Blog clippings

Mar 8 2014

Is OEE a Useful Key Performance Indicator? | Jeffrey Liker

See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
“For manufacturing that is equipment-intensive, how the equipment works is often the main factor in productivity. Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) has become a buzzword in lean and a generally accepted metric is Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). This is measured as the product of three factors:

  • OEE = Availability x Performance x Quality
  • Availability = run time/total time
  • Performance = Total count of parts/target count (based on a standard)Quality = Good count/Total count

Ignacio S. Gatell questions whether companies using OEE really understand it, can explain it clearly to their customers, and understand what it means to compare OEE as a KPI across plants. He questions whether even plant managers understand how it is calculated and what it means.

The only good argument for OEE is that at a macro-level in a plant it provides a high level picture of how your equipment is functioning.”

Michel Baudin‘s insight:

About 15 years ago, a summer intern came to work at a client plant in aerospace machining. I thought a great project for him would have been to identify a common tooling package for machining centers that were grouped in a “Flexible Manufacturing System” (FMS). It was challenging, but it would have actually given the FMS the flexibility it was supposed to have. It was a real engineering project that would have improved performance.

Management, however, decided that a better use of his time was to collect data and calculate OEEs for another set of machines. It did keep the student busy all summer, but resulted in no change, and no improvement bragging rights for the student.

I have had a problem with OEE ever since. It is an overly aggregated and commonly gamed metric that you can only use by breaking it down into its constituent factors; you might as well bypass this step and go straight to the factors.

Among these factors, I find Availability to be most often confused with Uptime. The availability of a device is the probability that it works when you need it, and the total time in the denominator has to be the time you need it for. For example, if you work two shifts a day, the availability of a machine is not affected by your taking it down for maintenance on third shift. There have been cases of managers overproducing to increase run time and thereby boost the OEE of their machines…

See on www.industryweek.com

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Feb 27 2014

A brief rant about the ABC’s | Bill Waddell

See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing

“Apparently the folks writing about stratifying inventory into A, B and C items and building calculations of such into ERP packages didn’t get the lean memo.

Wikipedia is typical of such thinkers when they describe the ABC thought process as:

  • ‘A’ items – 20% of the items accounts for 70% of the annual consumption value of the items.
  • ‘B’ items – 30% of the items accounts for 25% of the annual consumption value of the items.
  • ‘C’ items – 50% of the items accounts for 5% of the annual consumption value of the items.

The idea of micromanaging some items and slacking off on others based on purchase price is the very same theory they taught me at the University of Cincinnati back in the days  when … ”

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

I agree with Bill that, from the point of view of manufacturing operations, the purchase price of materials is not the most important parameter. because the lack of a nail can prevent the completion of a product as effectively as the lack of a pump costing 1,000 times more.

It doesn’t mean, however, that classifying items to treat them differently is wrong, but it must be done by frequency of use rather than price, and I prefer to call the categories “Runners,” “Repeaters,” and “Strangers” rather than A, B, and C.

As a function of rank, I then look for the percentage of units actually built that can be fully assembled with only the items of this rank and higher. It starts at 0%, and, as long as it stays at 0%, I consider the items to be Runners, essentially items you can’t build any product without. At the other end of the spectrum, I call Strangers all the items without which you can make 95% of the units. And everything in-between is a Repeater.

Then you may decide, for example, to dedicate an easily accessible storage location to each Runner, and make special arrangements with suppliers. For Repeaters, you may use the Kanban system, with smaller dedicated locations.  And you don’t keep any stock of Strangers, but order them as needed and store them, if at all, in dynamically allocated slots.

See on www.idatix.com

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Feb 12 2014

Working for Anonymous Funds | Bill Waddell

See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
Vancouver island“There is a company I know well that will remain nameless that has about 300 employees, and they manufacture stuff on Vancouver Island – Just outside of Victoria, British Columbia.  The major markets for their products are gradually shifting from the Northwestern USA and western Canada to the Southeastern USA.  That puts them about 2,400 miles as the crow flies from more and more of their customers, but since crows can’t take their products to market it is actually a lot farther than that.

Closing their plant has never been an option.  They simply accept the fact that manufacturing on an island is never good, and being that far from their customers is a huge disadvantage, so they have no choice (at least no choice they are willing to consider) but to tighten their chinstraps and do that much better to overcome their geographic problems….”

See on www.idatix.com

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Jan 30 2014

The Limits of Imitating Toyota | Bill Waddell

See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing

From Lisa Abellera’s blog, 6/21/2011

“I recently received an email from a guy challenging the legitimacy of organizing into value streams and lean accounting.  The linchpin of his argument:  ‘I can’t find anything saying Toyota has done any of that.’

[…] Seems to me if we want to get all Toyota-y about things we have to take Shingo’s words to heart when he wrote, ‘We have to grasp not only the Know-How but also Know-Why.’

[…]Using Toyota as the acid test for whether something is lean or not is rather naive and intellectually lazy. In most companies and most plants, asking ‘what would Toyota do?’ is the appropriate question – not ‘what did Toyota do?’”

 

 

Michel Baudin‘s Comments:

 

Learning by imitation

Imitation is effective for learning. We condemn outright plagiarism, despise imitation, and value creativity. Yet even an original and unique artist like Pablo Picasso learned as a child by copying paintings. In Karate, you learn a new kata by following others. As you memorize the sequence of moves, you learn to perform them with speed and power. Then, as Jim Mather teaches,  you learn the underlying self-defense principles embedded in the kata.

Until the 1970s, many Americans and Europeans dismissed “the Japanese” as imitators who copied what they saw and then competed with the original creators through low wages. But I have not heard this in decades. A principle behind the way Japanese traditional arts are taught is that know-how precedes and leads to know-why. Once you have assimilated techniques to the point that they are second-nature to you, your mind suddenly understands how they fit together as a whole and why they are necessary.

While this approach works not just for Karate, but also for sumi-e, sushi, flower arrangement, and even machining, it can be abused. I would not recommend it, for example, to teach math. Sometimes, what you ultimately achieve as a result of going through motions is only an illusion of understanding that rationalizes the years you have invested in training.

For Lean or TPS, there is no alternative to learning by doing. There is no way to gain an understanding of cells or the Kanban system without living through implementation on an actual shop floor. As a consequence, the first time you do it, you are following along and imitating. Once you understand what you are doing, however, it behooves you to add your own twist and adapt the concepts to your needs.

When brute force imitation works

On the scale of an entire company, we should also not forget that brute-force imitation sometimes works. Once I had in one of my Lean classes a student who was a former plant manager in a large, European auto parts company known for its successful implementation of Lean. “Everything you taught,” he told me,”I used in the plant, but I never knew why, until today.” As he explained to me, the company’s top management  issued “guidelines” to plant managers that were specific on which tools to use, regularly audited the plants,  and routinely fired the managers who did not comply, regardless of results.

It sounds wrong, but how do you argue with success? In retrospect, it worked for that company because it was in the industry for which TPS had been developed and, at least initially, creativity was not necessary to improve on the existing system. Where brute force imitation fails is in new and different industries.

How do you know “what Toyota would do”?

Either you are steeped in Toyota’s ways as a result of being an employee of the company for 10 years, and you have an idea of what its management might do outside of its core business —  including the ways it might misunderstand it — or you have studied Toyota’s system from the outside, and you don’t really know what it would do.

On the other hand, you may have a deeper understanding of the challenge at hand than any Toyota manager. Rather than trying to figure out what Toyota would do, I would rather follow Soichiro Honda’s advice to his engineers: “Solve your own problems.” Learn everything relevant that you can, then use your own judgement. You will be responsible for the outcome anyway.

Divergence and accurate representation

The whole Lean movement started from people learning about the Toyota Production System (TPS). That Lean should diverge from TPS was inevitable, but the Toyota connection remains the key reason business professionals pay any attention to Lean.  Given that the vocabulary itself has changed, making the connection on specifics is not always obvious. “Value Stream” or “Lean Accounting,” for example, are not Toyota  terms, which does not make it easy to gauge the extent to which Toyota uses the concepts.

There is nothing wrong with Lean professionals inventing approaches beyond TPS, but it must be clear and the tools must stand on their own merits. Business executives assume that what they are being sold as “Lean” is what Toyota does. Where it is not the case, they must be told upfront.

See on www.idatix.com

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Jan 23 2014

The NUMMI Story (Minus the Ending) | Matthew May

See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
“At the risk of being repetitive, allow me to retell one of my favorite stories. First, imagine the worst place you’ve ever worked. The darkest, most depressing, soul-sucking work environment you’ve ever had the misfortune to inhabit.

Got it in your mind’s eye? Now, multiply it by oh, say, 100. That’s how bad the place I’m about to describe was. I know, because I spoke to people who were there.

The year was 1982. It was the year of Jordaache Jeans. The year of Wendy’s “Where The Beef?” commercial. And the It was 1982, the first full year of Reaganomics.

The place was the General Motors Fremont, California plant…”

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

The NUMMI joint venture between GM and Toyota is a great story of thorough transformation. It is how a car plant from worst to best. Unfortunately, it ended in 2010, when GM when bankrupt and Toyota declined to take over the entire venture.

Now Toyota is part owner of Tesla,  the facility is the Tesla plant, and it has been getting renewed attention as such. This is a new lease on life but Tesla’s 10,000 cars/year do not compare with the 250,000 NUMMI used to make.

See on matthewemay.com

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Jan 22 2014

Shortage of skills, not yet – but very soon – a wake up call (part 1) | Wiegand’s Watch

This is a translation of the bulk of Bodo Wiegand’s latest newsletter, followed by my comments:

“As long as our support professionals and staff spend less than 50% of their time on their core activities, we have no shortage of skilled workers . But it’s coming — mercilessly, and we are not doing anything about it!

Whenever I ‘m in a company and we discuss about efficiency in the indirect area , the first reaction is disbelief and astonishment, with statements like “Mr. Wiegand, certainly not with us.” When, in the 10/2007 issue of Focus, I wrote “the labor productivity in administration is about 50%” [of what it should be], no one wanted to believe it , or admit it … and it was and is dismissed by most with a ” not with us.”

In fact is it is below 50 % , today as well as yesterday, and if we do not start worrying about it soon and finally wake up from our slumber , we will run into real problems that will jeopardize the existence of our German business model.

Now my dear  “not with us” unbelievers and  friends – wake up : The facts are coming. According to a study by the AKAD University in Leipzig, each week, office workers spend a whole day in meetings and one whole day processing email. You don’t think so? The proof: Based on a Varonis survey from 2012:

  • 4.8% receive 300-500 emails a day ,
  • 17.6 %,  100-300 emails a day ,
  • 44.8 %,  50-100 emails a day and
  • 32.8 %,  1-50 emails a day .

According to a survey conducted by Mimecast and Microsoft Exchange from 2012, from the recipients’ perspective, 61 % of the emails are unnecessary, 25 % are at least useful, and only 14% are “really important.”
Once again in plain text: Nearly 70 % of employees working in offices receive more than 50 messages/day.

Assume only 50 emails/day. The processing time per email is about 1-2 minutes, Here is some additional information for the smart alecks who think they only 10 seconds per email: they are among  the 70 % who get more than 50 emails/day and don’t read them. The additional mental setup time in normal office activity for one mail is 64 seconds, as calculated by Loughborough University psychologist Thomas Jackson.

It follows that,  in the best case , the processing of the assumed 50 mails / day takes at least 2 hours, which works out to 10 hours a week or 55 working days/year. It devours 1 day per week (see also the study by Leipzig’s AKAD University) .

Considering that the processing of 61 % of the mail is a waste of time . This corresponds to 6 hours a week or 38 days per year or 17 % more time for the employee.

Studies have shown that when engineers and developers work constructively or on complex problems , the mental setup time is up to 12 minutes. This group of people needs 250 minutes/day for just 25 mails/day and 10 minutes of mental setup times. It is already makes 50 % of their time. With an average salary of €100,000/year,  makes € 50,000/employee for email processing !

So, if we eliminate for this group the 61% of unnecessarily emails , they would receive only 10 mails/day and would thus have 120 minutes more time for their actual work. Then we focus on processing the email in the morning and afternoon , and save another 100 minutes.

Now, how doe we fight this email flood?

  1. Introduce email etiquette to reduce the number of messages and raise their quality .
  2. Analyze the structure of the information enhance the quality of information and communication , and stop the sending of unnecessary emails.

Moreover, we should take heed of a more serious study and begin to protect our employees . 63.6 % of all managers believe that is expected of them that they should be accessible in their free time. An survey of German executives in 2013 asked what measures were taken to put limits on their accessibility?

81 % of the executives responded : “None.”

Which is at least one reason for the rise in the burn-out syndrome. If 81 % of the companies do not take this problem seriously , it’s actually only a matter of time before the executives burn out.

It is the duty of the companies to care about this.

Next, let us discuss meetings. How often has each of you experienced meetings

  • That have no agenda ,
  • Where there no clear tasks have been defined,
  • Where there is no clear outcome or agreement on actions and responsibilities,
  • Without any follow-up on actions from the last meeting,
  • Where the allotted  time was exceeded,
  • That did not start on time,
  • Where someone came too late ,
  • In which one or more persons ( Mr. or Mrs. Important) left to make a call ,
  • Where computers with emails were answered during the meeting ,
  • Where there was little conversation,
  • Where documents were issued at the meeting for “fast” decisions,
  • Where all agreed at the meeting on a decision and afterwards said “Maybe,”
  • Where everything was discussed except the real issues ,
  • …

All waste – pure waste .

What can you do so in order to curb the meeting madness and to cut one day meeting per week to four hours ? Change the meeting culture , and take actions to reduce the number of meetings and radically shorten them, such as:

  • Put out a guide for improving a culture of dialogue .
  • Analyze the structure of discussions to establish which types of meetings are needed. For example, keep routine meetings to up to 30 minutes, standing in front of a whiteboard, and discuss only anomalies. Time savings immediately 50 % guaranteed!

Summing up the potential for meetings and email processing together , can get a relief of more than 15 to 20 % of the time for each .

Hello my dear ” Not with us” friends, if you stick your head quietly in the sand, you do not have to even deal with these issues.

A manager of a large automotive supplier once said to me : ” Mr. Wiegand, in production, we are chasing cents and leaving euro notes on the floor in administration. “So what in the world is holding back our managers from raising their efficiency and thus to relieving much-needed management resources from this senseless workload. They just look and pointlessly waste our most important resouce : our employees , our specialists and managers , our engineers and developers.

Relieve this group from distractions like secretarial work , travel planning and other non-core activities , and you generate further potential , and that without even tackling interface problems , optimizing the processes or breaking down silos.

For this you do not need a consultant , you only need to invest in training your employees.

[…]

In my 15 years of experience with administrative Lean projects, I can see that there a total of at least 20 to 30 % increase in efficiency is  possible.

In Part 2 of this topic , we deal with the other 15 to 20% of improvement and how to realize them.”

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

Bodo Wiegand paints the abuse of email and poor meeting organization as an existential threat to the German business model. According to him, German managers and professionals are only operating at 50% of their capacity because of the time they spend processing unnecessary emails and sitting through meetings that belie the worldwide perception of German promptness and rigor. In fact, as much as I enjoy myth busting, from my personal experience of meetings in Germany, I would not put this issue high on the list of needed improvements. I have seen worse elsewhere.

As for email, even though Wiegand only proposes to improve its use, he seems to be attacking the medium, which he used himself to send out his newsletter. And the countermeasures he proposes address, at best, internal email abuse. If all employees of a company stopped sending each other unnecessary emails, it wouldn’t stem the flow from outside. You can filter it with firewalls but, if you do it too aggressively, you can interfere with necessary communications.

Let’s face it: email is the greatest medium ever invented for one-to-one or one-to-many informal communication in writing. It is informal in the sense that, unlike a form with fields and check boxes, it imposes no structure on the content. It replaces the business letter, but not the purchase order.

It is not perfect. Email over the internet has proven reliable, but it offers no guarantee of delivery, and the fact that you sent a message is no legal proof that any other party received it. And the informality of the medium has led many to let loose and write things that they came to regret when they discovered that email communication is not as private as they assumed it to be, and that completely deleting an email is next to impossible. In essence, all the emails you send become part of your permanent record.

Technically, email does not work well for the many-to-many communication required, for example, in a project team. The members of a team need to post information in one place for the team, and nothing but the team, with tools to collaboratively edit it. This is not accomplished by sending messages to each other, that are stored redundantly in each recipient’s mailbox.

This being said, email today is the primary way business is done, and there is nothing wrong, per se, in having office professionals spend time processing emails. It is only wrong if they do too much of it, but there is no universal rule on the amount they need to do their jobs; it depends on what their jobs are. It won’t be the same in marketing and in product development.

I agree with Wiegand on the need for training in the effective use of email, but management should also know, for example, that it is a bad idea to standardize email addresses. If you give all employees addresses like “[email protected],” you make them easy to spam.

If I were to point out waste in German office organization, I would mention the following:

  1. Nomenclature. I have seen “smart” numbering systems used not only for manufacturing parts but for projects and even employee IDs. In the age of databases, it is archaic and counterproductive. It makes employees take longer to fill out forms in computer transactions, and it makes reports more difficult to understand. I have never met anyone in Germany who was even aware that it is a problem.
  2. German office with Leitz bindersOversorting. Not every paper document needs to be filed under the proper tab, in chronological order, in a two-ring binder. This should only apply to documents that are frequently retrieved. But the neat rows of Leitz binders on the shelves of German offices are a source of pride…

I also find Wiegand’s advocacy of relying on secretaries for tasks like travel planning odd, considering that explaining your travel needs to another person takes longer than booking on-line directly. It didn’t use to be that way, but it is that way now. Human intermediaries in travel booking still have a role for groups but, for individuals, they are as extinct as typists. “Admin” isn’t just a fancy title for a secretary; admins are far fewer than secretaries used to be, and do different work, such as screening calls and maintaining calendars for executives.

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