Jul 30 2019
Is Pick-to-Light More Than A Stepping Stone?
Pick-to-Light directs manual picking by lighting up bins. The Lean literature is mute about it, it’s not in the Industry 4.0 technology stack, and Wikipedia doesn’t have an article about it. Pick-to-Light system suppliers are touting it as part of both Lean and Industry 4.0 but no one else is chiming in. In the field, however, you find it in many factories, where it reduces training time and picking errors, while increasing picker productivity.
Pick-to-Light fits best in usability engineering. It’s neither jidoka nor automation because it just prompts the operator. And it’s not Poka-Yoke because it doesn’t physically prevent mistakes, the way flip-lids can. It looks like an intermediate technology, a stepping stone on the way to full picking automation but is it? It can also be viewed as a move towards using technology to make work easier for people instead of automating it.
Oct 29 2019
The Manga Style In The Japanese Literature On Manufacturing
A unique characteristic of the Japanese literature on manufacturing is its use of comic strips — or manga — to communicate with readers. The subject came up in a recent discussion on LinkedIn, that Mark DeLuzio started by saying:
My comment was that, while expressed in jargon, most of what goes as “Lean” in the US is simplistic. I contrast it with what I found in Japan, like the Kojo Kanri (工場管理, or “Factory Management”) monthly. It is full of case studies communicated in manga, on subjects ranging from the strategic to the tactical. Stories I remember include a recap of a multi-year transformation in a chemical plant, design guidelines for chaku-chaku lines and improvements to toilet cleaning procedures in high-speed trains. The October 2019 issue has a series of articles about employing immigrants to remedy the labor shortage in Japan.
Why manga?
Brad Schmidt once told me that, if you submitted an article to Kojo Kanri with neat technical drawings, the house artists would transform them into manga. I think it is because the target audience is production supervisors who read in commuter trains. At work, they need to communicate with production operators, who are also likely manga readers. In the US, I don’t recall seeing improvement cases explained in the style of Marvel comics. Perhaps it is because these improvements require no magic powers.
Examples
For a more extensive example, I turned to the most dog-eared and annotated of my Japanese books. It’s about practical mixed-flow production systems and I found it a gold mine, as you can tell from this picture:
In the figure below, I translated the captions on the page about a tool called “AB Control.” It reminds of the “after-you” systems you see in some airports, where the conveyor delivering luggage waits until there is open space on the carousel. In the picture, the coiled cables from the sensors to the controllers are so 1991. Today, this might be a simple IoT application with a PLC, with the same logic.
#Manufacturing, #Manga, #LeanManufacturing, #Kaizen
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By Michel Baudin • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: Kaizen, Lean, Manga, Manufacturing