About Michel Baudin

Consultant, trainer, author on Lean Manufacturing

Posts by Michel Baudin:

Apr 30 2020

The Impact Of Social Distancing On Assembly Operations | John Shook | LEI

 

Testing temperature measurement setup

“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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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

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Apr 22 2020

COVID-19: Toyota Restarts Onnaing Plant | CNews

Until March 17, Toyota’s plant in Onnaing, France, was turning out about 1,000 cars/day with 4,500 employees. Management closed it then on orders of the French government due to COVID-19. They are now restarting it, with an initial goal of making 50 cars/day. The changes they have made are highlighted in the following video but the narration is in French. Even if you can’t follow it, please look at the pictures, and check out the explanations below.

Continue reading…

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Apr 14 2020

From Pandemic Disruption To Global Supply Chain Recovery | David Simchi-Levi | INFORMS

David Simchi-Levi has been a contributor to supply chain management for more than 20 years and I have two of the books he co-authored on my shelf, Designing and Managing the Supply Chain, a textbook for business and industrial engineering students, and The Logic of Logistics, for readers who care about the math behind the formulas and algorithms. So, when he announced a webinar on supply chain recovery after a pandemic, I signed up to listen. The full webinar is now available on Youtube, including a couple of minutes of dead silence in the middle while he was reading audience questions. The slide set is also available in PDF, and it includes an appendix with descriptions of algorithms not discussed in the webinar.

Michel Baudin‘s comments: As the COVID-19 pandemic is a currently unfolding catastrophe, the webinar devotes a large opening section to admiring the problem. This section is as of April 8, 2020. If the webinar were held, say, in August, 2020, this section would require an update. Simchi-Levi then goes on to describe a Risk Exposure Model that he and his team co-developed with Ford in the early 2010s based on the experience of supply chain recovery after the Fukushima earthquake or the Thailand floods of 2011. It is less connected to the latest news than the introduction.

These events disrupted, in particular, the supply of black paint to Ford, so that its customers could buy a car in any color as long as it was not black. They were major disasters at the time but, in retrospect, look small when compared with COVID-19. Simchi-Levi then uses the Risk Exposure Model as the basis for a series of recommendations to manufacturers.

Continue reading…

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Apr 6 2020

Tracking COVID-19 | D. Wheeler, A. Pfadt, K. Whyte | QualityDigest

Projected COVID-19 Fatalities in the US

“While the spread of Covid-19 was effectively suppressed for two short periods, each time it rebounded. Another aspect of the Covid-19 pandemic is illustrated by this graph—declines in new cases of Covid-19 lag behind the interventions. Accordingly, these data cannot be used to establish cause-and-effect relationships.

In addition, deaths from Covid-19 lag even further behind. On March 27 there had been a cumulative total of 9 deaths from Covid-19 cases in all of Westchester County. Three days later this total had climbed to 19 deaths. The next day, March 31, there had been a total of 25 deaths from this outbreak. All of this suggests that while non-pharmaceutical interventions can be used to mitigate, or even suppress, the Covid-19 pandemic, these interventions have to be maintained until pharmaceutical interventions become available.”

Source: QualityDigest

Michel Baudin‘s comments: An informative, well-researched piece on the current tragedy. It’s not about manufacturing but it’s about the context in which we’ll have to practice it for the next two years.

#covid16, #coronavirus

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Mar 24 2020

A Sobering But Remarkable Chart | Josh Katz and Margot Sanger-Katz | New York Times

Click picture to enlarge as needed.

 

“As the coronavirus pandemic unfolds, people are dying around the world. But the trajectories of cases and deaths differ by country.”

Source: The New York Times

Michel Baudin‘s comments: On two prior occasions, I pointed out remarkable graphics in the New York Times:

This one, however, is remarkably rich, yet readable thanks to details like labeling the lines with the name of the country, as opposed to having the names in a legend block. The author, Josh Katz. is a graphics editor for the newspaper and his co-author, Margot Sanger-Katz, a writer on health care.

Continue reading…

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Mar 10 2020

Critical Data Elements and Data Quality | Rupa Mahanti | QualityDigest

“Not everything that can be counted counts. We are currently living in the digital age and are drowning in an ocean of data. Organizations have a large number of data entities and data elements, and a large volume of data corresponding to the same, and they continue to amass more and more data with each passing day. With a large amount of data coming in, it’s important to know what is ‘quality’ data, and what isn’t.”

Source: QualityDigest

Michel Baudin‘s comments: It is refreshing to see an article in QualityDigest on current topics, as opposed to pre-World War II methods. I tried to address this topic myself early on in this blog, in A Management Perspective on Data Quality.

#dataquality

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