Apr 3 2013
A #Lean Look at the #Baseball Jersey Manufacturing Process
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
Chad Walters
Michel Baudin‘s insight:
Insightful comments. Keep it up.
See on leanblitz.net
Search Results for: #Lean,
Apr 30 2020
The Impact Of Social Distancing On Assembly Operations | John Shook | LEI
“Problems and Countermeasures at GE Appliances and Herman Miller:
- Problem 1: Clarify what is the problem to solve
- Problem 2: Ensure each member is coming to work healthy
- Problem 3: Make assembly line work safe for social distancing
- Problem 4: Maintain social distance for Team Leader Andon response
- Problem 5: Apply social distancing to other, non-assembly line, work areas
- Problem 6: Resolve the many other safety concerns that are cropping up
- Cleaning surfaces
- Cleaning air – Ventilation
- PPE
- …”
Source lean.org
Michel Baudin‘s comments: John Shook’s writings are usually more polished. This one feels like notes from conversations with managers from GE Appliances (GEA) and Herman-Miller (HM). It goes straight into the heart of the matter with no lead or introduction and with acronyms that are not defined but easy to decypher, like “TT” for Takt Time. This tone actually infuses the article with a sense of urgency. It reads like an unvarnished look at what is actually happening and it contains many informative photographs of the shop floors.
For each problem, GEA and HM give pointers on making assembly work safe from COVID-19 but I have a few questions the article does not address:
- How do you protect assembly workers from infection through the products? Social distancing protects them from each other’s breaths but an infected worker’s hand can contaminate a workpiece. The workpiece can then, in turn, infect the next worker’s hand. The article does not discuss means of disinfecting workpieces between stations.
- What does distancing do to assembly operations? For decades, we have been bringing workstations closer together, to make it easier for operators to help each other and run multiple stations when the volume is lower. Now, we have to go in the opposite direction.
#socialdistancing, #assembly, #leanmanufacturing, #covid19
Jan 13 2020
New Year Lost and Found | John Shook | Planet Lean
“As many of us are wont to do, I reflected a bit over the holidays. As always, it wasn’t hard to find ample fodder on both sides of the hope vs despair ledger: we have so much cause for concern around us, but also plenty to rejoice about. […] This year’s reflection confirms what I’ve found over many years: when seeming to lose something of great value, if you look you can find that something new has come along to offer welcome and perhaps unexpected value.[…]
As a noteworthy attempt to shed light on the lean and digital muddle, I turn to Christoph Roser’s Industry 4.0 Discovery Bus Tour of Geeks. Christoph rented a bus and invited interested parties to join in a tour to try to figure out exactly what is all this noise about Industry 4.0. The Geeks visited 10 German factories that claim to be doing exemplary work, with Christoph blogging about the visits along the way. I encourage you to read the entire series of posts on his blog All About Lean.”
Source: Planet Lean
Michel Baudin‘s comments:
It’s wonderful to see LEI Chair John Shook recognize Christoph’s tour of Industry 4.0 as a highlight of 2019. The tour takes up half of his picture gallery. In his description, he got the essence right but a few details wrong. It wasn’t a “Bus Tour of Geeks” but a “Van Full of Nerds.”
It was a van because there were only 8 of us, and “nerds” at my insistence. Geeks are wannabee nerds and “nerds” was a more accurate description of Ralph Richter, Franck Vermet, Torbjørn Netland, Christoph Roser, Hironori Hibino, Kai Lorentzen, Mark Warren, and me.
We also visited 7 factories, not 10: Bosch (2 sites), ABB, Kärcher, Siemens, Trumpf, and Audi. In addition, we visited R&D labs, startups, and universities. Altogether, it was the most informative and densely packed tour I have ever been on or organized.
I agree with John Shook that Christoph’s posts about the tour are must-reads, as he covered every visit we made. I blogged about this trip in a complementary way, about tools and ideas that intrigued me rather than companies:
#lean, #lei, #planetlean, #allaboutlean, #johnshook, #industry40, #vanfullofnerds
Jan 6 2020
Kei Abe, unsung Japanese genius | Hansjörg Wyss | Swiss Made
Swiss Made is a 2013 book by James Breiding and Gerhard Schwarz about the successes of Swiss companies. It came to my attention for a paragraph that celebrates the contributions of my mentor Kei Abe as a consultant to Synthes and its charismatic CEO Hansjörg Wyss. As I was with Kei Abe on several occasions at Synthes and witnessed his interactions with Wyss and with engineers, I can attest that the following quote from the book is true:
“Hansjörg Wyss consolidated and expanded the Swiss orthopedic industry, becoming in the process one of Switzerland’s most successful and wealthy entrepreneurs. Wyss’s career is a tale of conquering the US market and then managing to consolidate the Swiss orthopedic industry, gobbling up one competitor after another — while effectively remaining the controlling shareholder. […] In 2011, Wyss sold Synthes to Johnson & Johnson for $21.3B.
The unsung Japanese genius
[…]The unsung hero of the company was Kei Abe, […] who managed to come up with novel designs for three decades. According to Wyss, Abe helped Synthes by ‘constantly forcing change in manufacturing, bringing new ideas and concepts for machines, thus enabling us to be at the forefront of new technology and having the best margins in the device industry.’Of the overall strategy, Wyss remarks that ‘competitors thought we were crazy, but this is what kept the company one step ahead and gave us 10% higher margins'”
The book’s authors are journalists and had embellished the story with untrue statements that I edited out. No, Kei Abe was not a professor and never claimed to have “established the Kanban system” at Toyota. He was an aeronautics engineer from Tokyo University who went to work as a motorcycle designer for Honda, later joined the JMA and started his own consulting group, Management & Technology Japan in 1984, where I joined him in 1987.
On my last visit to Synthes, in Switzerland and without Kei, I remember pointing to a machine in a cell and telling my host “This looks like Kei’s handy work.” He confirmed that it had indeed been based on his input.
#synthes, #keiabe, #hansjoergwyss, #leanmanufacturing
Dec 25 2019
Your Lean Six Sigma Belt Program Is the Problem | Dan Markovitz | Industry Week
“I visited a company a few weeks ago that asks all of their employees to do a green belt project. It’s not mandatory, but completion of a project is part of their annual review. Not surprisingly, the management boasts that nearly everyone does a project. You know how many people do a second project? Less than 5%. This company is doing okay, but they definitely don’t have a culture of continuous improvement.”
Source: Industry Week
Michel Baudin‘s comments: Dan’s article is spot on, except in his assessment of statistical tools. Depending on the company’s situation, none of the ones he lists may be needed. Other tools, like SMED, cell design, mistake-proofing or JKK may be more relevant. Data science is needed in semiconductors and pharmaceuticals but the statistical tools Dan describes as “advanced” are not. ANOVA, regression, and t-tests go back 100 years; Design Of Experiments (DOE), a good 50. As for Ishikawa’s “7 tools of QC” from the 1960s, I have never seen them used as advertised anywhere. They are sorely in need of an update in every respect, from data acquisition to analysis and presentation.
#leansixsigma, #blackbelts, #datascience,#7toolsofqc
Dec 11 2013
John Shook – #Lean Production Meets #LeanStartup | Mark Graban’s notes
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
Blog post at Lean Blog : After their recent recorded conversation, it was great to see John Shook, CEO of LEI, and Eric Ries, Author of The Lean Startup together on[..]
The Lean Enterprise Institute’s John Shook shared the stage with “Lean Startup” author Eric Ries at a conference in San Francisco.
I was wondering whether Shook would in any way endorse Ries’s ideas as having anything to do with Lean. Mark’s notes show no evidence of that. It seems that Shook essentially explained his background at Toyota and NUMMI.
“The Lean Startup” is a good read. The ideas are reasonable, plausible, and well explained, including the “Minimum Viable Product” (MVP) and “pivoting.” In fact, they have taken root in the vocabulary of software entrepreneurs, at least here in Silicon Valley.
But are they, in any way, related to Lean?
See on www.leanblog.org
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By Michel Baudin • Blog clippings • 12 • Tags: Lean, Lean Startup, Ries, Shook