Feb 14 2014

Ford and Mass Production

In the TPS Principles and Practice group on LinkedIn,  asked about what mass production is and is not. With the loose talk of “Henry Ford’s Lean vision” going around, the confusion is understandable. In fact, the term “mass production” was coined specifically to describe Ford’s production system in an Encyclopedia Britannica article in 1926, and defined as follows:

“Mass production is the focusing upon a manufacturing project of the principles of power, accuracy, economy, system, continuity and speed.”

The article insists that “Mass production is not merely quantity production, for this may be had with none of the requisites of mass production. Nor is it merely machine production, which may exist without any resemblance to mass production.”

The encyclopedia article does not imply that the system was inflexible, but Ford’s system of that era was designed to build Model Ts and nothing else. Even though the following picture is from 1937, a decade after the end of the Model T era, the dense packing of presses makes you wonder how you were supposed to change dies:

Pressed steel building at the Rouge in 1937

Modern automotive press shops have machines arranged in lines, with space on the side for dies. In this shop, a die change had to be a rare event.

In essence, the term “mass production” is to Ford as “lean manufacturing” is to Toyota, a generic term applied to give broader appeal and generalize an approach developed in a specific company. It is not a derogatory term, and many elements of mass production found their way into TPS, along with parts of the “Taktsystem” from the German aircraft industry of the 1930s. To these external inputs, the Toyota people have been adding their own twists since the 1930s.

220px-William_S_Knudsen
William S. Knudsen in World War II

Ford’s system itself evolved as it was adopted by competitors. As Peter Winton pointed out in the LinkedIn discussion, the original mass production was the production of large quantities of the same thing. As early as the 1920s, all the high-speed machines and lines dedicated to making the aging Model T at the River Rouge plant were both the strength and the Achilles heel of the system, giving GM the opportunity to grab market share away from Ford by, as Alfred P. Sloan put it “introducing the laws of Paris dressmakers in the car industry.” Ford alumnus William Knudsen’s “Flexible Mass Production” at Chevrolet made it possible through yearly model changes that could be completed in a few weeks. When Ford finally had to change from the Model T to the Model A in 1927, it required a thorough retooling of the Rouge plant, which took 9 months.

Ford’s system itself changed over the decades, and, at least as Lee Iacocca described its practices,  the financially minded leadership that emerged in the 1950s no longer focussed on improving production. In my review of Deming’s Point 5 of 14 on that topic, I had included the following pictures of the same operation performed the same way 30 years later:

In the 1988 paper in which he introduced the term “Lean production,” John Krafcik makes a distinction between “Pure Fordism” and “Recent Fordism,” the main difference being that “Recent Fordism” involves large inventories, buffers, and repair areas. This, of course, implies nothing about what the Ford people have done since 1988.

The concept of a dedicated production line — effective at making one product and incapable of making anything else — is in fact not obsolete. If you have a product with long-term, stable demand, it is a better solution than a flexible line whose flexibility you don’t need. This is why you do a runner/repeater/stranger analysis of the demand for your products, and then investigate trends and seasonal variations. In the Lean approach, you use a dedicated where it fits and other approaches where it doesn’t; most plants, instead, have a one-size-fits-all approach.

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Feb 12 2014

Working for Anonymous Funds | Bill Waddell

See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
Vancouver island“There is a company I know well that will remain nameless that has about 300 employees, and they manufacture stuff on Vancouver Island – Just outside of Victoria, British Columbia.  The major markets for their products are gradually shifting from the Northwestern USA and western Canada to the Southeastern USA.  That puts them about 2,400 miles as the crow flies from more and more of their customers, but since crows can’t take their products to market it is actually a lot farther than that.

Closing their plant has never been an option.  They simply accept the fact that manufacturing on an island is never good, and being that far from their customers is a huge disadvantage, so they have no choice (at least no choice they are willing to consider) but to tighten their chinstraps and do that much better to overcome their geographic problems….”

See on www.idatix.com

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Feb 7 2014

What to Expect from Lean Manufacturing Consultants

How to select and use consultants is awkward for consultants to discuss, but it came up in a discussion started by Rey Elbo in the TPS Principles and Practice group on LinkedIn. On this topic, we can always quote third parties and, some years ago, I found the following strip in the pages of the Japanese monthly Kojo Kanri (工場管理, or “Factory Management”):

How to choose and use lean consultants

I understand that some of these recommendations may be surprising, and here are a few explanations from the body of the article:

  1. Do not hire cheap consultants, anymore than you would a cheap surgeon or a cheap lawyer.
  2. Use consultants who talk drills and wrenches and drills  rather than bar and pie charts. There is room in lean manufacturing for analysis resulting in charts, but mostly upfront, in setting a plan with top management, but 95% of the work involves the nitty-gritty details of shop floor life.
  3. Treat the consultant like a god. Follow recommendations rigorously and without challenging them.Defensiveness is self-defeating. If you don’t trust a consultant, replace him or her.
  4. The consultants should not do anything. For skills to take root in the organization, the work needs to be done by in-house personnel. This is the distinction between consulting and engineering services, and the idea is that Lean skills need to be permanently in the company.
  5. Get everything you can from the consultant in terms of ideas and recommendations. Pick the consultant’s brain relentlessly. If it takes being on the shop floor during the night shift, so be it.

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Feb 4 2014

Japan Update

Japan in burgundyWhether or not you join us on the Making Things in Japan  Tour 2014 this April, you may be interested in some of the updates about the country that Brad Schmidt and I have been posting on the tour’s site. While the fear of “Japan, Inc.” taking over the world has receded since the 1980s, Japan remains a society that values the art of making things, known as “monozukuri” (物作), hosts a unique concentration of thinkers and inventors in this area, and has developed many brands of manufactured products with worldwide renown.

What is it like today? We plan to keep providing more details, but the following can give you some answers:

  • Today’s Japan in Numbers. Japan is facing the same challenges as other advanced economies, and in particular an aging population receiving high wages. The numbers on Japan’s economy and demographics from the CIA World Factbook and the US Census Bureau bear it out, in comparison with other manufacturing heavyweights, like the US, China, and Germany:
  • Japan’s Manufacturing Sector in Numbers. The numbers on Manufacturing’s share of the Japanese economy show the sector holding steady at about 19% of GDP, 16.9% of the work force, and a value-added per employee of about $97K/year, placing Japan between the US and Germany on all three metrics, and far from China. The numbers are consistent with Japan’s manufacturing sector paying high wages for high productivity and using advanced technology.
  • Manufacturing Trends in Japan. Brad Schmidt, who is based in Tokyo and is in daily contact with Japanese manufacturers, sees a trend for companies to be moving production from China to Japan but only when the market is Japan.
  • The Experience of Visiting Plants in Japan. This is a gallery of pictures from the <120 tours Brad has organized to date, showing the different phases of a plant visit.

 

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Jan 31 2014

TPM and Part Replacement Schedules

On the Lean Enterprise Institute website, a reader asked the following question:

“My management has hired a TPM consultant who makes us systematically replace certain parts in our equipment even though they’re working fine. This seems needlessly costly. What do you think?”

Over the years, “TPM” has become an umbrella term for all improvement activities in process industries, and not just maintenance. In this question, however, it is used in its original sense of “Total Productive Maintenance,” meaning involvement of all employees in the maintenance of facilities and equipment to support production. There is a body of knowledge associated with it, in which I don’t recall seeing anything about deciding when equipment parts should be replaced. Generally, TPM tells you how maintenance work should be done, not what it consists of.

TPM’s first step is Autonomous Maintenance, which delegates routine checks and small maintenance activities to production operators. There are many other, higher levels, but Autonomous Maintenance is the only one I have ever seen implemented, to the point that TPM is often equated with Autonomous Maintenance. Besides the scheduling of part replacements, there are many other aspects of Maintenance that I don’t believe TPM addresses, but that you have to in a Lean implementation, such as the role, structure, and size of the Maintenance department.

On these issues, I have found that you are more likely to find answers from industries where maintenance plays a more central role than in Manufacturing, such as commercial or military aviation, or nuclear power. On part replacement in particular, seminal work was conducted 45 years ago at United Airlines when the Boeing 747 was first released. United’s maintenance experts realized that the replacement schedules they had previously used on the 707 could not be economically carried over to the much larger 747, and they undertook a systematic analysis of the plane’s components that led to the development of a theory now known as “Reliability Centered Maintenance,” or RCM.

Bathtub2One discovery they made was that the “bathtub curve” of reliability theory textbooks only applied to 4% of the 747 components. According to that theory, a component is subject to “infant mortality” when new, wear-out when old, and have a “useful life” phase in-between, during which they have a low and constant failure rate.  It was observed on vacuum tubes in the 1950s, and assumed to apply to everything, with consequences on maintenance and part replacement policies. Obviously, you would want to monitor parts closely when new and replace them just before wear-out kicks-in.

What the United people found was the parts exhibited instead a variety of patterns and that some, in particular, never had a wear-out phase. As a consequence, there was no point in systematically replacing them after a fixed interval or use count.

The consequences of a component failure on an aircraft in flight also varied greatly depending on whether it is a passenger reading light, an avionic system, or the rudder. You don’t need the reading light to stay in the air and you can’t replace the rudder in flight, but you can have a standby avionic system take over. This  Failure Mode Effect Analysis (FMEA) served as the basis for targeted redundancies.

The FMEA concept is known in manufacturing, but I have never seen it applied to production equipment. Targeted redundancies are used, for example, in machining centers by placing the same frequently used cutting tools in two pockets, with the second tool automatically taking over when the first is worn out.

The equipment supplier can provide generic recommendations, but they may not match your specific application.  If you want to improve your equipment part replacement policies, you will need to collect and analyze technical data on the behavior of your machines, on your shop floor. With today’s sensors, data acquisition and control systems, it is technically feasible. If United Airlines could do it in 1969, you can in 2014. What is most missing is  analytical capability. Today’s Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS) are still focused work order administration, not the technical analysis of equipment behavior.

Once you have worked out appropriate part replacement policies, you need to work out the logistics of making spare parts available when needed, which is a whole other topic.

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