to the perception of trust—customers don’t want to worry about the products they buy; they want it to be trouble free. We can offer them that….
We all use the same equipment to make tire, so we know it’s not the equipment that makes the difference. It’s the interface between the equipment, the material and the person—the training and the qualification of the person—that makes the difference.”
I see two key statements in this article, both quoted above:
See on www.industryweek.com
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
The key is to ensure that before program start-up, the organisation’s leaders buy-in to the fact that their lean management program must be viewed from a whole-of-business perspective.”
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.
See on www.foodmag.com.au
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
“Southland’s dairy farms and economy could reap the benefits of a manufacturing programme designed to increase efficiency in the industry.
The Venture Southland-led Lean Manufacturing Programme focuses on enhancing on-farm performance, reducing input costs and developing the skills and knowledge of farmers by identifying areas where efficiency gains can be made.”
Based on the article, it boils down to 5S.
See on i.stuff.co.nz
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
“In my experience these are ten reasons why Lean implementation fails:
Would my top 10 list be exactly the same? Probably not, but there would be extensive overlap.
See on www.aleanjourney.com
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
While I concur with Bill on the irrelevance of “Big Data” in manufacturing, I can’t follow him when he says it is a “singularly bad idea” for business in general.
Big Data, per se, is actually not an idea but a phenomenon experienced in companies like Google, Amazon, eBay, Netflix, and others that process clicks, queries and transactions from millions of users, and generatie Terabytes of data every day. This is what Big Data is. Making sense of it is vital to these companies, and its volume requires special technology.
Even in a large manufacturing company, specs, orders, production status and history, quality problem reports, etc., add up to Gibabytes of data in total, not Terabytes every day. While it is beyond what you can handle on an Excel spreadsheet, it does not qualify as Big Data and does not require the special technology that ecommerce companies have developed.
I also agree that the hot dog example from the HBR blog is simplistic. To give a less trivial example, assume you are in the business of providing streaming videos, and you discover from your customer data that those who view “Tora, Tora, Tora” also tend to view “The Bridges of Madison County.” That is unexpected and you wonder why. Then you find out that the customers who view both are married couples, form which you infer that the wife demands a chick flick for every aircraft-carrier movie…
This is a made-up example, but Ed Frazelle, in Supply Chain Strategy, quotes a real one about on-line ordering patterns for clothing. What kind of garments do customers tend to order together? I have asked that question around, and never met anyone who came up with the right answer, although, once you know it, it makes perfect sense: they order the same garment, in the same size, in different colors. And it is good to know if you are in charge of order picking.
See on www.idatix.com
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
“The traditional lean approach [...] omits the customer from the scenario—a rather glaring omission. The other approach, though, is extended lean, which goes beyond the plant level to include the customer and other supply chain partners. ‘Traditional lean works on processes within the plant,’ Lail says, ‘whereas extended lean connects the entire supply chain.’”
I am sure many others familiar with TPS and Lean will find the notion of a Lean approach that “omits the customer” as objectionable as I do. The gist of the article is that textile manufacturer Valdese Weavers survived by ignoring manufacturing and focusing instead on moving full truckloads.
This puts the Valdese Weavers experience in direct contradiction with that of companies that have seen the pursuit of transportation efficiency degrade ratther than enhance their overall performance, as documented, for example, in the work of Hau Lee.
See on www.industryweek.com
