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Dec 16 2011

How Manufacturing Software Should Adapt to Support Lean Principles

Via Scoop.it – lean manufacturing

This article takes a critical look at the debate between lean manufacturing and MRP software advocates, and how to find middle ground.
Via blog.softwareadvice.com

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By Michel Baudin • Press clippings • 0 • Tags: Kanban, Lean, Logistics, Production control, Production planning, Production scheduling

moneytoiletpaper-300x229

Dec 16 2011

“Muda” just means “Unnecessary”

Discussions of Lean often contain statements like the following:

In a lean manufacturing environment, waste is defined as spending resources  on any activity that does not add value to the end customer.

While such statements sound deep in casual conversation, they are impractical. First, not having access to end customers, most employees are left to guess what they might value, and second, much of the work of manufacturing is unintelligible to end customers, like revision control on engineering changes. Everyone recognizes the existence of such activities, but the above definition of waste leads to calling them  “non-value added but necessary” or, even worse, “necessary waste.”

Having to resort to such convoluted oxymorons is a clear sign that there is something amiss in the definition. The English literature on Lean uses “waste” as translation of the Japanese “muda,” which just means unnecessary. If an activity is muda, you are better off not doing it. Overproduction is muda because you don’t need it, and so are excess inventory, overprocessing, etc.

More formally, if you eliminate muda, your performance does not degrade in any way. It also means that muda is what keeps your operations from being Pareto-efficient, because, if you didn’t have any muda, there would be no way to improve any aspect of your performance without making others worse.

The bottom line is that there are only two kinds of activities in manufacturing: those you need to do and those you don’t. And you can tell them apart without asking an end customer, by using, for example,  Ohno’s famous  list of 7 categories.

In what you need to do, you pursue effectiveness and efficiency; for what you don’t, elimination. It is a simple idea. It gets complicated enough when we work out its practical consequences. But we don’t need to make it unnecessarily complicated.

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By Michel Baudin • Management • 0 • Tags: Lean, Lean manufacturing, Management

NoMoreBackOrders2

Dec 15 2011

Lean causing an increase in backorders?

The following is lifted from the quarterly report of a public company and is attributed to the CEO:

We experienced a temporary increase in backorders at the close of the first quarter as we rebalanced inventories as part of our lean manufacturing initiatives. […] We also implemented a new ERP system during the quarter that will enhance our real-time information for inventory levels, shipments, sales information and production costs.

It seems that the leaders of their Lean Manufacturing initiatives forgot one key principle: First, do no harm! A professionally planned and executed Lean Manufacturing initiative enhances performance. It does not decrease it, even in the beginning and even for the short term.

It is essential for the long-term success of the initiative that its first pilot projects be unquestionable, rapid, obvious successes, and projects that lengthen order fulfillment lead times do not qualify. Nothing should ever take priority over delivering to customers, even Lean.

Furthermore, implementing a new ERP system before you are far enough along in Lean is a generally ineffective for two reasons:

  1. Lean changes your business processes, and embedding your old business processes in an ERP system is a waste of time and will make the changes more difficult.
  2. The implementation of ERP is a resource drain that you cannot afford while implementing Lean.

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By Michel Baudin • Management • 14 • Tags: Lean manufacturing, Management

Dec 15 2011

Libaries, warehouses, and “smart” numbering systems

Via Scoop.it – lean manufacturing

Like warehouses, libraries are storage and retrieval systems, and have the same need to identify and locate physical objects. Almost all manufacturing companies and libraries use numbering systems that are “smart” in that they encode information in the IDs. While it may have been a good idea in 1876, when the libraries’ Dewey Decimal Classification was invented, it is obsolete in the age of databases. But the weight of tradition keeps it going.

Encoding information in part numbers is just as obsolete in Manufacturing, where it increases training costs, unnecessarily complicates information systems, encourages confusion between similar parts having similar IDs, and makes data analysis contingent on the ability to extract the encoded information out of the part numbers. But you hear almost no voices making these points in the manufacturing world.

This article is from 2007 — not exactly breaking news — but it is the most recent I could find about a public library district, in Maricopa County, AZ, that has gotten rid of the Dewey system, uses the books’ ISBNs for IDs, and organizes the library floors like bookstores do. The readers no longer need to learn to decode the book IDs, the categorization of the books is independent of their IDs and can be changed, and all the book data can be retrieved on line without needing the ID, including availability status in branches.
Via www.nytimes.com

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By Michel Baudin • Press clippings • 1 • Tags: Information systems, Lean, Management

Dec 13 2011

Motorola Mobility’s Thomas Goodwin on Six Sigma

Via Scoop.it – lean manufacturing

Motorola Mobility is being taken over by Google, and the article is from October, 2011. It includes links to videos. In the first one,  Ashton Kutcher tries to figure out Six Sigma. Based on how youthful he looks, it must at least 15 years old. The others are introductions to “Six Sigma,” that discuss nothing but the obsolete, 80-year-old tools of SPC: histograms, control charts, etc.   The impresssion you get from the article is of Six Sigma as warmed up SPC sprinkled with a smidgeon of Lean. This is not the perception I had of the program.
Via www.supplychaindigital.com

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By Michel Baudin • Press clippings • 0 • Tags: Lean manufacturing, Quality, Six Sigma

Dec 11 2011

Russian Lean Blog Post about Cultural Differences

Via Scoop.it – lean manufacturing

This is a translation of my own comments in this discussion:

General statements about “the Japanese people” are never right. There are 130M of them, all with different personalities, and >1M companies. There is more to Lean than customer orientation and continuous improvement, namely specific tools developed over 60+ years, which must be learned rather than reinvented. People involvement, while necessary, is not sufficient. Company culture transcends national culture. We worked for Unilever in the Netherlands, the UK, Italy and the US, and the plants in all these different countries had much more in common than with plants of other companies in the same countries. Each country is special in some way, but these special characteristics mean little on a production shop floor. The only people who bring them up are those who want to prevent change.
Via www.leanforum.ru

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By Michel Baudin • Blog clippings • 0 • Tags: Lean, Lean manufacturing, Management

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