Sep 1 2013

‘Lean’ Manufacturing Takes Root in U.S. | Fox News

See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
It’s called “lean” manufacturing, and analysts say it enables managers to reduce redundancy, increase output and save capital that can be used to hire more workers.

 

 

 

Michel Baudin‘s insight:

This article in from April 29, 2011, but I just found it today. The facts are approximate, as you would expect from Fox News, but the video includes a good segment on a raku-raku seat in action and an interview of Jeffrey Liker.

Toyota dealership carsThe article presents the Toyota Production System are being strictly make-to-order, which makes you wonder where the new Toyotas for sale at your local dealership come from.

Toyota’s system is also presented as centered on collocating designers, suppliers, sales and marketing by project, which says nothing about production… Incidentally, no one who has actually researched Toyota’s approach to product development describes it as collocating everybody.

Even the Liker quote about Toyota’s not having laid off anybody during the financial crisis, while formally accurate, does not take into account what happened with temporary workers. These workers do not have the tenured status of permanent employees, but some work for the company continuously for years.

See on www.foxnews.com

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Aug 31 2013

Misleading Graphics in Global Manufacturing Report from McKinsey

See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
“The global manufacturing sector has undergone a tumultuous decade: large developing economies leaped into the first tier of manufacturing nations, a severe recession choked off demand, and manufacturing employment fell at an accelerated rate in advanced economies. Still, manufacturing remains critically important to both the developing and the advanced world. In the former, it continues to provide a pathway from subsistence agriculture to rising incomes and living standards. In the latter, it remains a vital source of innovation and competitiveness, making outsized contributions to research and development, exports, and productivity growth. But the manufacturing sector has changed—bringing both opportunities and challenges—and neither business leaders nor policy makers can rely on old responses in the new manufacturing environment.”

Michel Baudin‘s insight:

The bubbles above are intended to represent global market share by gross value added in 2010 in the manufacturing of “global goods for local markets,” which includes appliances, automotive, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals.

The complete chart (see below)  is a map of the world with a bubble for each of the top ten countries. From the point of view of graphic art, the chart looks professional; as a means of presenting data, however, it misleads.

McKinsey chart junk example

From the center of the bubbles, you can see that China’s share is twice that of Japan, but the bubble is four times larger. This is because its radius is twice that of Japan’s bubble.

This is a perfect example of Tufte’s rule that you should not us a two-dimensional symbol to show one-dimensional data. Market share is one number. If you want to make an accurate graphic comparison of different countries’ market shares, use a bar chart. It would look as follows:

McKinsey chart content in bar chart

As most readers know where in the world the US, China, and Japan are, you can lose the map of the world. It looks great, but it adds no information.

 

See on www.mckinsey.com

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Aug 27 2013

Piecework and Excellence Cannot Coexist | Bill Waddell

See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
“There are only a few absolutes when it comes to lean but one of them is that there has never been a company that achieved true manufacturing excellence that paid its folks on a piecework system.  It can’t happen – ever – period.  Either you want to make the right product at the right time … or you just want to make a whole lot of stuff.  You can’t have it both ways.”

Michel Baudin‘s insight:

A couple points that could be added are:

  1. The administration of piece rates is expensive, because you not only have to develop, maintain and monitor rates for every single task but you have to do with caution as people’s livelihoods are at stake and it is easy to start a mutiny.
  2. Tensions inevitably arise between operators who do a manual task at a speed they can control and those who run machines with automatic cycles they cannot change.

In the 1990s, I was surprised to learn that 2/3 of factory workers in Germany were still paid on a piece rate, which I was told after observing an operator getting furious at a machine that he couldn’t get to start because of a faulty safety latch. I also learned the piece rates are not set by the company directly but by an external organization called REFA that is accredited for this purpose by the unions. In that plant, everybody was producing to 140% of the standard, the performance that generated the maximum income for the operators.

See on www.idatix.com

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Aug 26 2013

Beware the Sirens of Management Pseudo-Science | HBR Blog | Freek Vermeulen

See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing

“…A common formula to create a best-selling business book is to start with a list of eye-catching companies that have been outperforming their peers for years. This has the added advantage of creating an aura of objectivity because the list is constructed using “objective, quantitative data.” Subsequently, the management thinker takes the list of superior companies and examines (usually in a rather less objective way) what these companies have in common. Surely — is the assumption and foregone conclusion — what these companies have in common must be a good thing, so let’s write a book about that and become rich…”

Michel Baudin‘s insight:

Bill Waddell branded the author of this article “The Naysayer Personified,” which prompted me to read it. Vermeulen’s first target it “In Search of Excellence,” a best seller from the 1980s that pointed out “excellent” companies that didn’ excel so much after the book came out. I had read it at the time, and had found it little more than a cheer-leading compilation of the public relations literature of the companies. So far, I agreed with Vermeulen.

Further on, he bashes as management fads not only Six Sigma, TQM, and ISO-9000 — no argument here — but also Lean. Ouch! This is my stock in trade, and I really should argue that Vermeulen doesn’t get it.

But my heart is not in it. Much has been done in the name of Lean by now that amounts to little more than slapping the label onto ideas that are unrelated to the Toyota Production System (TPS), and it hasn’t been particularly effective.

That is not what Lean is to me. I see it as the adaptation to other contexts of the principles that have made Toyota successful in the car business, involving in practice the selection and adaptation of relevant TPS tools, as well as the development of new ones. And I admit readily that it is not a panacea. There are plenty of human endeavors to which it does not apply, but what interests me is the ones to which it does.

When you want to discuss this now, just can’t just say “Lean,” you have to qualify it as “Lean Deep” or “True Lean,”  as opposed to “Lean Lite” or “Lean As Mistakenly Executed” (L.A.M.E.).

Could the same be said of the other approaches Vermeulen criticizes? To some extent, yes. Six Sigma and TQM, for example, are based on real contributions made in specialized areas, before their promoters went global cosmic.

See on blogs.hbr.org

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Aug 23 2013

How the 80/20 Rule will improve the safety of your warehouse | IndustryWeek

See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
“If companies can identify their high movers from a pick history list, the “vital” 20% can be optimally located within the shelving systems to maximize production efficiencies and to minimize wasted time and effort. The 80/20 Rule can help companies strategically locate “vital” materials so that employees’ efficiency and safety are maximized.”

 

 

Michel Baudin‘s insight:

In this article ergonomist Lance Perry explains that organize items in warehouses by frequency of use improves the ergonomics of manual storage and retrieval.

In Lean Logisitics, I presented the same policies as a means of increasing productivity and reducing the lead times of warehouse operations. Making what you use the most often easiest to reach improves multiple dimensions of performance at the same time. There is no tradeoff; you don’t rob Peter to pay Paul; you don’t make X better by making Y worse. That’s why we call is an improvement.

What is most puzzling is that such a simple idea is not already universally applied.

See on www.industryweek.com

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Aug 22 2013

Get certified in Lean without setting foot in a factory! | Industry Market Trends

See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing “Lean Six Sigma – This is perhaps one of the most popular training systems for manufacturing companies. […] Online courses can provide training and certification for all levels from yellow belt to black belt.”

Michel Baudin‘s insight:
William Hope as pilot in Aliens (1986)
William Hope as pilot in Aliens (1986)

It reminds me of the movie “Aliens,” when Ripley asks the spaceship pilot how many times he has landed on an unknown planet: “38 times,” he says, before adding “… in simulations.”

See on news.thomasnet.com

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