Aug 11 2019
The first stop in Christoph Roser‘s tour of Industry 4.0 in Germany last month was a research facility called ARENA2036, attached to the University of Stuttgart. There, the first demonstration we saw was of the Bosch smart floor, and the pictures included here were taken by fellow participants Franck Vermet and Hironori Hibino.
Jul 30 2019
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.
Jul 16 2019
A conversation with Franck Vermet about problem-solving tools for factory operators caused me to revisit the 7 tools of QC from 50 years ago and ponder how they should be updated with current data science.
Data Science for Operators, as a book, remains to be written. If you google this phrase today, what comes up is training courses offering to “change your career” by attending a “data science bootcamp.” TIBCO Spotfire has “Workflow Operators” but these are programs, not people.
So the following are tentative answers to questions that haven’t been asked before.
Jun 20 2019
This is the translation of article recently published by Asenta’s Partner-Director Luis Mauleón in Empresa XXI, summarizing the key points of my lecture last month at the Faculty of Engineering of Deusto University in Bilbao, as part of a series of events organized by Asenta Management Consultants.
In an environment with an overabundance of data, it is a paradox that we still have difficulties to finding simple answers to simple questions.
Jun 17 2019
“TPS can be applied to any setting, as long as you can define your customer and product…” – Darren Migita MD– Seattle Children’s
Quoted by Jun Nakamuro on LinkedIn from a podcast.
Michel Baudin‘s comments: To be fair, Dr. Migita is a pediatrician with 20 years of experience. His podcast is about adapting TPS to health care, not to “any setting.” It is an interview, a format that can trip up anybody.
What I find remarkable throughout is that Migita does not hide behind the word “Lean.” He explicitly refers to Toyota and Taiichi Ohno and vigorously asserts that you can borrow ideas for car making to improve patient care.
This opening sentence in Jun Nakamuro’s quote, however, makes TPS sound like Shimmer, the product once advertised on Saturday Night Live as “both a dessert topping and a floor wax.” It almost kept me from listening further.
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.
Continue reading…
Share this:
Like this:
By Michel Baudin • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: Kaizen, Lean, Manga, Manufacturing