Mar 1 2013
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
Ford and Toyota Celebrate Historic Milestones Assembly Magazine (blog) However, the just-in-time concept was not fully realized at Toyota until 1954, when the supermarket supply method—the idea of having subsequent processes take what they need…
See on www.assemblymag.com
Mar 1 2013
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
Is production pacing oppressive or can it promote joy? Dr. Jeffrey Liker examines this lean manufacturing principle through two stories from a lean journey.
See on www.manufacturingpulse.com
Mar 1 2013
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
Harley-Davidson has announced a no music in the factory rule – period – no exceptions – no ifs, ands or buts.
“Hundreds of Harley-Davidson employees learned through a memo last week that their radios and music being piped onto the factory floor would be kaput by Wednesday — part of a continuous effort to improve safety.”
“‘It’s a distraction,’ said Maripat Blankenheim, director of external communications for Harley. ‘It’s really important for people – no matter what they do – to be focused on what they do.’”[…]
Behavior policies for working adults & the lean principle of treating people with respect are polar opposites: http://t.co/jqAk0y8cdQ
Bill Waddell takes exception to a policy recently issued by Harley Davidson to stop piping music onto the factory floor. According to him, such policies are demeaning. I can’t follow him there, for the following reasons:
See on www.idatix.com
Mar 1 2013
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
TEAMwork is St. Luke’s application of lean principles. It’s our management operating system. TEAMwork stands for timely, effective, accountable, measureable work. And it’s making its way through St. Luke’s Health System as we gain on our Triple Aim of better health, better care, and lower costs.
Starting last summer, SLIM embarked on a top-to-bottom examination of how it conducted its work. They wanted to eliminate waste by tapping into the potential and knowledge of every member of the clinic team and build a culture of continuous improvement.
The improvements described are all about supplies and the handling of patients by nurses and administrative staff.
There is not a word about any changes to the work of doctors themselves or involvement by doctors in the improvement process. What form might that take? I don’t know, but, the last industrial engineers to work on health care before Lean were Frank and Lillian Gilbreth 100 years ago, and their focus was the work of surgeons inside operating rooms, not patient handling before and after they see a doctor.
The result of their work was the now standard mode of operation in which the surgeon calls for tools that are handed to him by nurses. It seems hard to believe today but, earlier, surgeons would actually leave patients to fetch tools.
Following in the Gilbreths’ footsteps today would mean for Lean Health Care to get involved with the core of the activity: what doctors do with patients.
In manufacturing, successful Lean implementations start with the work of production on the shop floor, not with the logistics upstream and downstream from production. First you worry about line layout, work station design, and the jobs of production operators. Then you move on to keeping them supplied and shipping their output.
See on drpate.stlukesblogs.org
Feb 28 2013
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
Blog post at Lean Blog :
“…The plant has performance measures, safety crosses, Kaizen improvements, training schedules, team pictures, and all sorts of information posted everywhere. Our tour guide said, “We love visual management here” — and that includes information sharing. The boards were all labeled “FMDS” – or “Floor Management Development System” (see a quick description of it here from a book). That label seems to illustrate Toyota’s focus on developing people… interesting thought that what some people might call “metrics boards” aren’t just for managing and improving company performance, but they’re also for improving people….”
See on www.leanblog.org
Mar 3 2013
From Ybry charts to work-combination charts
This is a screen shot from yesterday’s evening news on the France 2 channel, part of a story about TGV high-speed trains used on regular tracks to bring vacationers to ski areas. The TGVs, of course run at regular speeds on these single line tracks and must stop at sidings to let regular trains through in the opposite direction. In an earlier post, I discussed the charts invented by Charles Ybry in 1846 for railroad scheduling, and this newscast shows that they are still used in railroads today. Besides railroad scheduling, they are also used in the management of multiple, concurrent projects, and I believe they were the basis for Toyota’s work combination charts.
The x-axis is time; the y-axis, position along the line. On the chart, the downward lines represent trains going down the line; the upward lines, trains coming up the line. When and where the lines cross, trains cross, and there must be a siding available. The news story had the TGV pilot call in his position on a siding to a control center in Chambéry where the chart was displayed. On the high-speed TGV lines, the signalling is all electronic, and the system automatically knows where the trains are; when you run a TGV train at reduced speed on a regular line, however, it seems that the driver has to report what happens the old-fashioned way.
I learned about these charts in Edward Tufte’s Envisioning Information, where he describes them as a special case of a “narrative of space and time.” Among the examples he gave were a similar railroad scheduling application from Switzerland 80 years ago and the development of Wagner’s operas over almost 50 years in the 19th century:
Work combination charts are a tool to design and communicate about production jobs that require operators to perform a sequence of operations on multiple machines that operate automatically between visits. This is a Japanese example of such a chart:
The concept looks similar, doesn’t it? I found this chart particularly useful when you need to plan the activities of more than one operator, as in the following example:
In the Legend, “Manual In” refers to time spent by the operator on the machine with it stopped; “Manual Out,” time spent on the machine while it runs.
To this date, in the US, this powerful technique is far from enjoying the popularity it deserves. It is generally perceived as “too complicated” and I still don’t know of any software tools that fully support it. In designing jobs that involve interactions between human and machines, however, the consequence of not using it is leaving about 50% of the potential productivity improvement on the table. It may take a project team an extra day to do it, but the result is achieving a 40% productivity increase instead of 20%. Details are discussed in Chapter 7 of Working with Machines.
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By Michel Baudin • Technology 3 • Tags: industrial engineering, Manufacturing engineering, Operator job design, Railroad, Scheduling, TGV, Toyota, Work-combination charts