Jan 15 2014

The “Making Things in Japan Tour” — April 20-26, 2014

You may have noticed a new widget on our sidebar, which links to a site about this tour and registration through Eventbrite. Brad Schmidt and I are organizing this together, and I am thrilled to be working with him again.

Why go to Japan to visit plants in 2014? Until the 1970s, Japanese manufacturing got no respect. When I headed there as an engineering graduate in 1977, a classmate of mine called this move “career suicide.” Whatever competitive success Japanese companies had achieved by then was chalked up to long hours and low wages, much the way China is perceived today.

Then came the 1980s and the discovery that there was more to it — that should be looked into and studied — coupled with fear that “Japan, Inc.” was going to take over the world. The two-decade recession that hit Japan in the early 1990s put a quick end to the paranoia and, more slowly, dampened the enthusiasm for so-called “Japanese methods” in manufacturing and management.

The renewed neglect of Japan today, however, is no more rational than was the exuberance of the 1980s. Japan today has a highly trained but aging and expensive work force, and is facing the same challenges as other advanced economies. And it still has the most advanced, most productive, manufacturing plants in the world, with the best quality. It is still the go-to place for manufacturing excellence, where the art of making things (Monozukuri, 物作り) is valued and honored both in companies and in society at large. 

For those who don’t know him, Brad Schmidt is a South African raised in Japan, a graduate of Japanese schools,  and perfectly bilingual. With 128 tours in 15 years under his belt and counting, he is a pro. Few people have seen the inside of more Japanese factories than him, and he has the logistics of tours worked out, from airport pickups to  interpreters, transportation and lodging. That leaves me with the easy part: promoting this tour in tour in the US and then going on it to help answer participants’ questions  and facilitate site reviews.

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Jan 14 2014

And around and around it goes | Bill Waddell

See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
“Not long ago I conducted an exercise with a client in which two teams of three people assembled a Lego product.  One team of three folks from accounting was given the 500 or so pieces the way Lego presents them – kitted in bags of parts that align with the largely graphic instructions.  Basically, all of the parts needed to make sub-assembly #3, for instance, are in a bag marked ‘3’, and the instructions for 3 show pictures of exactly how all of the parts are to be assembled…”

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

You can do many things with Legos, like our own Leanix™games, and this article shows an example where a team of accountants who were given parts in kits and assembly instructions from Lego performed 40% faster than a team of engineers who were given the parts in single-item bags and only pictures of the finished assemblies.

In drawing far-reaching conclusions from this example, however, Bill is comparing apples and oranges. It was faster to assemble from kits because somebody at Lego had kitted the parts, and the kits were complete and accurate. A fair comparison would require including the time needed for this. Kitting may still win, but not by a 40% landslide.

In a real manufacturing situation, you buy components and materials from specialized suppliers and, if you want kits, you have to put them together before assembly. Whether it is justified or not depends on what you are producing and on the parts you use.

Let us assume you are making custom-configured products on a mixed-flow line, but there is one screw that is used in all configurations. You are better off presenting this screw on the line side in bins than distributing it across kits.

On the other hand, it often makes sense to kit configuration-specific parts off line. It requires less labor overall but, most importantly, the work of kitting is done in parallel with assembly rather than in the final assembly sequence, which can cut in half the start-to-finish assembly time on the line.

Even then, however, you have issues with kitting errors by operators who don’t know the product, kits rendered unusable by a single defective part, and part stealing from kits, which is often done as an immediate remedy to the above.

See on www.idatix.com

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Jan 7 2014

Using videos to improve operations | Part 7 – Detailed review of process segments

Asenta 2011-03 Roberto Cortés
Roberto Cortés
Asenta Juan Ortega head shot
Juan Ortega

This post was co-written with Asenta’s Roberto Cortés and Juan Ortega, based on a joint project in Spain in October, 2013. A detailed analysis of the video recordings on two operations was key to generating improvement ideas that the plant has implemented since. The company had shot some videos of operations before, but not used them this way before, and it was a learn-by-doing experience for the participants. 

The demand for the company’s products is growing, and it is struggling to keep up. Its core technology is a fabrication process, and engineering has focused its attention on it to increase capacity. After fabrication, however, the product needs several assembly operations. From direct observation, it was clear that the operators were working at a pace that could not be sustained for a whole shift. The manager confirmed that the pace slackened and the quality dropped towards the end of the shift.

The challenge was therefore to change the assembly process so that the operator could complete the tasks within the takt time of about 60 seconds, at a steady, sustainable pace, without running ragged or getting exhausted. While on site, we focused on two operations, shot videos as recommended in earlier posts — from an elevated position and focusing on the operator’s hands — and coached the plant team on reviewing the videos, with the goal of enabling them to do it on their own for the other operations.

Preparation

The detailed review breaks the operation down into its smallest identifiable steps  to discover improvement opportunities for each. If you are going to do this on a regular basis, you should probably invest in software to collect timestamps from videos, categorize the steps, and record improvement ideas, like Timer Pro or Dartfish.  Timer Pro was developed specifically for Manufacturing; Dartfish, for sports, but it has also been used in Manufacturing.

For the first time, it is best to do it on short operations, and you can make do with an Excel spreadsheet on which you manually record the timestamps. It needs the following columns:

  • Step number
  • End time
  • Step duration, calculated from the timestamps.
  • Cumulative time, aggregated from step durations.
  • Operation Description
  • Operation Category
  • Improvement Ideas

Sufficient time has to be allowed for the detailed review. It is customary to allow between 3 and 5 times the length of the recording and even more if the recording is very short. It is recommended to have a sample of the product and components at hand where the review is being held.

Asenta----Product-sample-in-conference-room
Product sample in conference room

Review

The video is analysed and the spreadsheet completed step by step. For short steps, you can play the video in slow motion  to give time to observe details. Because you are going to be adding times, you need record the timestamps at a higher precision than you are really interested in. For example, to analyze time in second, you need to record the timestamps to one tenth of a second. The video and the form are shown on the screen at the same time.

Asenta----Video-and-analysis-form-on-same-screen
Video and analysis form on the same screen

While conducting the analysis, do the following:

  • Describe each step with an action verb and a single object. If you find you can’t, break it down further until you can.
  • Do not criticize ideas. Write them down for later evaluation.
  • Aim to eliminate unnecessary steps (muda), reduce the variability in how the steps are carried out (mura) and their inconvenience (muri).
  • Assign a category to each step so that you can aggregate times by category.

You can generate your own categories as you go along and standardize them as you reach conclusions. There must not be too many (5 better than 10) and they are usually of the following type:

  • Pick up/put down
  • Walk
  • Assemble
  • Inspect or test
  • Wait
  • Adjust
  • Rework
  • ….

If there are large differences in how different operators perform the operation, several videos can be screened at the same time, with the same task carried out by different operators. It is essential to carry out this detailed review with the operators in the videos. They know things that nobody else knows, and have ideas that you want to use.

Asenta -- Operators participating in analysis
Operators participating in the analysis of their own work

Conclusions

When you analyze operations for the first time, it is common to discover that about 40% of the time is spent on activities other than assembly or test. This is due to a combination of wrong sequencing, redundant steps, multiple handling, inadequate fixtures, inconveniently located tools or parts, etc.

Of course, not all of these can be eliminated easily. Some can be, by redesigning or retrofitting the work station; others can be taken out of the assembly flow and performed in parallel so that, for example, the operator does not have to prepare a part while the product waits. The net productivity increase that can usually be accomplished is on the order of 30%, without overburdening the operator. In our client’s case, this means making the assembly jobs sustainable while absorbing a higher demand.

Once the summary of times by category has shown the “gold in the mine” — that is, the improvement potential, the team fleshes out the ideas generated during the review of the video, tries them out as much as possible immediately, and turns them into proposals. The following pictures shows the flip chart with sketches of the proposals generated in our sessions, and a snapshot of try-storming.

The team then turns the  improvement proposals into a detailed action plan for the short, medium-, and long term.

Once the improvements are implemented, the team shoots another video of the operation, for the following purposes:

  • Validating the improvements.
  • Standardizing the sequence of operations
  • Training other operators

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Jan 6 2014

We passed 200,000 page views!

Yesterday, the cumulative number of page views since the start of this blog crossed the 200,000 mark. I was hoping it would happen by December 31 to make it an even year since the previous milestone at 100,000, but it came a few days late.

A big thank you to the readers. Please keep making comments.

I hope to keep your interest in the future.

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Jan 2 2014

Lean and Management Processes

An online sparring partner of 15 years, Bill Waddell, concluded our latest exchange with the following:

“Lean is comprised of three elements: Culture, management processes and tools. While you obviously have a keen awareness of the culture and tools, you continually under-appreciate the management processes, Michael.”

It is a 3-step progression: first, Bill makes a general statement of what Lean is, then he points out a serious shortcoming in my thinking, and finally he misspells my name.

As I am not trying to go global cosmic with Lean but instead remain focused on Manufacturing, rather than Bill’s three elements, I see Lean as having the four dimensions identified by Crispin Vincenti-Brown. Whatever you do has some content in each of the following:

  • Engineering, in the design, implementation, and troubleshooting of production lines.
  • Logistics and Production Control, covering both physical distribution and the processing of all information related to types and quantities of materials and good.
  • Organization and People, covering the structure, sizing, responsibilities and modes of interaction of departments in production and support, to run daily operations, respond to emergencies, and improve.
  • Metrics and Accountability. How results are measured and how these measurements are used.

Attention must be appropriately balanced in all of these dimensions and, if one is under-appreciated in the US, it is Engineering, not Management. Metrics and organization issues hog the attention; what little is left over goes towards Logistics and Production Control, and Engineering is taken for granted. The tail is wagging the dog, and reality bites back in the form of implementation failures.

What is a management process, and how does it differ from a tool? The term sounds like standard management speak, but, if you google it, the only unqualified reference to it that comes up is in Wikipedia, where it is defined as “a process of planning and controlling the organizing and leading execution of any type of activity.”

Since Henri Fayol, however, we have all been taught that the job of all managers is to plan, organize, control, and lead. In those terms, there doesn’t seem to be any difference between a “management process” and just “management.” All other Google responses are for the processes of managing different functions, like the “Project Management Process,” “Performance Management Process,” “Change Management Process,” or the “A3 Management Process.” The corresponding images are a variety of box-and-arrow diagrams, pyramids, wheel charts, dish charts, and waterfalls/swim lanes, as in the following examples:

A manufacturing process is the network of tasks to make a product from materials — with routes that merge, branch, and sometimes even loop. A business process, likewise, is a network of tasks to turn inputs into outputs, like the order fulfillment process that turns customer orders into deliveries. A political process  is also a network of tasks leading to a particular result, like the election of a president or the approval of a budget. So, what about a management process? And what is the level of appreciation that it deserves?

Bill is the one who should really explain it, but, if I were to use this term, at the most basic level it would be for what I have been calling protocols, by which I mean the part of management work that is done by applying sets of rules or procedures rather than making judgement calls. They are pre-planned responses to events that might occur but are not part of routine operations. It can be the arrival of a new member into a team, the failure of a truck to show up, or a quality emergency.

This is the spirit of Toyota’s Change Point Management (CPM), in which the pre-planned responses are prepared by the teams that are potentially affected by the events and posted in the team’s work place. When the event occurs. all you have to do is retrieve the plan and you know what to do. And it is usually a better plan than what you would have improvised in the heat of the moment.

At a higher level, I would call process a protocol used to organize the way you make judgment calls. You can’t set the strategy of a company by applying rules, but you can use Hoshin Planning to organize the way you do it. A process like Hoshin Planning is akin to the rules of a game; it doesn’t determine how well the managers play. If they just comply with a mandate and go through the motions, they will produce a certain result. If, on the other hand, they understand what they are doing, connect it to their own work, and see the value in it, then they will produce a different result.

A good process does not guarantee a good outcome, and great teams have been able to coax performance out of dysfunctional processes. What is the proper level of appreciation for these management processes? Clearly, there is more to management than processes, and the best managers are those who excel at endeavors for which there is no script.

I learned to appreciate the relationship between management and engineering in Manufacturing from working with my mentor, Kei Abe. When he took me on as a junior partner in 1987, one of the first things I learned from him was to approach problems in a holistic manner, simultaneously at the technical and the managerial levels. I saw him coach a shop floor team on the details of SMED in the morning, and the board of directors on company strategy in the afternoon. It’s not a common mix of skills, but I believe it is what a manufacturing consultant should have.

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Jan 1 2014

Internal Threat to TPS due to new Hiring Practices | Christoph Roser

See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing

“Toyota with its Toyota Production System is the archetype of lean manufacturing, which also makes it to one of the most successful companies on earth. This success is due to outstanding management at Toyota; however, recent changes in hiring practices threaten the Toyota Production System at its core.”

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

Now a professor at Karlsruhe University, Christoph Roser is an alumnus of Toyota Research in Japan, so he has first-hand knowledge of the topic.

Toyota’s response to the Aisin Seiki fire of 1997 is certainly a shining example of its supply chain management practices at work, but its relevance to employee hiring practices is not clear to me.

Also, one should not confuse dominating a meeting with getting decisions to go your way, and learning to say “No” rather than “It would be a little difficult” is just being culturally sensitive.

Having this ability carries no implication on a person’s character.  Being articulate and assertive does not mean being selfish. Being selfish means only looking after yourself. Making sure that what you mean comes across clearly to the other side in a negotiation is perfectly compatible with seeking win-win solutions.

See on www.allaboutlean.com

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