Mar 6 2016
Bodo Wiegand heads Germany’s Lean Management Institute. In his latest newsletter, on Wiegand’s Watch, he discusses the case of a company he recently visited that is rushing to invest €12.3M ($13.4M) in a new warehouse and new machines but “doesn’t have the resources” to improve current operations.
Mar 3 2016
“It is with this enigmatic sentence that one of my Japanese mentors introduced the growing difficulty with continuous improvement. What it means is that at the beginning of an improvement program or when starting in a new area, the first and usually the easiest actions bring big improvement, hence the “easy” 50%. This is also…”
Sourced through Scoop.it from: hohmannchris.wordpress.com
Michel Baudin‘s comments:
I have been using this method, but for the categorization of improvement ideas within a project rather than whole projects. For example, starting a SMED project on a machine with a 30-minute setup time, you find that you can get it down to 12 minutes in one week for $300 by organizing and prepositioning tool carts. This is your A idea.
Then you find that, by modifying a fixture on the machine, you can get it down to 4 minutes, in three months for $5,000. That’s your B idea. Finally, you discover that an automation retrofit can get it down to 2 minutes, in a year for $50,000, and it is a C idea.
The one issue I have with applying this kind of thinking to whole projects is that the scope of “low-hanging fruits” changes over time with the skill level of the work force. Much of what appears inaccessible at the outset of your transformation becomes cheap and easy by its third year.
I also find that how long and how much money it will take to implement an idea is easier for teams to work with than a metric like ROI. The economic justification of improvement projects is a difficult and sensitive subject.
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
Mar 3 2016
Last week, Beau Keyte sent me a copy of Chapter 10 of his book The Complete Lean Enterprise, entitled Leading in the Future State, and we have been exchanging thoughts about it by email since. Many of my words below are already in my account of the Central Coast Lean Summit, where this conversation started; what is new here is the back-and-forth.
Mar 2 2016
“It seems to be popular these last years and more recently to explicitly state that Lean is not (only) about cost reduction or cost cutting. See the recent posts by Mark Graban or Matt Hrivnak. So let me be somewhat controversial in this post (which I think is allowed to spark the discussion) and drop a bombshell: I think Lean is about cost reduction.”
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Michel Baudin‘s comments:
I know that much of the TPS literature is about “reducing costs,” but it never includes any discussion of money! Ohno is even quoted as saying “Costs are not there to be measured, but to be reduced.” On the face of it, it makes no sense, because cost is an accounting term intended to represent the monetary value of all the resources spent to achieve a result.
Feb 28 2016
Whether you manage operations with paper and pencil as in 1920 or use the state of the art in information technology (IT), you need clean data. If you don’t have it, you will suffer all sorts of dysfunctions. You will order materials you already have or don’t need, and be surprised by shortages. You will make delivery promises you can’t keep, and ship wrong or defective products. And you will have no idea what works and what doesn’t in your plant.
I have never seen a factory with perfect data, and perhaps none exists. Dirty data is the norm, not the exception, and the reason most factories are able to ship anything at all is that their people find ways to work around the defects in their data, from using expediters to find parts that aren’t where the system thought they were, to engineers who work directly with production to make sure a technical change is implemented. Mei-chen Lo, of Kainan University in Taiwan, proposed a useful classification of the issues with data quality. What I would like to propose here is pointers on addressing them.
Mar 9 2016
How is Lean Different From Taylorism? | Michael Ballé | LEI
“They are completely different indeed. They differ in their purpose, their practice and their outcomes. Lean is about self-reflection and seeking smarter, less wasteful dynamic solutions together. Taylorism is about static optimization of work imposed by ‘those who know’ on ‘those who do.'”
Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.lean.org
Michel Baudin‘s comments:
Yes, “Scientific Management” was just a marketing label for theories that weren’t truly scientific but were instead based on a simplistic view of human nature. And Taylor’s stopwatch time studies were just aimed at increasing production at every operation with no consideration of flow. I would, however, ask for a more accurate and complete story
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By Michel Baudin • Blog clippings • 2 • Tags: Lean, Taylor, taylorism, Toyota, TPS