Press clippings

Oct 2 2013

“The Fragility of Lean is its Strength” | Michael Ballé

See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing

“Can a pull system with zero stock make the company more fragile? Sure it can, that’s the whole point: fragile, but flexible. The pull system doesn’t make the company fragile: it reveals the weak points. Top performance is about keeping a ball on top of a round hill it needs everybody’s engagement to make sure it stays there.”

Michel Baudin‘s insight:

Pull systems don”t have zero stocks, but low stocks, and the experience of disasters — from the Mississippi flood of 1993 in the US, to the Aisin Seiki fire of 1997 and the Fukushima earthquate of 2011 in Japan — has shown Toyota’s pull system to be robust and able to recover much faster than anyone expected, including the Japanese press.

“Fragility is strength” is a cute paradox, but not applicable here. The true paradox is that stocks generally do not protect you against shortages. They do for crude oil and similar commodities, but not for  the thousands of different items you need in manufacturing. You end up with full warehouses that are somehow out of the item you need today.

What protects you more effectively is the combination of low stocks with the kind of vigilance that makes you reserve all the available trucking in Chicago a few days before a flood, as Toyota did in 1993. A pull system supports the vigilant monitoring of stocks in two ways:

  1. Self-adjustment in the speed of circulation of pull signals automatically absorbs the routine fluctuations in volume and mix.
  2. When major disruptions occur, they are quickly detected and acted on.

See on www.scdigest.com

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Sep 28 2013

Pathways to high performance | Manufacturers’ Monthly

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“The High Performance Consortium LTD (HPC), a not for profit organisation, facilitates groups of up to 12 non-competing businesses to undertake a program that incorporates events, site visits, coaching and facilitated peer-to-peer forums.”

Michel Baudin‘s insight:

This is similar to supplier groups as organized in Japan: non-competitors helping each other improve performance through joint projects. In this case, it appears to be organized directly by the participating companies, rather than by a common customer.

See on www.manmonthly.com.au

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Sep 28 2013

Does This Man Look Efficient? | Businessweek

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“…Threading the nut is waste, as are the first five turns of the wrench. Only the last quarter-turn of the nut adds value. The customer doesn’t pay you to turn the nut. The customer pays you to fix the joint. My customer—my editor—only pays me to hand in completed articles. Everything else I do up to that point is waste.

Toyota will scratch at tenths of a second to bring down “takt time,” what it takes to complete a single step in a process…”

 

Michel Baudin‘s insight:

The coverage of Lean in the mainstream press often turns into a collection of strange statements of this kind.

What does it mean that only the last quarter turn of the nut adds value? The gas cap on my car is fastened with just a quarter turn, but the nuts that hold the engine together are not. When you tighten a nut, force is applied to the entire length of the thread, which makes running down the nut about as “wasteful” as prepping a surface before painting it.

That Business Week’s editor only pays the author for completed articles does not mean that the work of writing them is waste. Customers, generally, are no authority on the process to make what they buy. If you sell something, it’s your job to figure it out. There is what you need to do, and what you don’t. If you need to do it, it’s not waste; if you don’t, it is.

And Takt time is not what it takes to complete a single step in a process! it is a common misconception but it completely misses the point of producing to takt. For a weekly magazine, the takt time is one week.

See on www.businessweek.com

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Sep 26 2013

Cells in Jewelry Manufacturing? | Dumontis

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How Stuller’s development of continuous-flow work cells using a lean manufacturing approach is helping the company compete in the U.S.

 

Michel Baudin‘s insight:

The words in the article are great, but the picture does not match. This looks like traditional workbench manufacturing, not Lean cells!

As Crocodile Dundee would have said, that‘s not a cell, this is a cell:

This one is in machining. For assembly, I don’t have as good a video, but this is picture of an assembly cell for small parts:

Slimmed down cell

See on www.mjsa.org

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Sep 20 2013

The top ten lean manufacturers | Manufacturing Digital

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From the automotive philosophers of Toyota to the makers of Kleenex tissues, Lean manufacturing principles have been exemplified by some of the world’s top companies. Here is a list of some of the best practitioners in the …

Michel Baudin‘s insight:

Top ten by what criteria? What is the measure of leanness on which these companies outperform everybody else? The article doesn’t say. Most “top ten” lists don’t either, but you want to see who is on them anyway. If you know the inner workings of some of these companies, you may be surprised to find them there. You may also wonder what the actions described in the paragraph about Nike have to do with Lean.

See on www.manufacturingdigital.com

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Sep 18 2013

The Legacy of Eiji Toyoda | Businessweek

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Washington Post
The Legacy of Eiji Toyoda
Businessweek
He transformed Toyota into a global powerhouse with management and manufacturing processes that transcended the auto industry.

See on www.businessweek.com

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