Sep 18 2013
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
Washington Post
The Legacy of Eiji Toyoda
Businessweek
He transformed Toyota into a global powerhouse with management and manufacturing processes that transcended the auto industry.
See on www.businessweek.com
Sep 17 2013
Google “Karakuri Kaizen,” and you see a small number of Youtube videos from Japan, Thailand, Italy, and Hong Kong showcasing materials handling devices that rely on gravity, levers, cams and inertia to move bins in elaborate ways, transfer parts between machines, or deliver a controlled number of small parts to an operator’s hand.
Here is one from Japan’s JMAC with multiple examples:
Such devices have long been used as part of TPS and Lean, but now we have a generic name for them. The principles of Karakuri Kaizen given at the end of this video are as follows:
While “Karakuri Kaizen” is an alliteration that rolls of the tongue almost as easily as “cash for clunkers” or “toys for tots,” you may still wonder where “Karakuri” comes from and what it means. Until “Karakuri Kaizen,” I had never heard it stand-alone but always as part of “Karakuri Ningyo,” or Karakuri Dolls, which are wind-up automata with wooden gears and levers developed at toys in 18th-century Japan. The best known are tea-serving dolls, like the one in the featured image.
As Karakuri dolls are a reminder of ancient ingenuity, the term has a positive connotation in Japan. I once used a picture of one in a magazine ad for US-made automation software, to connect the product with the local culture. But the term, obviously, means nothing to anybody who is not Japanese.
Sep 15 2013
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The Economist is a British magazine not known for getting facts wrong, but it did here.
Lean Production is not for the 1980s. The name may be from the late 1980s but the thing itself is a work in progress that started decades earlier. And it is from Toyota, not from generic “large Japanese companies.”
And a competent implementation does not start by making things worse.
See on www.economist.com
Sep 13 2013
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The gist of this article is that you should hold just enough WIP to meet your production requirements with the changeover times you currently have and protect your bottlenecks against malfunction in other resources. So far, this is stating the obvious, and a visit to a Toyota plant or even dealership is enough to see that the Toyota system is not one with zero inventory. You see shelves of stampings, bins of bolts, and trees of wire harnesses. The Kanban system involves some inventory, and, in fact, the only approach that doesn’t is just-in-sequence. What is considered waste is not all inventory, but unnecessary inventory, accumulated for no valid reason anyone can explain.
The article, however, goes further and asserts that it is cheaper to accumulate WIP than to expose and solve the problems that make it necessary, which is a return to the mass-production thinking that was prevalent in pre-Lean operations management.
What the Lean successes of the past decades have shown is (1) that the overall costs of WIP were understated and (2) that the ingenuity of production people and engineer was underestimated. You operate today and next week with the resources that you have, dysfunctional as they may be, and you hold WIP as needed to sustain production. As you do this, however, as an organization, you keep working at solving your problems so that you need less and less WIP month by month and quarter by quarter. This perspective is missing from the article.
See on www.manufacturingdigital.com
Sep 6 2013
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Bill seems to exclude the possibility that a product mix could be trimmed without reducing customer satisfaction, but isn’t that exactly what Steve Jobs did when he returned to Apple in 1997? Microsoft has a confusing array of product “editions” which actually make it difficult to figure out what will meet your needs. To this day, Apple’s product lineup is comparatively simple.
Furthermore, “SKU” covers parts as well as products, and all companies, including Toyota, have suffered from an unnecessary proliferation of parts, simply because software makes it often easier to design a new part than to reuse an existing one.
According to Bill, also: “That Henry Ford pioneered lean in the modern era is not up for debate.” In fact, the term Mass Production was coined specifically to describe what came out of Ford. When discussing Lean, the proper focus is on the ways it differs from Mass Production, not the many things it has in common with it, because they are not what makes it work better.
See on www.idatix.com
Sep 20 2013
The top ten lean manufacturers | Manufacturing Digital
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
Top ten by what criteria? What is the measure of leanness on which these companies outperform everybody else? The article doesn’t say. Most “top ten” lists don’t either, but you want to see who is on them anyway. If you know the inner workings of some of these companies, you may be surprised to find them there. You may also wonder what the actions described in the paragraph about Nike have to do with Lean.
See on www.manufacturingdigital.com
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By Michel Baudin • Press clippings • 1 • Tags: Ford, Kimberly-Clark, Lean, Nike, Parker-Hannifin, Toyota