Apr 8 2017
Wacky Lean House | Bob Emiliani
“This year is the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI). There will surely be a big celebration. But in my view, there is less to celebrate than meets the eye. Here’s why:
LEI has controlled the progressive management agenda for the last 20 years. That means they own the failures as well as the successes. By LEIs own reckoning (as well as its sister organization, the Lean Enterprise Academy in the U.K.), success has been much less than they had hoped for.”
Sourced through Bob Emiliani’s blog
Michel Baudin‘s comments: Overall, I agree with Bob’s assessment, but I think American manufacturers deserve more of the blame than the LEI, for faddishly latching on to one tool after another and mistaking it for a panacea. For example, in his introduction to “Learning to See,” Mike Rother explicitly warns the reader that, at Toyota, Materials and Information Flow Analysis (MIFA) is not a major tool. Yes, he repackaged it with the attractive but nonsensical name of “Value Stream Mapping” (VSM), but his audience didn’t have to elevate it to the status that it did.
“Many topics in lean address how to deal with uncertainty and fluctuations (or mura for unevenness). There is a particularly neat trick for manual lines that self-organizes fluctuations in the workload: the Bucket Brigade! It does have some advantages, but it also has quite a few limitations and prerequisites for it to work. Most importantly it works best only for very short cycle times as for example picking materials. Unfortunately, these requirements are rarely mentioned in literature. Let me show you the basics work in this post before I go into some of the trickier details in the next post.”
Apr 24 2017
Flow Line Pacing | All About Lean | Christoph Roser
“There are three different options on how to time the production lines.[…] The “easiest” one is an unstructured approach. The processes are still arranged in sequence; however, there is no fixed signal when to start processing a part. The pulse line is also a flow line, but now all parts move at the same time. […] When all processes are done, all parts move to the next process simultaneously. […] Another common way to structure the timing of flow lines is the continuously moving line.”
Sourced through All About Lean
Michel Baudin‘s comments: Christoph’s two posts are great for their rifle-shot focus on the single issue of flow line pacing and for their effective use of animation to illustrate principles. It makes the differences clear in a way you couldn’t on paper.
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By Michel Baudin • Blog clippings • 1 • Tags: Production line design, Production pacing, Takt time