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Nov 4 2019

Phase Two Charts and Their Probability Limits | Don Wheeler | Quality Digest

“The ability to react to process changes is more important than protecting yourself from occasional false alarms. […] So do not worry so much about straining out the gnats of false alarms that you end up swallowing the camels of undetected process changes.”

Sourced through Quality Digest

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

The people of the Honda plant in Anna, OH, claim to make the best engines in the world. On the floor, there is neither a single control chart nor any engineer trained in SPC.

Of course, we should fact-check their claim. Rankings of engine quality are not readily googleable. The closest I could find is a ranking of engine reliability from 2014 in a UK blog called The Car Expert, based on data from Warranty Direct, a UK provider of extended warranties. According to them, Honda indeed made the most reliable engines:

“Only one in every 344 Honda owners have had engine trouble, with second-placed rival Toyota notching up just 1 in 171.”

According to Anna engineers, their machine tools can hold tolerance ten times tighter than necessary. The few quality problems they do have are due to operators picking the wrong parts in assembly. Control charts in the machine shop would produce nothing but false alarms. With the charts crying wolf, the alarms would lose credibility and nobody would react when a real one hit.

In this kind of situation, Wheeler’s statement can be reversed. The ability to protect yourself against false alarms that send your engineers on wild goose chases is more important than detecting changes that hardly ever happen. You do want to detect changes in the process but control charts are too crude a tool for this purpose.

#SPC, #ControlChart

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By Michel Baudin • Press clippings • 0 • Tags: Control Charts, SPC

KarakuriKaizenManga2

Oct 29 2019

The Manga Style In The Japanese Literature On Manufacturing

A unique characteristic of the Japanese literature on manufacturing is its use of comic strips — or manga — to communicate with readers. The subject came up in a recent discussion on LinkedIn, that Mark DeLuzio started by saying:

“Toyota has been given credit for making the complex simple. Some say that this is the definition of genius. I think that the Lean consulting industry, in their attempt to help others follow Toyota’s footsteps, has in many cases done the opposite. We have made the simple very complex.”

My comment was that, while expressed in jargon, most of what goes as “Lean” in the US is simplistic. I contrast it with what I found in Japan, like the Kojo Kanri (工場管理, or “Factory Management”) monthly. It is full of case studies communicated in manga, on subjects ranging from the strategic to the tactical.

Continue reading…

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By Michel Baudin • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: Kaizen, Lean, Manga, Manufacturing

SmartFloorConcept

Aug 11 2019

Smart Floors

The first stop in Christoph Roser‘s tour of Industry 4.0 in Germany last month was a research facility called ARENA2036, attached to the University of Stuttgart. There, the first demonstration we saw was of the Bosch smart floor, and the pictures included here were taken by fellow participants Franck Vermet and Hironori Hibino.

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By Michel Baudin • Automation • 4 • Tags: Automation, Industry 4.0

Pick-to-Light bin Nefit_3_680x382

Jul 30 2019

Is Pick-to-Light More Than A Stepping Stone?

Pick-to-Light directs manual picking by lighting up bins. The Lean literature is mute about it, it’s not in the Industry 4.0 technology stack, and Wikipedia doesn’t have an article about it. Pick-to-Light system suppliers are touting it as part of both Lean and Industry 4.0 but no one else is chiming in. In the field, however, you find it in many factories, where it reduces training time and picking errors, while increasing picker productivity.

Pick-to-Light fits best in usability engineering. It’s neither jidoka nor automation because it just prompts the operator. And it’s not Poka-Yoke because it doesn’t physically prevent mistakes, the way flip-lids can. It looks like an intermediate technology, a stepping stone on the way to full picking automation but is it? It can also be viewed as a move towards using technology to make work easier for people instead of automating it.

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By Michel Baudin • Automation • 4 • Tags: Industry 4.0, Lean manufacturing, Pick-by-Light, Pick-to-Light, Picking, PTL

QCtrackingToyota1950sArtOfLean2

Jul 16 2019

Updating the 7 tools of QC

A conversation with Franck Vermet about problem-solving tools for factory operators caused me to revisit the 7 tools of QC from 50 years ago and ponder how they should be updated with current data science.

Data Science for Operators, as a book, remains to be written. If you google this phrase today, what comes up is training courses offering to “change your career” by attending a “data science bootcamp.” TIBCO Spotfire has “Workflow Operators” but these are programs, not people.

So the following are tentative answers to questions that haven’t been asked before.

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By Michel Baudin • Data science • 11 • Tags: 7 tools of QC, data science, Industry 4.0, QC, QC Circles, Quality, SPC

DeustoLectureFeature

Jun 20 2019

The Use of Data to Improve Manufacturing | Luis Mauleón | Empresa XXI

Luis Mauleón

This is the translation of article recently published by Asenta’s Partner-Director Luis Mauleón in Empresa XXI, summarizing the key points of my lecture last month at the Faculty of Engineering of Deusto University in Bilbao, as part of a series of events organized by Asenta Management Consultants.

Practical lessons from Michel Baudin

In an environment with an overabundance of data, it is a paradox that we still have difficulties to finding simple answers to simple questions.

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By Michel Baudin • Press clippings • 2 • Tags: Asenta, data science, Lean, Operational Excellence, University of Deusto

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