Mar 5 2012
Masaaki Imai Remembers Taiichi Ohno
Via Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
This article includes interesting details about Ohno’s background and early life, from someone who has actually met him.
Via www.gembapantarei.com
Mar 5 2012
Via Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
This article includes interesting details about Ohno’s background and early life, from someone who has actually met him.
Via www.gembapantarei.com
By Michel Baudin • Blog clippings • 0 • Tags: History of technology, Lean manufacturing, Toyota, TPS
Mar 2 2012
The French magazine L’Usine Nouvelle is similar to Industry Week in the US and has a special place in my heart as the first organization ever to pay me for my writings. I wrote an article for them on quality in Japan in February,1981, and they sent me a check.
Last week, the current editor in chief, Thibaut de Jaegher, wrote the editorial translated below:
At the origins of lean manufacturing
Published February 25th, 2012 at 11 55 | L’Usine Nouvelle No. 3273
Everyone seeks their own production system. The Renault-Nissan Alliance has its production way, and so does Michelin. Alstom has developed its Apsys, SEB its Operational Performance Plan …
Since the publication of the book “The Machine That Changed the World” in 1990, manufacturers worldwide have embarked on a frantic quest to eliminate waste, improve quality, and increase productivity.
Because this book coined the phrase lean manufacturing, we also think that Toyota is the instigator of these organizational methods. It is not the case.
Since industry has been industry, manufacturing engineers have sought to continuously improve their manufacturing methods. It only became a Japanese specialty after World War II. Before, the search for more efficient production systems and a scientific organization of labor was rather the prerogative of the Americans.
The first production standards have emerged during the Civil War, to facilitate the repair of guns on the battlefield. The American system of manufacturing (ASM) was used to accelerate the manufacture of guns and their maintenance during operations.As in the Toyota production system, this organization was based on two pillars: standardization and mechanization. And one might think that all sites of Springfield (the manufacturer of rifles) turned in just in time because of the war.
The ASM was probably one of the competitive advantages that allowed the “Yankees” to win.
This is another article that denies the contributions of the developers of Toyota’s system. To say that they did not invent anything and that everything they have done is just a rehash of American industrial engineering is like saying that Einstein’s theories are that a copy of Newton, Maxwell, Lorenz, etc..
As in all disciplines, advances in production techniques are based on previous achievements. The American System of Manufacture is a set of techniques aimed at the manufacture of interchangeable parts. It dates from the 19th century. It included among other things, technical drawings, the concepts of critical dimensions and tolerances, and it got the machine tools industry started. This a major contribution, somewhat forgotten because industry around the world has so thoroughly assimilated it.
And the Toyota system is built on this foundation, incorporating further elements from Taylor, Gilbreth, the engineers at Ford or GM, not to mention TWI. That does not mean that people at Toyota have added nothing there, or that their ability to incorporate these elements into a coherent and efficient whole is negligible. The Machine That Changed The World is a good book, which introduced the term “Lean”, but we should not overestimate the importance. By other names, the approach had already aroused a sustained interest in industry for at least 10 years it came out. My own introduction to the topic dates back to 1980.
Thibaut de Jaegher in turn responded as follows;
@ Michel Baudin
My paper does not deny the contribution of Toyota in the history of production but just reminds readers that there were production systems well before the TPS. Which you also recognize claiming that Toyota was inspired by American methods, and particularly what I wrote about, to invent its own model.
And an anonymous other reader chimed in as follows:
@ Reglede3
This is very true. Americans, for the purposes of the conflict, however, have pushed the system of standardization to its logical conclusion.In fact, it was the French who invented standardization (in the late 18th century) in the manufacture of guns (a lock adapting to any gun or butt). It passed to the United States through sales of French guns to the “insurgents”. The English invented the standardization of nuts and bolts.
I have several issues with this exchange. The first is the attribution of inventions to nations. As such “the French,” “the Americans,” “the English,” or “the Japanese” don’t invent anything; inventors are individuals, and sometimes teams. It’s not, “the Americans” who invented the assembly line but a team working at Ford in the 1910s, including Charles Sorensen, P.E. Martin, Clarence Avery, and others. Attributing nationalities to inventions is neither fair to inventors nor useful, because all it does is make the inventions more difficult to adopt outside their countries of origin.
The second point is that both the editor in chief and the anonymous reader are surprisingly casual about historical accuracy, considering that “the French” are known for historians like Fernand Braudel, who make cautious inferences from thorough research. Just-in-Time production of rifles in the Civil War? Interchangeable parts in the Revolutionary War? Come on! As often, the Wikipedia article on the American System of Manufacturing, and its list of references, is a good place to start checking the facts.
Why should we care? Because interchangeable parts technology is the first example of a successful, decades-long government-funded R&D program in the United States, and refutes the widely-held belief that all innovation comes from the private sector. It was the first in a line of such efforts that, in recent decades, includes the Apollo program and the Internet.
Does it have anything to do with Lean? Yes, but so indirectly as to be irrelevant. The creators of TPS, like Taiichi Ohno, acknowledge Ford’s mass production system, as an inspiration both on what to do and what to change, and Ford’s system could not have existed without interchangeable parts.
By Michel Baudin • Press clippings • 2 • Tags: History of technology, Lean, Lean manufacturing
Feb 28 2012
Via Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
According to Nigeria’s Daily Sun, Lean is new there, and we can assume that the version that arrived is the result of a long chain of steps in the telephone game. This is how they describe it:
“The Lean programme, […] was first used as a term in quality improvement system when it was applied to the Toyota Production System (TPS) in the 1980s. Presently it is used by at least 25 percent of Fortune 500 companies in America. When it was first used by GE in 1997, over $400million was gained in the company’s operating income.”
By Michel Baudin • Press clippings • 0 • Tags: Lean, Management
Feb 27 2012
Via Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
The floods in Thailand are the latest. Before, there was the Fukushima earthquake and, going back further in time, the Aisin Seiki fire of 1997 in Japan and the Mississippi flood of 1993… Each time, the press has faulted Lean for making the economic disruptions caused by theses events worse. The actual record is that the vigilance inherent in Lean Logistics and the strength of customer-supplier relationships in a Lean Supply Chain are in fact key to a rapid recovery.
In 1993, Toyota logisticians in Chicago reserved all the trucking available in the area a few days before the flood cut off the rail lines to California, thereby allowing the NUMMI plant to keep working during the flood.
In 1997, when the Aisin Seiki fire deprived Toyota in Japan of its single source of proportioning valves, other suppliers came to the rescue in what the Wall Street Journal a few months later called the business equivalent of an Amish barn raising.
You can, and should protect production against routine fluctuations. That is what tools like Kanbans are countermeasures for. But there is no way you can afford to protect your business against all possible, rare catastrophic events. What you can and must do instead is be vigilant and prepared to respond quickly and creatively to whatever nature or society might throw at you.
Via the Bangkok Post
By Michel Baudin • Press clippings • 2 • Tags: Kanban, Lean, Lean Logistics, Lean supply chain
Feb 26 2012
Via Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
This article describes a method involving initial testing and extensive training used by an Alabama steel mill to increase Maintenance’s share of its work force to almost 30%.
Jim Peck drew my attention to it on NWLEAN through a post in which he questioned their approach to recruitment as training people who didn’t need it or turning down people with the right skills. This kind of information, of course, is not in the article.
The article points out the growing of share of Maintenance in the work people do in a manufacturing operation as it evolves. Based on the numbers in the article, close to one in four employees of the mill works in Maintenance today, and they are trying to increase this ratio. Steel is an industry that has had enormous productivity increases in the past decades. As they point out in the article, they went from 45,000 employees in the 1940s to 2,100 today, who produce as much.
In today’s labor-intensive manufacturing activities, maintenance’s share of the labor force is on the order of 5%, and I believe we can expect that number to rise. For example, an auto plant that employs 5,000 today may produce the same amount with the same depth of manufacturing with 500 people 25 years from now — if cars are still around in 2037… And, out of these 500 people, 150 to 200 will be in Maintenance, the rest being primarily programmers of automatic machines.
Whether testing is appropriate or not depends on the relevance of what people are tested on. An organization has the right to decide what “qualified” means for its own needs. On the other hand, I find testing inappropriate if there is a hidden agenda.
Many Silicon Valley software companies, for example, subject applicants to “coding interviews,” in which they are tested on such topics as the details of sorting algorithms. A computer science student learns this in college but rarely uses it as a professional programmer, because 90% of the time you need to sort records, you just invoke a sort function without worrying about what is under the hood. As a consequence, this kind of test is an effective way to bias the interviews in favor of recent college graduates and filter the experienced programmers.
Via www.reliableplant.com
By Michel Baudin • Blog clippings • 0 • Tags: Maintenance, Management, Manufacturing
Mar 6 2012
Four operators working on a fuselage section
This is a section of a photograph published in the UK’s Guardian on 12/20/2011, showing four operators at work on an aircraft fuselage section.
When you examine the picture, how many do you see actually engaged in modifying the work piece?
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By Michel Baudin • Press clippings • 1 • Tags: Lean assembly, Lean manufacturing, Manufacturing