Oct 9 2013

Model T Assembly Line Starts For First Time – October 7, 1913 | The Truth About Cars

See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing

Michel Baudin‘s insight:

This is mostly interesting for the collection of photos from the Ford Highland park plant.

See on www.thetruthaboutcars.com

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Oct 6 2013

Predicting the benefits of “Lean Actions”

In the TPS + 1 ENGINEERING group on LinkedIn, Hela Hassine asked  “How can we predict and quantify the profit of lean actions before implementing them?”

I see three types of what Hela Hassine call “actions”:

  1. For some, you can do a complete discounted cash flow analysis before implementing. Cellularizing a job-shop falls into this category.
  2. For others, you cannot calculate the benefits ahead of time, but you can measure them afterwards. When you improve quality, first you can’t tell ahead of time by how much it will actually improve, and second, you can’t tell how much good this improvement will do to your business. After you have improved quality, you know by how much, and you can also measure the market impact of the improved quality, which is its dominant benefit. There is no way you can justify quality improvement ahead of time through cost-of-quality analysis.
  3. For the rest, the benefits are too diffuse to be measurable. 5S falls is in this category.

This has obvious consequences on implementation sequencing, that are often overlooked. Projects that lend themselves to a-priori justification are easiest to sell to management, and success in such projects gives you the credibility you need to undertake others with less tangible benefits. In other words, you are better off starting with cells than with 5S.

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Oct 5 2013

A new logo for the takt times group

The takt times group has a new logo. The old one was the result of a brainstorm back in 2007 involving Christophe Caberlon, Marc Deloges,and me, and it was intended as a stylized rendition of an old-style metronome, which we thought was an apt metaphor for takt time. We still think it is, but we were engineers, not graphic designers, and we have lately gotten feedback to the effect that the artwork could be improved.
Being based in Silicon Valley has its advantages, like the ability to pick the brains of digital media artists like Nathalie Mathé who took a break from developing the computer-generated 3D backgrounds for movies like Skyfall or Captain Phillips to propose changes to our logo. It is now curvier, less busy, and with less aggressive colors. Actually, if there were a kanji for “metronome,” this is the way it might look.

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Oct 2 2013

“The Fragility of Lean is its Strength” | Michael Ballé

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“Can a pull system with zero stock make the company more fragile? Sure it can, that’s the whole point: fragile, but flexible. The pull system doesn’t make the company fragile: it reveals the weak points. Top performance is about keeping a ball on top of a round hill it needs everybody’s engagement to make sure it stays there.”

Michel Baudin‘s insight:

Pull systems don”t have zero stocks, but low stocks, and the experience of disasters — from the Mississippi flood of 1993 in the US, to the Aisin Seiki fire of 1997 and the Fukushima earthquate of 2011 in Japan — has shown Toyota’s pull system to be robust and able to recover much faster than anyone expected, including the Japanese press.

“Fragility is strength” is a cute paradox, but not applicable here. The true paradox is that stocks generally do not protect you against shortages. They do for crude oil and similar commodities, but not for  the thousands of different items you need in manufacturing. You end up with full warehouses that are somehow out of the item you need today.

What protects you more effectively is the combination of low stocks with the kind of vigilance that makes you reserve all the available trucking in Chicago a few days before a flood, as Toyota did in 1993. A pull system supports the vigilant monitoring of stocks in two ways:

  1. Self-adjustment in the speed of circulation of pull signals automatically absorbs the routine fluctuations in volume and mix.
  2. When major disruptions occur, they are quickly detected and acted on.

See on www.scdigest.com

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Sep 28 2013

Pathways to high performance | Manufacturers’ Monthly

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“The High Performance Consortium LTD (HPC), a not for profit organisation, facilitates groups of up to 12 non-competing businesses to undertake a program that incorporates events, site visits, coaching and facilitated peer-to-peer forums.”

Michel Baudin‘s insight:

This is similar to supplier groups as organized in Japan: non-competitors helping each other improve performance through joint projects. In this case, it appears to be organized directly by the participating companies, rather than by a common customer.

See on www.manmonthly.com.au

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Sep 28 2013

Does This Man Look Efficient? | Businessweek

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“…Threading the nut is waste, as are the first five turns of the wrench. Only the last quarter-turn of the nut adds value. The customer doesn’t pay you to turn the nut. The customer pays you to fix the joint. My customer—my editor—only pays me to hand in completed articles. Everything else I do up to that point is waste.

Toyota will scratch at tenths of a second to bring down “takt time,” what it takes to complete a single step in a process…”

 

Michel Baudin‘s insight:

The coverage of Lean in the mainstream press often turns into a collection of strange statements of this kind.

What does it mean that only the last quarter turn of the nut adds value? The gas cap on my car is fastened with just a quarter turn, but the nuts that hold the engine together are not. When you tighten a nut, force is applied to the entire length of the thread, which makes running down the nut about as “wasteful” as prepping a surface before painting it.

That Business Week’s editor only pays the author for completed articles does not mean that the work of writing them is waste. Customers, generally, are no authority on the process to make what they buy. If you sell something, it’s your job to figure it out. There is what you need to do, and what you don’t. If you need to do it, it’s not waste; if you don’t, it is.

And Takt time is not what it takes to complete a single step in a process! it is a common misconception but it completely misses the point of producing to takt. For a weekly magazine, the takt time is one week.

See on www.businessweek.com

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