Jan 29 2024
Like spouses in murders, errors are always the prime suspect when measurements go awry. As soon Apollo 13 had a problem, a Mission Control engineer exclaimed, “It’s got to be the instrumentation!”
It wasn’t the instrumentation. In general, however, before searching for a root cause in your process, you want to rule out the instrumentation. For that, you need to make sure it always gives you accurate and precise data.
Jan 12 2024
The Gaussian – also known as “Normal” – distribution is used and abused in many domains. In Manufacturing, this includes quality assurance, supply-chain management, and human resources. This is the first in a series of posts aimed at understanding the range of applicability of this tool.
Googling uses of the normal distribution produces nearly 1 million results. Yet the top ones all ignore science, even when you narrow the query to physics, and this post attempts to remedy this. For example, the Gaussian distribution plays a central role in modeling Brownian motion, diffusion processes, heat transfer by conduction, the measurement of star positions, and the theory of gases.
These matter not just because the models are useful but also because they anchor this abstraction in physical phenomena that we can experience with no more equipment than is used in a Middle School science project. This post will not help you solve a shop floor problem by the end of the day, but I hope you will find it nonetheless enlightening.
Dec 30 2023
This blog’s greatest hits of 2023:
#greatesthitsof2023, #quality, #VSM, #ValueStreamMap, #deming, #toyota
Nov 29 2023
Online forums do not often discuss quality fundamentals like characteristics and tolerances. You find arguments about process capability, but the requirements for process capability are taken as given. Tolerances on characteristics are objectives that production is expected to meet, and deserve an exploration of what they mean and how they are set.
Nov 13 2023
Within the quality profession, a capable process is one with a high C_{p_k}. In the field, it is not quite so simple. My colleague Joerg Muenzing recently shared concerns about the process capability indices:
“Many manufacturers that I know struggle with incapable processes. Intellectually, people understand the concept of capability, but are unable to effectively apply it to an entire process. A single-figure measure for the entire chain would be ideal to better understand and manage it. The challenge is that the chain consists of processes with measurable characteristics, like thickness, substitute characteristics, like leak current to infer dryness, and also visual inspection results like blemishes or scratches.
They know that C_{p_k} < 1 is bad, and scrap shrinks the bottom line, but not much more. At the same time, customers like large Automotive OEMs demand from their suppliers a C_{p_k} > 1.33 for manual and “uncritical” characteristics, and C_{p_k} >1.66 or even >2.00 for critical characteristics.
What would be useful without being ‘too wrong’?”
Let’s take a closer look.
Feb 7 2024
Toyota’s job rotation policy
Kerry Creech became President of Toyota Motor Manufacturing of Kentucky (TMMK) in July 2023. He had joined Toyota as a team member in powertrain quality control in Georgetown, KY in 1990. Toyota’s policy of developing people and promoting from within made this career possible. Kerry Creech got a degree in electrical and electronics engineering in 2010 while a manager at Toyota.
There are many dimensions to Toyota’s Human Resource Management, and I would like to focus this post on the specifics of Job Rotation as a policy that sets Toyota apart from most other manufacturing companies. A blog reader asked about it, so I checked with Tracey Richardson for accurate details, at least for Toyota’s US operations when she was working there.
There are two types of rotations, involving, in different ways, production operators – “team members” in Toyota parlance – and the support staff, starting with first-line managers – known as “group leaders.”
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By Michel Baudin • Management • 8 • Tags: Job rotation, Toyota, Training