Nov 14 2012

Applying Lean to retail

In the Lean Logistics group on LinkedIn, Shouvik Chattopadhyay asked the following question:

Is it possible to implement LEAN in the retail industry?

Retail is a broad sector. The issues and opportunities will not be the same depending on whether you are selling shoes, books, or food.

Assume you are running a supermarket chain. Then there are opportunities in the customer interaction within your stores, in the shelf replenishment operations, in the receiving and preparation of the goods, and in all aspects of supply chain management.

On the floor, for example, you might work on the following:

  1. Reduce customer waiting times at check-stands.
  2. Lay out the shelves on the floor to make the most frequently bought items easily available.
  3. Collocate items that are frequently bought together.
  4. If you have deli counters, you can work on the kitchen where the items are prepared to increase productivity, reduce spoilage and assure the availability of all items on the floor.

Behind the scenes, there may be opportunities in the flow of goods from trucks to the shelves customers pick from. Trucks deliver in pallets or cases that need to be received, put away, and broken into the totes or display cases for customers. Observation of these operations usually uncovers improvement opportunities.

You may have a distribution center receiving some or all your items from suppliers, in which you may be able to do the following:

  1. Improve the breakdown between items that are delivered straight to stores or go through the distribution center.
  2. Organize delivery milk runs from the distribution center to stores.
  3. Organize collection milk runs to suppliers.
  4. Improve flow and visibility in warehousing or cross-docking operations within the distribution center.

Then you may pursue further opportunities in the information systems used to run the chain. It sells thousands of items to tens of thousands of individual consumers every day. There may be opportunities to improve the way this flow of transaction data translates into orders to suppliers, with their attendant consequences. These transaction data also need to be mined for differences in customer behavior in different locations, trends, or correlations between items.

Identifying opportunities is the easy part; changing the organization to take advantage of these opportunities, the hard part. The top management of the chain has to want it for strategic reasons, and to have the determination and perseverance to make it happen. Unlike manufacturing, retail is an area where the most successful innovations in recent decades have come from companies in the US, like WalMart or Amazon, or in Europe, like Auchan or Ikea. To the management of a supermarket chain, these may be more compelling sources of ideas than Toyota.

By • Technology • 1 • Tags: ,

Nov 13 2012

A perversion of the Toyota method | Pierre Deschamps | La Presse

See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing

The article is in French, from Quebec. Following is a full translation:

“A recent story in La Presse reports on the implementation of the famous Toyota method in home care by the Montreal firm Proaction. The article argues that the implementation is driving nurses, social workers and occupational therapists to nervous breakdowns.

In fact, what is described has nothing to do with the Toyota method, but is a practice labeled “Lean,” disconnected from one of the fundamental values of the Toyota approach.

Toyota’s business philosophy is based on two fundamental principles: respect and continuous improvement. At Toyota, the continuous improvement process is based on the respect that the company provides to its customers, suppliers and employees. Continuous improvement, yes, but never at the expense of respect for people.

In recent years, several consulting firms who see the Toyota approach as a business opportunity have appropriated some of its processes, and argued that organizations adopting them would rapidly increase their performance and efficiency.

What these companies have forgotten is that the Toyota method is successful when it is part of a strong corporate culture and in businesses with a healthy work environment. It is not successful in organizations where there is a significant psychological distress and is mental suffering high among employees, as appears to be the case with several employees of the health system.

In addition, for the Toyota approach to be successful within an organization, those who want to use it have an excellent knowledge of the culture and be able to develop a profile of the organization in terms of governance, leadership, ethics, practices, traditions, etc..

In a book called The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership, the authors issue a serious warning about external consultants who claim to be experts in the Toyota or Lean approach.

The traditional role of external consultants is to manage a project and produce a plan of action. Actually, the consultants do the thinking for their clients. They claim to have expertise in Lean methods and guarantee that they say will make the client’s organization more efficient by eliminating all unnecessary tasks and standardizing work.

However, in reality, knowledge of the new methods remains with the consultants and they leave at the end of their engagement is very fragile.

The authors insist that the changes we want to make within an organization to improve performance must be under the direction of a person called sensei or master, who will act as a guide to employees .

In this case, obviously, the Lean consultants — who manage to bring social workers and occupational therapists on the verge of a nervous breakdown, exhaust them, and create a climate of fear — operate outside the philosophy of the Toyota approach.

In fact, they are the opposite of all that is at the heart of this philosophy. The Minister of Health and Social Services is quite right to say that what is at the heart of Lean and, more precisely, the Toyota Way is involving and listening to the service staff in a climate of respect for the values of the organization and all the people, staff and patients.
Want to locate in an area like health care techniques without the underlying philosophy is not only doomed to failure, but can be detrimental to the quality of care.”

See on www.lapresse.ca

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Nov 13 2012

Cochlear discusses lean manufacturing processes

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Cochlear, an Australian manufacturing of hearing aids,  discusses its new, lean manufacturing manufacturing processes, and its hearing hub at Macquarie University.

See on www.manmonthly.com.au

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Nov 12 2012

Takt time – Transfer from Germany to Japan in World War II

In Americanization and its Limits, p. 325, the sentence “In February and March 1942, visiting engineers from the German firm Junkers lectured to Japanese aircraft engineers on high-volume manufacture of fuselages and engines.” made me wonder how, in the middle of the war, engineers just “visited” from Germany. It’s not as if you could then hop on a plane in Berlin and land a few hours later in Tokyo.

According to Wikipedia, until Germany invaded Russia in June, 1941, Japanese and Germans visited each other by riding the Transsiberian railway, from Moscow to Vladivostok, which took a few weeks. After that, the only way to travel was by blockade-running submarines, and only six such trips occurred, carrying in total 96 people from Germany to Japan, and 89 in the other direction.

According to the 1946 US Air Force report on the Japanese aircraft industry, passage of materials by rail stopped after Germany attacked Russia, but passage of personnel continued. This is surprising, and it is difficult to imagine how Germans could have allowed to travel that road, but Japan was not at war with Russia until August, 1945. It had a neutrality pact with the Soviet Union, which must have allowed Japanese citizens to travel to Moscow under diplomatic cover, and then on to Germany through a neutral country like Sweden or Turkey.

Ernst Udet visited Japan, its air force and its aircraft industry in 1939. Early in 1941,  the train was still available  and General Yamashita — future “tiger of Malaya” hanged as a war criminal in 1946 — spent several months in Berlin. He brought back 250 aircraft technicians, engineers, and flight instructors. Given the timing and arithmetic, there is no way the vast majority of these 250 could have returned to Germany before the war ended.

The people who visited Mitsubishi aircraft must have been from that group, and must have been available for more than a lecture. My guess is that they stuck around to help Mitsubishi implement their Taktsystem. These people’s direct knowledge of the Junkers system is also as of 1941, before forced labor.

The JMA (Japan Management Association) currently is a large consulting firm in Japan. Shigeo Shingo worked there, and it is also where Nakajima coined the term TPM. The JMA already existed during the war, and, after the war, was instrumental in propagating techniques from aircraft manufacturing to other industries.

According to the same source, “Even in the early 1960s, the Japanese market for cars remained small and assemblers wanted to produce a variety of cars. The companies preferred to accommodate many types of cars on a single line, and consequently emphasized the need to equalize the cycle times of all production processes. This was rather similar to the situation at aircraft companies during the war…”

By • History • 4 • Tags: , , , , ,

Nov 11 2012

Takt time – Even more about origins in German aircraft manufacturing

Earlier this week, I ran into John Paxton’s 2008 paper called Myth vs. Reality: The Question of Mass Production in WW-II, in which he makes a convincing case that production methods were far more advanced in the US aircraft industry than in Germany or Japan. It is really not in doubt. The point in trying to understand the Junkers Taktsystem is simply as one of the sources of TPS. World War II German and Japanese engineers could design advanced planes, like the first jetfighter, the Messerschmitt 262 that you can see in the Smithsonian today, or the Mitsubishi Zero. But, in production, they could not come anywhere near the one-bomber-an-hour performance of Ford’s Willow Run plant.

Yesterday, I was able to go to the main library at Stanford University, where they have about one foot on one shelf in the basement with books on the German aircraft industry in World War II. including in particular Lutz Budrass’s work on the subject and Holger Lorenz‘s Kennzeichen Junkers. Budrass’s book is a forbidding 1,000 pages of small print with a few grainy pictures, long on armament policies and politics, but short on technology:

Lorenz’s book is much more accessible and contains many high-quality photographs, which contradict Paxton when he says:

“Photographs from the era show this  difference. Classic photos from Vickers and DeHavilland (British) and Junkers and Heinkel (German) production facilities show  isolated aircraft in ‘final assembly’, in  stationary jigs, being assembled by ‘work  gangs’, embodying the ‘craft production’  process. In contrast, photographs from  Grumman, North American, Republic, and others show rolling final assembly processes, with aircraft moving from station  to station, much like Model T assembly  twenty years earlier.”

What Paxton writes is not consistent with what little I have seen about  the Junkers Taktsystem, and it is not consistent with the photographic evidence either, which shows that, at Junkers, the final assembly methods in the 1930s were eerily similar to those today for airliners, as you can see in the following side-by-side comparison:

Junkers clearly had a rolling assembly line, albeit one that, unlike the Boeing 737 line, was not continuously moving, Otherwise, the similarities extend even to the kits of parts that are rolled over to each plane. Of course, this is Junkers, not the whole of the German aircraft industry at the time, but Junkers is the one we are interested in, because of their Taktsystem and their transfer of this method to Mitsubishi aircraft in Nagoya, through which it reached Toyota. Other companies used a variety of methods. As we can see on the following picture Heinkel 111 bombers appear to have been assembled on fixed stations in 1939, but Messerschmitt fighters on assembly lines in 1943:

These and more pictures of German aircraft manufacturing before and during World War II are available from the Bundesarchiv Picture Database.

Upstream in fuselage assembly, the comparison looks as follows:

In 1934, for Ju-52 fuselages, Junkers used a nose-to-tail assembly line; in 1940, for the Ju-88, a side-by-side line. Today, Boeing 737 fuselage assembly, Spirit Aero in Wichita, KS, appears to be using parallel fixed stations. Fuselage assembly in this context, however, is limited to fastening together sections that have been assembled separately, with automated riveting.

Paxton’s article contains other assertions that are also difficult to accept. He claims, for example, that the abundance of cars in the US spread mechanical skills throughout the population and that these skills made it easier for large numbers of workers to learn how to build airplanes. He quotes the following statistics for the number of people per vehicle in different countries in 1926:

  • Australia:  30
  • China: 31,871
  • Japan: 1,789
  • Britain:  49
  • France:  54
  • Germany: 194
  • Italy: 353
  • United States: 6

The US was the only country in which almost every family had one car, and American cars of that era were designed to be maintained by their owners. They came with a kit containing the necessary tools and instructions. The US aircraft industry during World War II, however, is known to have employed women in large numbers, as in the following photo of  women installing fixtures and assemblies to a tail fuselage section of a B-17F Bomber (Library of Congress).

If do-it-yourself car maintenance pre-trained World War II aircraft workers in mechanics, then car maintenance must have been done by women. Single women in isolated farms certainly had no choice but to maintain  their cars and tractors, but, in the culture of the 1920’s and 30’s, it is difficult to imagine that women who had a man at hand didn’t delegate changing spark plugs to him rather than learn it themselves. Paxton’s article also asserts that German aircraft production required skilled craftsmen, but most of it during the war was done by forced laborers from occupied countries who were not trained mechanics or machinists.

On the other hand, the article fails to mention two obvious reasons for the superior performance of aircraft manufacturing in the US:

  1. Among all the belligerents, the US was the only one with aircraft factories that were out of the enemy’s range. Germany’s ABC program, on the other hand, had defense against air attacks as a central design consideration. Whatever you do to spread out the facilities and protect the supply chain from bombs does not help you in productivity or quality. The Junkers factory in Dessau was bombed in 1944.
  2. The US aircraft industry in World War II had a highly motivated work force. Not only were these manufacturing jobs the best these women had ever had, but they knew they were producing equipment for the men in their lives who were fighting for a cause they believed in. By contrast, in Germany, Rosie the Riveter’s counterparts were Polish or French workers building bombers against their will for the worst thugs in history, and they would have been happy to see these planes crash on take-off. In addition, most of them didn’t speak German.

The picture that emerges from the documents I have seen so far is that, in the late 1930s, Junkers had organized production in what is now called pulse lines. Final assembly was divided into operations of balanced durations, so that the planes didn’t move during operations but moved forward in unison at fixed time intervals, with upstream processes and the supply chain organized to support this mode of operation. And this is the Taktsystem that was taught to Mitsubishi Aircraft by Junkers engineers in 1942.

By • History • 4 • Tags: , , , ,

Nov 8 2012

Metrics — Companies focus on what is easy to measure

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in a recent Forrester report, analyst Craig Le Clair, argues that much of the information companies collect is just noise. “We often focus on what’s easiest to measure,” he writes, “not what’s most important.”

See on www.processexcellencenetwork.com

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