Aug 3 2012
Lean Assembly available for the Kindle
Browsing through Amazon, I discovered that my own book Lean Assembly is now available for the Kindle. It is a welcome development, but I just wish they had told me.
Aug 2 2012
Brillopak wins lean manufacturing innovation award
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
“The company was chosen as an inaugural winner of the Medway Innovation Voucher, towards the development of its new lean production control package. This is being developed to support small and medium manufacturers, using Brillopak’s new COMPACT C Series and robot cell packing and palletising solutions.”
See on www.packagingeurope.com
Aug 1 2012
What about operators who do not want to be cross-trained?
Question from Bret Matthews on LinkedIn:
We have been talking about cross training our people in the different areas of our shop and the question we have yet to answer is:
What happens when a person that is great at one process fails to meet the expectation in another area?
Ideally, We would like to have a crew that could do any position needed.
Do we just accept that they could be better at some things than others?
What if they just choose to not meet the expectation because they don’t want to do that particular job?
You have two seemingly contradictory objectives:
- You want your work force to become multi-skilled.
- You want to show respect to your people, particularly if they have spent many years developing specialized skills. You don’t want to punish them for having done what the company used to expect.
This is how I would recommend managing the transition, and it involves Human Resources:
- Create a new job category, that you may call “technical operators” or “superoperators” or “operator-technicians,” or any other name that conveys that they are an elite within the work force.
- Train the superoperators to be multiskilled and give them also extra training in areas like quality and problem-solving.
- Post the skills matrices on the team performance boards, and make each certification of an operator on a new skill a small ceremony at the daily team meeting.
- Establish a policy that all new hires will be recruited at a higher level of education, will receive special training, and will join this group.
- Setup a road map for existing operators to receive the appropriate training and join this group.
- Revise the wage system so that the superoperators earn slightly more than regular operators.
The idea is to allow the old categories to coexist with the new for the transition period, and eventually disappear. Most operators will come around when they see that the company is serious about cross-training and shows it in visible, concrete and tangible ways. For those who don’t, you need to find the best way to use the skills they do have. To the extent it’s not disruptive, they can stay in place, but they can also migrate to other functions in Maintenance, Quality, or even Training.
You should also keep in mind that cross-training is a never ending quest, because people who are fully trained on all the jobs in a shop are first in line to be promoted out of the shop and new people come in.
Aug 1 2012
Hansgrohe uses Kanbans with RFID chips
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
“Hansgrohe uses RFID-enabled kanban (signal) cards to track the flow of containers between its two production sites. The company now enjoys several benefits, including accelerated goods receipt and the certainty of having all the required components readily available for assembly.”
See on bathroomdesignideas.freeenergygeneration.net
The system has been used since 2008, and Hansgrohe provided the following pictures:
The cards look like regular kanbans.
The cards are read when placed in the mailbox on the left.
The full mailbox is read at once.
It should be noted that this system does not eliminate the recirculating cards, but simply replace bar codes with RFID chips as a means of integrating the Kanban system with the company’s ERP system, for the advantages of richer and faster data collection. It does not eliminate the manual handling of cards, at least internally to the plant.
The next step would be to eliminate the cards, attach the RFID tags to part bins, install readers on racks, and implement the replenishment logic electronically. But the readers would have to be substantially smaller than those shown in the pictures.
Jul 31 2012
Kaizen and small things – A recent example
This picture shows a recent example of genuine Kaizen in a US factory. The workpiece in the vise is 28 ft long, and requires greasing in multiple locations. The operator on the left was tired of running back and forth to a fixed location to pick up the grease. The cart now contains everything he needs to apply grease anywhere on the work piece, and he wheels it back and forth as needed. To the right is the production supervisor for the area, who supports this and other similar projects.
How was it actually done? The production team from this area was given a budget of $500/operator to spend as they saw fit on supplies and devices for improvement projects at a Home Depot store. Their actual spend worked out to $113/operator, including the cart and bins you see on the picture and a magnetic sweeper.
It is a perfect illustration of the Kaizen concept. It is too small an improvement to warrant the attention of engineers or managers, yet it makes the work easier for the operator and makes him more productive. The only way to make sure such improvements are made is to enable and encourage the people who do the work so that they do it themselves. It is a valuable part of Lean, but it is not all of it. Higher-level issues must also be addressed, include make-versus-buy decisions and production line layout.
Aug 5 2012
Lean and Kanban: Poker Chips, Kanban and Buffets
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
An approach to improving the experience of using a buffet that relies on capping the number of people with concurrent access. It is like the nightclub or museum management system in which a fixed number of visitors is allowed in, and the next one only allowed in when one leaves.
This is in the same spirit as the purely production control approach to Lean, in which you change production planning and scheduling but you don’t redesign the production line itself. For pointers on buffet design, see Waiting For Each Other.
See on www.software-kanban.de
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By Michel Baudin • Press clippings • 0 • Tags: Buffer, Kanban, Lean, Restaurant