News

Oct 24 2014

Keep It Simple: Value Stream Map at the Gemba | Dave LaHote | LEI

“As we walked the line I had my notebook and pencil out. We walked each step and took note of the work-in-process inventory. I timed and recorded the cycle time of each process step. We asked the workers how long it took to change-over from one product to another. And we asked the workers about the kinds of problems they experienced when a sample order needed to be completed. It took us about 20 minutes. When we were done we had an old fashion process and material flow chart (today more commonly called a value stream map). In addition, our discussion with the workers pointed us to one step in the process that commonly got behind when sample orders were put into the process.”

Source: www.lean.org

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

Dave LaHote tells an interesting story, with good learning points for practitioners. Except that it is about process mapping on the shop floor, not “Value Stream Mapping” (VSM) as described in the Lean literature.

A VSM is supposed to map an order fulfillment process, following data from customer to supplier and materials from receipt to delivery. And, while quite detailed in terms of production control, it does not show process details at the machine or workstation level.

And it is not simple. It involves 25 different graphic symbols, some of which, like the zebra-patterned push arrows, take forever to draw by hand.

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Oct 21 2014

Is Lean A Science Based Profession or Tool Based Craft | Steve Spear | LinkedIn Pulse

“Is lean a bona fide management science based profession or a tool based craft? I’ll suggest that current practice and teaching is more the latter than the former and because of that, the influence of lean is far inferior to its potential.”

Source: www.linkedin.com

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

Within Manufacturing, management, engineering, and even consulting are professions. “Lean” per se is not a profession, but a loosely defined body of knowledge that all manufacturing professionals should possess to some extent.

Like Spear, we all tend to think of mechanical engineering as an application of Newtonian mechanics. In reality, however, it is not as if the field had developed from scratch based on Newton’s theories.

People had been making mechanical devices long before, and mechanical engineering as we know it actually came from the grafting of Newtonian mechanics onto an existing body of craft-based, empirical know-how.

As Takahiro Fujimoto pointed out, the Toyota Production System (TPS) was never designed from first principles but instead emerged from the point solutions and countermeasures Toyota employees came up with to overcome a succession of crises in the development of the company. What is remarkable is that they did coalesce into a system.

Lean is supposed to be a generalization of TPS to contexts other than car manufacturing at Toyota. The challenge of developing Lean is to reverse engineer principles from tools.

Over the past 35 years, many Japanese publications have described TPS, with authors like Taiichi Ohno, Shigeo Shingo, Yasuhiro Monden, Kenichi Sekine, Takahiro Fujimoto or Mikiharu Aoki…

These publications have made many of the tools of TPS accessible to anyone willing to study them. They have been less effective, however, at showing how the tools work together as a system, and even less at spelling out underlying principles. It is something I have attempted in my books.

Little of the content of TPS has made its way into Lean, as promoted and practiced in the US and Europe, where it boils down to drawing Value-Stream Maps and running Kaizen events that have little to do with TPS.

TPS still needs to be studied, and its essence abstracted into a theory that is neither false nor trivial and provides principles that can be practically deployed as needed in new industries. I agree with Spear that there is great value in such a theory, but it has to exist before we can use it.

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Oct 11 2014

The Great Lightbulb Conspiracy | IEEE Spectrum

On 23 December 1924, a group of leading international businessmen gathered in Geneva […]. Present were top representatives from all the major lightbulb manufacturers, including Germany’s Osram, the Netherlands’ Philips, France’s Compagnie des Lampes, and the United States’ General Electric. […] the group founded the Phoebus cartel, a supervisory body that would carve up the worldwide incandescent lightbulb market, with each national and regional zone assigned its own manufacturers and production quotas. It was the first cartel in history to enjoy a truly global reach.

The cartel’s grip on the lightbulb market lasted only into the 1930s. Its far more enduring legacy was to engineer a shorter life span for the incandescent lightbulb. By early 1925, this became codified at 1,000 hours for a pear-shaped household bulb, a marked reduction from the 1,500 to 2,000 hours that had previously been common. Cartel members rationalized this approach as a trade-off: Their lightbulbs were of a higher quality, more efficient, and brighter burning than other bulbs. They also cost a lot more. Indeed, all evidence points to the cartel’s being motivated by profits and increased sales, not by what was best for the consumer. In carefully crafting a lightbulb with a relatively short life span, the cartel thus hatched the industrial strategy now known as planned obsolescence.

Source: spectrum.ieee.org

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

Early in my career, I worked with an older engineer who told me that his first professional experience had been in the reliability department of a large, US appliance maker, where his job was to change product designs to make them fail as soon as the warranties expired.

I had heard of such efforts before, but had found the accounts difficult to believe. How could companies spend money to deliberately lower the quality of their products? But this was the testimony of a man I trusted who had personally done it, and hated it.

It was malicious, and it was corporate hubris at its worst. It created opportunities for competitors, which they eventually took. When we were having this conversation, my colleague also told me that the manufacturer was no longer in business.

This article from IEEE substantiates another story of market dysfunction that I had heard of but was not sure was true: the manufacturers of incandescent light bulbs conspired to reduce the lives of the bulbs.

The article gives dates, names, and places. An organization called the Phoebus cartel was set up in Geneva in 1924 by the leading lightbulb manufacturers in the US, Germany, the Netherlands, France, and Japan for the purpose of shortening bulb lives from 1,500 to 2,000 hours down to 1,000 hours.

Now that the incandescent lightbulb itself is becoming obsolete, how do we prevent LED manufacturers from pulling the same stunt?

It should be noted also that designing products to fail quickly is only one form of planned obsolescence. A less nefarious one is simply introducing regular product updates to make today’s cool product lame tomorrow. iPhones last much longer than one year. An iPhone 3 may still work today, particularly on its original operating system, but has been made unattractive by five new product releases. In IT in general, you don’t have to play along and can save by buying last year’s products.

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Oct 10 2014

Takumi, Toyota’s Secret Weapons To Train The Robots

Source: www.worldcrunch.com

Interesting article about master craftsmen (匠) at Toyota. I just wonder why the people in the picture wear caps from air conditioner manufacturer Daikin.

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Sep 29 2014

Discipline And The Broken Windows Theory | Dumontis

“Over the last few years a lot has been written about Lean leadership. For instance about what the differences would be between Lean and traditional leadership. And what the characteristics are of a Lean leader. One of the aspects often missing, I feel, is “discipline”. I have always told my managers that they weren’t paid more because they would supposedly be more intelligent or because they studied for a longer period of time, but because I expected them to be the most disciplined in respecting standards. As without the manager’s respect – also interestingly described in the “broken windows” theory – the organization as a whole will flout its own rules.”

Source: www.dumontis.com

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

Is being disciplined in respecting standards truly the quality that justifies managerial pay? By this criterion, the Caine’s Captain Queeg and the Bounty’s Lt. Bligh were both excellent managers. Whatever happened to “plan, organize, control, and lead”?

Like the “Hawthorne effect” or “Maslow’s hierarchy of needs,” the broken windows theory is being accepted just because it sounds plausible, not because it is supported by experiments. Do clean walls and intact windows deter serious crime? Perhaps, but it has to be established, and the response of passers-by to flyers does not do the job.

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