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May 17 2014

Who Invented the Car? | Ronnie Schreiber

See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing

Marcus’s 1870 car

“[…] the Nazis tried to write Austrian inventor Siegfried Marcus (who was Jewish) out of history by ordering German encyclopedia publishers to replace Marcus’ name and credit Gottlieb Daimler and Carl Benz as the inventors of the automobile[…]”

 

 

 

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

As this article is not about manufacturing or Lean, I hesitated about posting it. Who cares who invented the car anyway?

When President Obama mistakenly referred to the car as an American invention, it created a small diplomatic row with Germany because, as everyone knows, the car was invented by Gottlieb Daimler and Carl Benz…

Or was it? Not according to Ronnie Schreiber, and he shares plenty of  evidence that, until the Nazis decided otherwise, the inventor of the car was an Austrian jew named Siegfried Marcus who beat Daimler and Benz by about  two decades.

We should care about giving credit where it is due, even for inventions that are 150 years old, and for practical reasons. We want the inventors of today and tomorrow to know that they will be properly honored for their contributions, whether or not they are able to profit from them.

Now back to manufacturing!

See on www.thetruthaboutcars.com

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May 16 2014

Does the World Need More MBAs? | Sally Blount says “Yes” | Business Week

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“Business is our most important social institution—improving the lives of millions. Yet it falls far short of its potential to serve society […]  When you’re creating the next Google, Tencent, or Apple, you’re going to need people with the training, skills, and network that business education is uniquely good at providing. There’s a reason all of those companies hire people with MBAs. Even more important than the skills argument, however, is the intellectual argument for an MBA education, where there is critical knowledge to be gained. Business has evolved to be the dominant social institution of our age. Business is the cultural, organizational, and economic superforce in human development.”

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

Bill Waddell disagrees. I do too, for different reasons.

While I agree with Blount about the value of business skills, I see MBA programs as steeped in the druckerian fallacy that management is a profession in its own right, like Medicine or Engineering, and that a well-trained manager can be equally effective at running businesses in any industry, whether selling sugared water or making computers that change the world.

Rather than being a specialty in its own right, “Business Administration” is best viewed as a set of skills that complements industry-specific knowledge and experience.

That business is “the cultural, organizational, and economic superforce in human development” is something the dean of a business school would say. You could easily make the case for other forms of human endeavors, like universal public education, scientific research, or even democracy.

Bill Waddell seems to think that MBAs are inherently unable to implement and sustain Lean. I have, however, met several leaders who excelled at Lean while having MBAs. But it was not all they had.

A unique feature of this degree is that it takes over the identity of its holders, to the point that they describe themselves as “being MBAs” rather than “having MBAs.” The ones I have admired for their excellence in Lean had an engineering degree and had worked as engineers before getting MBAs.

See on www.businessweek.com

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May 13 2014

The GM Toyota Rating Scale | Bill Waddell

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“In a survey of suppliers on their working relationships with the six major U.S. auto makers – Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Ford, Chrysler and GM – GM scored the worst.  But of course they did.  They are GM and we can always count on such results from them. […] Toyota scored highest with a ranking of 318, followed by Honda at 295, Nissan at 273, Ford at 267, Chrysler at 245, with GM trotting along behind the rest with an embarrassing 244.”

 

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

While I am not overly surprised at the outcome, I am concerned about the analysis method. The scores are weighted counts of subjective assessments, with people being asked to rate, for example, the “Supplier-Company overall working relationship” or “Suppliers’ opportunity to make acceptable returns over the long term.”

This is not exactly like the length of a rod after cutting or the sales of Model X last month. There is no objective yardstick, and two individuals might rate the same company behavior differently.

It is not overly difficult to think of more objective metrics, such as, for example, the “divorce rate” within a supplier network. What is the rate at which existing suppliers disappear from the network and others come in? The friction within a given Supplier-Customer relationship could be assessed from the number of incidents like the customer paying late or the supplier missing deliveries…

Such data is more challenging to collect, but supports more solid inferences than opinions.

See on www.idatix.com

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May 1 2014

13 pillars of the Toyota Production System |Toyota UK corporate blog

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“Underpinned by thirteen core processes and philosophies, The Toyota Production System pioneered modern manufacturing as we know it. Here’s what each one is and how each one works. The Toyota Production System is the blueprint for modern manufacturing, and is employed in Britain to build the Toyota Auris and Avensis models. Here, we take a look at the thirteen philosophies that underpin it.”

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

Thanks to Mark Graban for drawing my attention to this blog from Toyota UK and this article in particular. It is always useful to know Toyota’s official line about its own system. Corporate blogs are perversions of the concept of a blog, which is intended to be a conversation between an individual human and the rest of the world. When you read a post, you know who stands behind it and who will respond to your comments. Corporate blogs lack this authorial voice, and are a public relations exercise.

The first “pillar” in this article is the Konnyaku stone. I had never heard of it The only kind of Konnyaku I am familiar with is gelatinous slabs found in Japanese dishes. I didn’t know the name was used in polishing sheet metal, and I am still not sure what kind of a pillar of a production system it may be.

The picture illustrating the Andon paragraph does not appear related to the subject. An Andon board, on the other hand, is shown as an illustration of Kanban.

The picture on Jidoka shows automatic welding by robots, but the text only describes equipment “designed to detect problems and stop automatically when required,” without saying that it happens to be automatic. The paragraph also describes operators stopping production “the moment they spy something untoward,” which, while important, is not jidoka per se.

“Kaizen” is described as “a mantra for continuous improvement.” I thought it was just continuous improvement, not a mantra for it. The paragraph also states that it achieves “efficiency optimization.” If it did, however, you would be at an optimum, and continuous improvement would no longer be possible.

See on blog.toyota.co.uk

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Apr 28 2014

Freddy Ballé’s Four Points | Richard Kaminski

The following is the translation of an excerpt from from Richard Kaminski’s latest ILF newsletter:

“As Dan Jones wrote in the preface to Lean Management, the leading global Lean Production System in Europe he saw was Valeo’s, developed by Freddy Ballé with coaching Toyota. […] Less known are the methodological battles that led Freddy Ballé to try to correct the failings of the machine he had put in place, battles that have always fascinated Dan and he has encouraged me to describe several items […]:

    1. Quality improvement is the key to innovation. The main industrial problem Freddy has always been improving product quality in production and the implications of these improvements on products under development. Kaizen events help “clean the window” ( and generate immediate savings ) but have meaning only to he extent that eliminating variations reveals quality and process control issues. Quality is much more difficult to achieve than efficiency because it quickly boils down to knowledge — and the need to develop deep skills, which is also one of the true keys to success in Lean.
    2. No improvement without involvement. The first topic for Freddy has always been operator safety. His image is that it takes two feet to move : improvement and involvement go hand in hand. Hop on one foot, and you fall. In the factory, one of his first questions is “How are you organized? ” It’s not about the organization chart but how are the operators are organized. Are the teams stable? With a team leader ? How many operators for one supervisor? How the are the operators’ problems handled?
    3. The pull system is essential not avoid cherry-picking problems. Another common battle is the constant temptation to set priorities for problems. The pull system requires the discipline of solving problems as and when they arise and block the flow. Often the problems faced by operators in the creation of value are very different from the fads that obsess their managers. There are no major or minor problems . There are problems that can be treated quickly and easily and more difficult problems that are a struggle to solve. But the key is to acquire the discipline not to choose problems, but to deal with the reality of flow reveals,  in the order in which it happens (as you produce to Kanbans in the order in which they arrive and not in the order you prefer) .
    4. Hypothesis testing is at the heart of problem solving. Deep learning in problem solving takes place when you test hypotheses . On the one hand , you open minds by asking for several hypotheses beyond the obvious solutions; on the other hand, you learn by testing these hypotheses one by one by practical experimentation rather than rush to a conclusion. Hypothesis test is demanding. However, pursuing ” process improvement ” without individual learning reduces Lean to a mechanical approach that can pick low-hanging fruits but not fundamentally develop the skills of the work force.”
Michel Baudin‘s comments:

What attracted me to this list is (1) that it is short enough to be remembered, and (2) that it is specific enough to be worth discussing.

For example, is it always true that quality improvement is the key to innovation? If your innovation is next year’s new model of a shock absorber, then it stands to reason that the lessons learned from improving quality on the current model can be applied to the design of the new one, so that it can be introduced into production faster and with fewer defects. If “innovation” refers to radically new products like the iPad or Google Glass, however, it is a stretch to link success with quality in production. The skills of the contract manufacturers obviously matter, but they are not the ones who come up with the innovative products, at least until they decide to compete with their customer, as Samsung did with Apple.

Regarding pull systems, I am used to thinking of them as tools for rapid problem detection. Machine breakdowns command immediate attention because they stop production. Defects are detected promptly as parts move swiftly from one operation to the next rather that sit in a WIP warehouse. Using a pull system does force you to address the problems in the order they occur, but only at the level of the immediate countermeasure, not the root cause. At that level, I see no alternative to setting priorities. If you find that the root cause of your forging problems is that your 300 dies don’t have standard dimensions, you have to decide whether and when to address it and it may take a year of sustained effort to fix it. If you simultaneously have a problem with microstoppages caused by parts getting stuck in chutes, you may have to make a choice. Operator involvement broadens the range of problems that can be worked on concurrently, but only to the extent that you can put together teams with the requisite technical knowledge.

Valeo is a well-known success story for Lean, now referred to as “Operational Excellence” and the “Valeo Production System” (VPS).  I couldn’t find any information on line that is not published by Valeo itself. The page on the company web site has quality data from 2013, but the copy is identical to a Reference Document from 2003.  I have had personal communications about VPS from consultants who are Valeo alumni, and I hope to see their comments here.

 

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Apr 27 2014

Comment on Nike: People are people no matter where they work | Bill Waddell

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“How […] can we understand […] Nike’s institutional commitment to systemic exploitation of folks working in factories? […]

The ‘manufacturing’ people at Nike are merely the internal champions of seeking out and making maximum use – abuse – of cheap labor.  If they were actually manufacturing people they would be ashamed of and outraged over factories such as the one they championed in Bangladesh – the one in which they “slogged up a dirty staircase to the top floors of an eight-story building” and had “rolls of fabric were strewn across the production floor and some windows were bolted shut.”

No serious manufacturing person with even the least measure of pride would have urged the company to perform production in such a pig sty of a factory.  Only some sort of mercenary focused solely on grubbing for pennies wants to be associated with such a plant.”

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

Not that long ago, the awful conditions Bill Waddell is describing in Bangladesh factories were common in the US, UK, Germany, France, Japan,… Right or wrong, today’s advanced economies did sacrifice generations of factory workers on the altar of development, including my grandparents, and perhaps Bill’s. It was a decade-long struggle to get past this but, by and large, we have.

What attitude should we have towards countries where workers are treated today the way they were here 100 years ago? Bill is suggesting a boycott, but how would this play out? Specifically:

  • Would the factories be improved?
  • Would the adult workers find other employment under conditions that meet our standards?
  • Would the child workers go back to school?

Unless we are in a position to make these outcomes happen, how sincere is our concern?

See on www.idatix.com

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