News

Jun 27 2014

Fundamental failings in “Lean” procurement | Supply Chain Digital

A side-loading truck

“The famous Lean approach, adopted by companies all over the world, considers the expenditure of resources on anything that doesn’t create value for the end customer as waste and seeks to eliminate unnecessary processes within this framework.

The concern, however, is that companies are losing out by either not fully understanding the practice or not committing themselves enough to the change in thinking adopting it requires.”

Source: www.supplychaindigital.com

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

The points in the article are valid, and could be summarized by saying that, in procurement/supply chain management/logistics, efficiency should never be pursued at the expense of effectiveness.

The more fundamental mistake, however, is the half-baked notion that “anything that doesn’t create value for the end customer is waste.”  Any business activity involves tasks the customer is never aware of, let alone values, and a narrow-minded focus on what customers are “willing to pay for” blinds managers to the need and the benefits of, for example, supporting suppliers.

Customer willingness to pay is not an actionable criterion to identify waste. An activity is waste if, and only if, your performance does not degrade in any way when you stop doing it. If eliminating it does not degrade your quality, increase your costs, delay your delivery, put your people at risk, or make your employees want to quit, then it is waste. But, even with a proper perspective on waste, eliminating it only improves only efficiency, not effectiveness. It’s about getting things done right, not getting the right things done.In a manufacturing company, procurement/supply chain management/logistics is the pit crew supporting production, and the business benefits of doing this job better dwarf any savings achieved through efficiency.

Reducing order fulfillment lead times, introducing new products, or customizing them helps the business grow. And it may require spending more rather than less on the supply chain, for example by moving trucks that are not 100% full.

By • Press clippings • 0 • Tags: , , , , , , ,

Jun 23 2014

Ex-Toyota exec preaches production gospel to aspiring supplier | Automotive News

Paula Lillard is now the bright hope for nth/works. She has come to help instill the Toyota Production System — or TPS — for a supplier that urgently wants it.

Source: www.autonews.com

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

This article paints a picture of what implementing Lean is really all about. It starts from the business needs of a parts supplier to the household appliance industry that wants to move into auto parts, where tolerances are tighter.And implementation is centered around what Lillard calls giving the plant “a little TLC.”

According to the article, her first task was “to ask employees to write and create step-by-step instructions on how to do their jobs.”  This is a far cry from all the nonsense about starting with 5S. It does not require value-stream maps, and it cannot be done in so-called “Kaizen events.”

Instead, it is patient work that requires time and perseverance.There is a TPS twist on work instructions — using A3 sheets posted above workstations rather than 3-ring binders on shelves — but such instructions  have been recognized as essential since the 19th century, and have been part of the industrial engineering curriculum since its inception, decades before Toyota was started.

Yet,  the article implies that  a stamping parts manufacturer in the American Midwest survived for 70 years without them. Having seen many plants with non-existent or ineffective job instructions, I believe it, and it raises many questions.

By • Press clippings • 2 • Tags: , ,

Jun 21 2014

Poka-Yoke in User Interface Design | Six Revisions

 

“Poka-yoke is a Japanese term that means “mistake-proofing”. It surfaced in the 1960s, and was first applied in the car manufacturing industry. Poka-yoke is credited to industrial engineer Shigeo Shingo.”

Source: sixrevisions.com

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

That IT specialists should be interested in the Poka-Yoke concept is natural. There are, however, consequential inaccuracies In the way it is described in many English-language sources, including Wikipedia.

The example given as the first Poka-Yoke is a redesign of a switch assembly process that involved presenting springs on a placeholders so that the operator would not forget to insert one.

Assuming this is a true example, it has two characteristics that make it different from the other examples given in Shingo’s book or in Productivity Press’s big red book of Poka-Yoke.

First, having a placeholder does not physically prevent the operator from making a mistake. A classical example of a system that does is one that puts a lid on every bin except the one the operator needs to pick from.

Second, this example adds labor to the operation, which means that the preparation step of placing the springs in the placeholder is likely to be by-passed under pressure. This is why it is a requirement for a Poka-Yoke not to add labor to the process.

For the same reasons, a multi-step deletion process in a software interface does not qualify as a Poka-Yoke. If you do multiple deletes, you end up pressing the buttons in rapid succession, occasionally deleting items you didn’t intend to, while cursing the inconvenience of these multiple steps.

Having different, incompatible plugs certainly made it impossible to plug the keyboard into a port for an external disk. USB, however, was an improvement over this, because, with it, the machine figures out the purpose of the connection. A connector that you can insert in any orientation is even better. It saves you time, and there is no wrong way to plug it in. This is a genuine Poka-Yoke.

There are other, useful approaches that make mistakes less likely without preventing them outright. Don Norman and Jacob Nielsen call them “usability engineering.” They should certainly be used in user interface design, but not confused with Poka-Yoke.

By • Blog clippings • 1 • Tags: , ,

Jun 20 2014

Supplier Assessment — It’s The Gut That Counts Says Nobu Morita | Pat Moody

“Beyond Report Cards, Beyond Balance Sheets?  When Evaluating Suppliers, Why It’s Your Gut That Counts.

What’s the best way for supply management and manufacturing pros to evaluate current and potential suppliers? And is there only one “best way?”  There are hundreds of supplier assessment tools, books and checklists, but there is no single standards committee that absolutely dead nuts certifies what’s out there, especially when your supplier is located two continents and three oceans and four hand-offs away!”

Source: sites.google.com

Michel Baudin‘s comments:
When assessing a manufacturing organization, I always look for information from three sources:

  1.  Data, and preferably raw rather than cooked into metrics by recipes unknown to me.
  2. Direct observation of production.
  3. What people tell me, which may or may not agree with the data and what I sense on the shop floor.

I don’t see Morita as disagreeing with this, but I think we must be careful about basing decision on a “gut feel,” which may be no more than the expression of prejudices you didn’t even know you had.

Still, when your gut feel tells you that something is not quite right, it often is. I wouldn’t base my decision on it, but I would take it as a signal that further investigation is needed.

By • Blog clippings • 3 • Tags: , , ,

Jun 13 2014

A Deming Interview from 1984

In a discussion in the TPS Principles and Practice discussion group on LinkedIn, Hein Winkelaar pointed out the following video of an interview with W. Edwards Deming taped in 1984:

for more details, you can also read about Deming’s list of “5 Deadly Diseases” in Chapter 3 of Out of the Crisis, pp. 97-148.

By • Blog clippings • 0 • Tags:

Jun 8 2014

What to Expect From a Corporate Lean Program | MIT Sloan Management Review

See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
“We studied the implementation of the Volvo Production System, or VPS. The Volvo Group, based outside Gothenburg, Sweden, is a leading manufacturer of heavy vehicles, such as trucks, buses and construction equipment. (The company sold its Volvo Cars unit in 1999.) The Volvo Group introduced the VPS in 2007, and since then, it has been implementing the VPS in its 67 factories, located in countries around the world. VPS is similar to lean production systems used in many other companies, and we believe the insights from this study can be usefully applied in other companies. We examined the five-year history of this program, visited 44 of the 67 plants and interviewed 200 managers.”

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

The first author of this article, Torbjørn Netland, is among my favorite bloggers. You can rely on him for good, clear-headed writing based on research. And this article delivers, as expected, but not what its title says. It’s not about corporate Lean programs in general, but all about the case of Volvo. Since I have not seen this kind of disconnect on Torbjørn’s blog, I suspect the title was selected by editors at the Sloan Management Review to broaden its appeal.

A general issue that is not addressed in the article is the level of knowledge of Lean in corporate Lean programs. A company that is just starting in Lean, by definition, has no internal expertise to draw on. If it wants its Lean program to be led by experts, it has to hire them from the outside, which is problematic in two ways:

  1. It is a challenge at this point for management to recognize real expertise.
  2. Leaders brought in from the outside have no roots or network in the company.

The alternative is to appoint insiders and expect them to learn. But then it has to be understood that they are not in a position to prescribe what plants should do, and that their role should instead be one of facilitation, coordination, and cross-pollination of ideas between plants.

Often, corporate Lean groups are overeager to standardize the approach across all plants — regardless of what they make or the business and social environment in which they operate.

If they don’t want to turn the Lean program into a exercise in formal compliance, they can instead, for example, on organize periodic conferences  where representatives from different plants present their work. They can also arrange for these conferences to be hosted in turns at the different plants and include shop floor visits. And this can be supplemented by various forms of knowledge sharing on the company’s intranet…

There is nothing wrong with collecting the best practices from different plants into a corporate standard, once the different plants have had the opportunity to develop these practices. But if you do it too early, all you do is stifle the creativity that you need for this purpose.

See on sloanreview.mit.edu

By • Press clippings • 2 • Tags: , ,

«< 31 32 33 34 35 >»