Nov 8 2011
Factory life with and without Kaizen
In Kaizen, Masaaki Imai describes Japanese executives returning in the 1970s to American plants they had visited thirty years before and being struck by the absence of change: they saw the same production lines with the same equipment operated the same way. This started me looking for photographic evidence. Overall, pickings were slim, but I did find the above pictures of the same coke oven at the Ford River Rouge plant shot in 1946 and 1976.
If there is Kaizen activity in a factory, how does it change the work life of employees at all levels? The following chart compares the breakdowns of their use of time, with and without Kaizen:
In a plant without Kaizen, operators and supervisors are fully occupied with routine daily tasks: production for the operators, expediting parts, enforcing discipline, and record keeping for supervisors. Only middle managers and executives spend a fraction of their time on projects involving capacity changes, new production lines or new technology. Nobody works on incremental improvements to the way the work is done today.
By contrast, Kaizen involves employees at all levels in such improvement activities to different degrees. Between improvement and daily routine, the boundary is sharp; between improvement and innovation, fuzzy. Over time, the cumulative effect of incremental improvement is radical change by itself. In addition, the skills acquired and the lessons learned from incremental improvements are incorporated into new line or plant design projects. In some Japanese auto parts plants, I remember seeing automatic lines side-by-side, where one used old machines that had been gradually retrofitted with devices that reduced the need for human intervention, while the other one had been built from scratch with new machines to be automatic. The Kaizen work done to implement the former was essential to the success of the latter.
Nov 10 2011
Opinels, swiss knives, smart phones, and production machinery
Using Opinel knives while picnicking last summer got me thinking about their differences in design philosophy from Swiss knives, our traditional perception of multifunction tools, and how smart phones and machining centers contradict that perception.
Mostly known for snow-capped mountains, the Savoie region of France is also the birthplace of the Opinel, a pocket knife designed 120 years ago, and very popular there with anybody who hikes or just goes on a picnic. As you can see below, it is a simple knife with a sharp, pointed blade, and a ring to lock it closed or open.
As a concept, it is diametrically opposed to its cousin, the swiss knife, and its multiple functions:
The Opinel only has one function, but performs it well; the swiss knife has many but does not excel at any. It will cut, but not as well as the Opinel; it serves as a corkscrew, but provides no leverage to pull out the cork; it will open cans, but slowly and by pulling the sharp edge of the lid outwards towards your hand rather than into the can, etc. It is convenient because you only have to carry one tool around, but, for everything it does, there is a dedicated tool that does it better.
When we think of dedicated versus multifunction tools, we usually think that they are like Opinels and swiss knives and that, when we add more functions to a tool, we necessarily compromise on performance or quality for each function. But is that necessarily true?
Our smartphones let us talk to each other but also contain the contact data of everyone we have met since elementary school. They tell you where we are on precise maps, wake us up in the morning, work as stopwatches and egg timers, play our music, receive our favorite radio station, identify a song from a snippet of a recording, etc.
Dedicated tools do not exist for everything a smartphone does and, when they do, rarely outperform the smartphone apps. For example, I have not seen an alarm clock do more than the clock app on my phone in terms of selecting whether it rings just once or every weekday at the same time, how loud, with what sound, etc.
What is it that makes a smartphone different from other multifunction devices? In what way is it not like a swiss knife?
The short answer is that a smartphone is a computer. We often think of computers as machines like any other, or worse when we are frustrated with confusing interfaces or system crashes, but the reality is that they are qualitatively different, and that programmability allows them to outperform dedicated tools. Their hardware configurations make them smartphones, game systems, laptops, or industrial controllers but, within this context, the range of services they can render well is limited only by the imagination and talent of programmers.
In production, machining centers or computer-controlled fabrication facilities are not swiss knives, in that their flexibility is not bought by a compromise in performance, and this has far-reaching consequences on production engineering and operations.
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By Michel Baudin • Technology • 4 • Tags: Autonomation, Lean manufacturing, Manufacturing engineering, Technology