Mar 30 2015
Toyota’s car factory of the future | Autocar Professional
“Toyota says it has has completely re-thought the way its future car factories will operate. Its plans for the new-generation factories – nicknamed ‘simple and slim’ – are well advanced. Toyota claims they will be 25 percent smaller than existing plants, require 40% less investment and emit up to 55% less CO2. Toyota also plans to re-engineer the production lines so they can be shortened or lengthened in less than 80 minutes. It’s claimed that a standard line can be shrunk from a 100,000 car-per-year capacity to just 50,000 cars, or vice versa. This would allow capacity to be easily reduced or increased depending on demand”
Source: www.autocarpro.in
Thanks to Rob van Stekelenborg, a.k.a. Dumontis, for this scoop, which, again provides more specifics on Toyota’s plans, including surface-mounted conveyors, smaller paint shops, laser screw welding, what sounds like induction heating of sheet metal for stamping, and a variety of energy saving techniques.
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
Apr 2 2015
Organize for learning to make kaizen stick | Michael Ballé
“[…]the Quality Director would ask the nursing supervisor to track the time of first incision in each theater every day and share the results with surgeons. This simple measure increased OR usage by 20% in the first month. It also led to heated discussions among surgeons (why were some late and others on time?) and paved the way for further kaizen. But then one of the crises hospitals are so accustomed to came, and the practice was abandoned. Theater usage went back to what it was before.[…]”
Source: planet-lean.com
The author is missing an essential point: changes that add labor are unsustainable. They will be reversed at the first emergency and rarely if ever reinstated once the emergency is over. Asking a nursing supervisor to track the time of first incision in each operating room meant adding to his or her work, without reducing anybody else’s. It was a change all right, but not a Kaizen.
100 years ago, Frank Gilbreth improved the performance of operating rooms by, among other things, having nurses supply tools and instruments to surgeons rather than having the surgeons leave the patient to fetch them. Work previously done by the surgeon was offloaded to nurses for the benefit of the patient, without any net addition of labor. It was a genuine improvement and became standard practice.
The author quotes Ohno as saying “Why not make the work easier and more interesting so that people do not have to sweat?” Adding record-keeping tasks does not fit that bill.
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
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By Michel Baudin • Management 0 • Tags: Gilbreth, Kaizen