Nov 10 2011
Via Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
TOYOTA City, Japan — Even Steve Jobs, the management maverick and incurable tyrant knew that the best and time-tested strategy is none other than regularly securing the best possible ideas from workers than follow the dictates of a corporate…
Via www.bworldonline.com
Nov 9 2011
Managing Automation published another response to the same study that claims to show that Lean does not work: Lean Manufacturing and Operation Excellence: Not Worth Their Weight?
As described in the press and their own press release, the AlixPartners study commingles Lean with “Six Sigma and other productivity programs,” which raises the following issues:
If these press accounts are correct, the survey confuses Lean with other approaches in an open-ended list, misstates its purpose, and considers exclusively metrics of cost reduction.
The effectiveness of Lean is not an easy subject to study. Should we survey all the companies that claim to be Lean, have a Lean program in place, have been certified Lean by some external authority, or are top performers in their industry? Once we agree on this, we still need yardsticks to quantify both the effort they put into Lean and the rewards from it.
I took a stab at it a few years ago, and did my own analysis, the results of which were published as a Viewpoint in Manufacturing Engineering in 2006. I chose 40 winners of the Shingo Prize and searched Hoovers Online, for comparative performance data with their 400 top competitors. On the average, the data did not show that the Shingo Prize predicted any advantage in profitability, market share or employment growth. The AlixPartner press release says roughly the same thing, but I see it as reflecting on the Shingo Prize itself, not Lean.
The Shingo Prize is supposed to be the “Nobel Prize for Manufacturing,” but what are the criteria used to award it? You can download the Shingo Prize Guidelines and see for yourself. A team of Shingo Prize auditors visits the plants and awards points to measure “the degree to which the behaviors in an organization are aligned with the principles of operational excellence.” In other words, the plants are measured on process compliance. They score points for practices they have in place. It is like measuring chess players on the number of pawns they move, and is correlated to victory like the Shingo Prize to business performance.
Toyota did not grow based on a compliance checklist. When I visit a plant, based on what I see and what people tell me, I can form an opinion as to whether they are among the few that have the spirit of Lean or the many that are going through the motions. But I don’t know how to generate a checklist that could be systematically applied to arrive at such a conclusion, and, desirable though it may be, I don’t believe a real survey is feasible.
Jamie Flinchbaugh doesn’t like sports metaphors, but I can’t resist one here. Usain Bolt is the fastest man alive. Let us assume somebody publishes a book entitled “The Running Secrets of Usain Bolt.” How Usain Bolt actually trains is probably not trivial and certainly involves sustained effort and ferocious discipline. The author of the book, however, is concerned that a stern, eat-your-vegetables message would hurt sales, and focuses instead on easier topics, like shoes. As a result, kids flock to shoe stores thinking that wearing these shoes will make them fast, but the real ones are too expensive, so they buy cheap imitations instead. Six months later, based on their responses, a survey concludes that Usain Bolt’s methods don’t work.
Most Lean programs today are to serious implementations as cheap imitation shoes are to the training of Usain Bolt. Where they may succeed is in ruining the reputation of Lean. It is bound to happen sooner or later. As a brand, Lean has had a 22-year run so far, already longer than I expected.
Nov 8 2011
Via Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
First state government went “green.” Now it’s gone “lean,” according to Department of Corrections staff.
Via www.king5.com
Nov 8 2011
In Kaizen, Masaaki Imai describes Japanese executives returning in the 1970s to American plants they had visited thirty years before and being struck by the absence of change: they saw the same production lines with the same equipment operated the same way. This started me looking for photographic evidence. Overall, pickings were slim, but I did find the above pictures of the same coke oven at the Ford River Rouge plant shot in 1946 and 1976.
If there is Kaizen activity in a factory, how does it change the work life of employees at all levels? The following chart compares the breakdowns of their use of time, with and without Kaizen:
In a plant without Kaizen, operators and supervisors are fully occupied with routine daily tasks: production for the operators, expediting parts, enforcing discipline, and record keeping for supervisors. Only middle managers and executives spend a fraction of their time on projects involving capacity changes, new production lines or new technology. Nobody works on incremental improvements to the way the work is done today.
By contrast, Kaizen involves employees at all levels in such improvement activities to different degrees. Between improvement and daily routine, the boundary is sharp; between improvement and innovation, fuzzy. Over time, the cumulative effect of incremental improvement is radical change by itself. In addition, the skills acquired and the lessons learned from incremental improvements are incorporated into new line or plant design projects. In some Japanese auto parts plants, I remember seeing automatic lines side-by-side, where one used old machines that had been gradually retrofitted with devices that reduced the need for human intervention, while the other one had been built from scratch with new machines to be automatic. The Kaizen work done to implement the former was essential to the success of the latter.
Nov 7 2011
Via Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
‘They are our opportunity to get better,’ says the director of lean enterprise at Greatbatch.
Via www.industryweek.com
Nov 10 2011
Opinels, swiss knives, smart phones, and production machinery
Using Opinel knives while picnicking last summer got me thinking about their differences in design philosophy from Swiss knives, our traditional perception of multifunction tools, and how smart phones and machining centers contradict that perception.
Mostly known for snow-capped mountains, the Savoie region of France is also the birthplace of the Opinel, a pocket knife designed 120 years ago, and very popular there with anybody who hikes or just goes on a picnic. As you can see below, it is a simple knife with a sharp, pointed blade, and a ring to lock it closed or open.
As a concept, it is diametrically opposed to its cousin, the swiss knife, and its multiple functions:
The Opinel only has one function, but performs it well; the swiss knife has many but does not excel at any. It will cut, but not as well as the Opinel; it serves as a corkscrew, but provides no leverage to pull out the cork; it will open cans, but slowly and by pulling the sharp edge of the lid outwards towards your hand rather than into the can, etc. It is convenient because you only have to carry one tool around, but, for everything it does, there is a dedicated tool that does it better.
When we think of dedicated versus multifunction tools, we usually think that they are like Opinels and swiss knives and that, when we add more functions to a tool, we necessarily compromise on performance or quality for each function. But is that necessarily true?
Our smartphones let us talk to each other but also contain the contact data of everyone we have met since elementary school. They tell you where we are on precise maps, wake us up in the morning, work as stopwatches and egg timers, play our music, receive our favorite radio station, identify a song from a snippet of a recording, etc.
Dedicated tools do not exist for everything a smartphone does and, when they do, rarely outperform the smartphone apps. For example, I have not seen an alarm clock do more than the clock app on my phone in terms of selecting whether it rings just once or every weekday at the same time, how loud, with what sound, etc.
What is it that makes a smartphone different from other multifunction devices? In what way is it not like a swiss knife?
The short answer is that a smartphone is a computer. We often think of computers as machines like any other, or worse when we are frustrated with confusing interfaces or system crashes, but the reality is that they are qualitatively different, and that programmability allows them to outperform dedicated tools. Their hardware configurations make them smartphones, game systems, laptops, or industrial controllers but, within this context, the range of services they can render well is limited only by the imagination and talent of programmers.
In production, machining centers or computer-controlled fabrication facilities are not swiss knives, in that their flexibility is not bought by a compromise in performance, and this has far-reaching consequences on production engineering and operations.
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By Michel Baudin • Technology 4 • Tags: Autonomation, Lean manufacturing, Manufacturing engineering, Technology