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Jul 5 2012

Amazon.com: Michel Baudin’s review of Gemba Kaizen, 2nd Edition

See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing

Includes good case studies, but oversells Kaizen (*** rating on Amazon)

Masaaki Imai is the grand old man who brought the words Kaizen and Gemba into the English language. I did, at some point, work for his company, and was exposed to his ideas then.

Gemba Kaizen has two parts. The first half is a general theory; the second, a series of case studies. Imai’s perspective is that Kaizen is the umbrella concept encompassing all efforts to improve not just factories but all businesses. In his view, TQC/TQM, the Toyota Production System, TPM, Hoshin planning, suggestion systems and small-group activities are all “Kaizen Systems.” It is understandable on Imai’s part, because he first made his mark with a book called Kaizen in the 1980s and called his consulting firm the “Kaizen Institute.”

It is, however, a stretch to make Lean or the Toyota Production System just a “Kaizen System.” Instead, Kaizen is part of what you need to do to implement Lean, but you could not achieve Lean with just Kaizen. Kaizen is continuous, incremental improvements made by those who do the work, and is as necessary as Imai says it is, but it is by no means sufficient, as Lean requires radical changes as well.

The theoretical part contains some valuable information but also overenthusiastic statements such as that the Gemba is the only source of information. Just because the Gemba is too often ignored doesn’t mean that the company’s information systems are useless. They also contain valuable information about customer orders, product configurations, or production history that cannot be inferred just by observing the shop floor.

As is common,the case studies are the most informative part of the book, but they do not necessarily support the premise that the Kaizen concept is central to all improvement. For example, the Production Preparation Process (3P) that is the subject of one of the cases has nothing to do with Kaizen. Some of the stories are also incomplete. The Wiremold case is described through an interview with former CEO Art Byrne, ending with the acquisition of the company by Legrand in 2000. While the post-acquisition epilogue doesn’t make the case for Kaizen, the reader might be interested to know that the new owners sank the company in the following years by reversing what Art Byrne and his team had done.

In conclusion, while I disagree with many of Imai’s ideas, I like to know what they are, and this book serves this purpose.

See on www.amazon.com

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By Michel Baudin • Book reviews 2 • Tags: Kaizen, Lean

Jul 5 2012

Yet another (wrong) definition of takt time

This is from a blog post published today that claims to clarify what a takt time is:

Takt Time:  This is the rate of time at which a product or service is being purchased.  For example, a Nissan commercial mentioned that every minute, someone in the world buys a new Nissan.  Selling a car every minute is an excellent example of takt time!

Writing a definition for a thing or an idea is tricky. Following Aristotle, I would say that you have done a good job if you have described what kind of a thing it is and how it differs from other things of the same kind, using terms your reader already understands.

In this definition, takt time is described as a “rate of time.” If there were such a thing as a rate of time, in what units would it be expressed? In production, a rate is expressed, for example, in pieces per hour; a time, in minutes or seconds. Takt Time, as its name suggests is a time, not a rate, and certainly not a rate of time, whatever that may be.

This definition then relates takt time exclusively to “a product or service [..] being purchased,” and gives the example of a Nissan being bought every minute in the world, suggesting that 1 minute is the takt time of a Nissan. Incidentally, if this figure were true, Nissan would sell about 500,000 cars/year, versus the 4 million it actually sells.

Takt time, as we use it in manufacturing and industrial engineering, is in fact not a parameter associated with just a product but with a production line making this product. Given the demand that is given to it and the amount of time that it actually works, the takt time of this production line for this product is the time that must elapse between two consecutive unit completions.

If a line is expected to produce 400 units of a product in a 400-minute shift, then, if you stand by the last station of the line, you will see one unit come out every minute, meaning that its takt time is 1 minute. If you switch from working 1 shift/day to 2 to meet the same demand, you double the takt time to 2 minutes.

This is why it is calculated as follows:

Takt\, time(Product, Production\, line)=\frac{Net\, available\, production\, time}{Demand}

It has a numerator and a denominator, and both matter. They are obviously calculated for the same time period.

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By Michel Baudin • Blog clippings 0 • Tags: industrial engineering, Manufacturing engineering, Takt time

Jul 3 2012

A Tour of Canon’s Suzhou facility – WhatTheyThink

See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing

Highlights include rising labor costs, a high employee turnover rate, cellular manufacturing, and deliveries from suppliers every two hours.

See on whattheythink.com

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By Michel Baudin • Press clippings 0 • Tags: Cellular manufacturing

Jul 3 2012

A Video Showing Office 5S Gone Wrong

See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing

Not fresh news, but my colleague Maria Samsonova just pointed it out to me.

See on www.leanblog.org

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By Michel Baudin • Blog clippings 2 • Tags: 5S, Office Lean

Jun 30 2012

Is there a “DIY” AGV in your future? – DC Velocity

See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing

This is what jidoka/autonomation is about! Contrary to what you read in the reductionist literature, jidoka is not just about stopping machines when they start to malfunction. It is instead a complete and intelligent approach to automation.

See on www.dcvelocity.com

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By Michel Baudin • Press clippings 0 • Tags: Autonomation, jidoka, Lean manufacturing

Jun 30 2012

Organization structure and Lean

There have been several posts on this issue in The Lean Edge:

  • Toyota’s Functional Organization. Art Smalley explains how, contrary to widespread beliefs, Toyota is organized in functional silos.
  • Don’t reorganize! Learn to pull instead. Michael Ballé wants to recall what he wrote 20 years ago about re-engineering organizations.

My own answer to the same question is as follows:

The first question to ask is the extent to which converting silos to process organizations should be done, and whether pursuing it at a given moment is opportune.

It is easy to overestimate the importance of organization structure. In discussions of these issues, American managers often use the following quote: “We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. Presumably the plans for our employment were being changed. I was to learn later in life that, perhaps because we are so good at organizing, we tend as a nation to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization” (C. Ogburn, Merrill’s Marauders, Harper’s Magazine, 1957). To emphasize how long this has been going on, many even falsely attribute this quote to Satyricon author Petronius, or even Cato the Elder.

It doesn’t mean, however, that organization structure is unimportant, only that changing it is not the right first step to solve a problem or implement change. What actually works is to start by changing the work that is being done, and then adjusting the organization to remove the friction caused by the changes. For example, in a machining job-shop, you would first implement some cells — moving the equipment and redesigning operator jobs — and then you would worry about changing the job categories in Human Resource policies to reflect how the work of cell operators differs from that of specialized mill or lathe operators.

The relative merits of functional versus process organizations have been widely discussed in both American and Japanese business literature, with various solutions proposed. In “Another Look at How Toyota Integrates Product Development,” (Harvard Business Review, July, 1998) Durward Sobek and Jeffrey Liker describe a functional organization with several twists added to ensure information flow between silos. One car company that did use an integrated team to develop a car is Ford, for the 1996 Taurus. All the product planning and engineering resources, including some representatives from Manufacturing, were collocated at one facility in Michigan. The approach did reduce the product development time but the resulting product, while great as a work of art and engineering, was not the market success that its designers had hoped, and the previous versions had been. For details, see Mary Walton’s Car.

In Electronics, a common approach has been to use “matrix organizations,” in which professionals report to both a process manager, for the work they do, and a functional manager for training, skills maintenance, and career planning.

When organizing around a process, we should always remember that Lean is about making it easiest to do what we do the most often. Putting together baskets of products around feature or process similarity is just classical group technology.The Lean approach starts with a Runner/Repeater/Stranger analysis to determine what it is we do often and what not. Without this analysis, we commingle in the same lines products made every day with other products made sporadically. In Japan, this is called P-Q, or Product-Quantity analysis, with the categories called A, B and C. The more vivid Runner/Repeater/Stranger terminology comes from Lucas Industries in the UK. You then use dedicated, integrated production lines for Runners, flexible lines for Repeaters, but a job-shop with functional groupings of equipment for Strangers.

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By Michel Baudin • Management 2 • Tags: Lean, Management, Organization structure

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