Jun 17 2013
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
“[…]But lean manufacturing is the norm, not the exception, in the global economy. Yet it’s also true that hands-on workers can be innovators about how to improve production and streamline work flow.”
See on news.google.com
Jun 8 2013
Christophe Caberlon has a special way of conducting this first step: at 6X normal speed. When reviewing videos with the operators who have been recorded, he has found that accelerated motion has the effect of drawing attention to the activities that consume the most time, as the ones that do not are filtered out. If the operator spends the majority of the time walking back and forth to a shelf to pick parts, a fast-motion viewing of the recording makes it dramatically obvious and compelling, making the operator eager to help improve the process. After trying various 2X, 4X and 8X, he has found that the 6X ratio of acceleration works best for this purpose.
When Christophe told me about this, it reminded me of a scene in the movie The Hunt for Red October, in which sound is used the same way. Jonesy, the sonar operator in the American submarine tracking the soviet submaring Red October, has just heard the sound of the propellers disappearing when the Russian boat turned on its “silent” propulsion system. But he still heard a vague rumbling. The analysis software categorizes this sound as magma displacement, but the sonar operator believes that the sound is made by the submarine. To convince his captain of that, he plays the recording at 10 times the speed, which turns the rumbling into a rythmic “tac tac tac” characteristic of a human artifact and not magma displacement.
The idea of watching the video in fast motion is that, by filtering, it lets you see patterns you would otherwise miss. The same is true of slow motion, but fast motion has the advantage,… of being fast. You wouldn’t want to review an entire 1-hour video in slow motion, but you may do it in a few excerpts as part of the detailed analysis we will go into in a coming post.
Of course, the idea of reviewing a video in fast motion is more interesting if you can actually do it, and the most common video players around don’t let you run at 6X. I tried the following:
Among video editors, Windows Live Movie Maker lets you change speeds, but Google’s Picasa 3 doesn’t. For Windows Live Movie Maker, it is again in powers of 2.
In video annotation software, ANVIL doesn’t do fast-motion, but Timer Pro does. To view a video in 6X in Timer Pro, you click on the Video tab and set the speed to 12. The video then plays at the right speed but the a wrong aspect ratio. If, however, you click on the Comparison tab, you can view at 6X normal speed and with the correct aspect ratio, albeit in a small window that you cannot adjust.
Jun 7 2013
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
Mark Graban on LeanBlog: “From my experience, you have to be cautious when somebody says either, “Lean says you should….” or “Toyota would tell you to…” because those statements, even if stated authoritatively, can be wrong.
At a recent speaking engagement (I won’t disclose where), a professor (one who teaches about Lean) made a curious comment that I’d put in the Lean As Misguidedly Explained (orL.A.M.E.) category.
The professor made a point that, when working in healthcare, we have to be careful about applying all methods and tools from Toyota. I agreed with that part of his statement. We’re not literally hanging “andon cords” or putting tape around every piece of equipment just because a factory does it. We have to be solving hospital problems and not just copying tools. I get that.
His example, though, was a bit off base.
The prof talked about “takt time” (or the rate of customer demand) and how we balance the service or production time to match up with takt. Again, that’s correct.
In his hypothetical, he said let’s assume that a doctor’s office is supposed to be seeing a patient every 20 minutes. What if the patient has been in the room for 19:59 already.
The prof said, ‘Toyota would tell you to kick the patient out of the room at 19:59 because you have to keep on takt time.'”
The example is about the hypothetical application of the concept of takt time to a doctor’s office. Mark’s post rebuts a statement that it would imply kicking out a patient at the end of the allotted time regardless of whether the patient’s problem was solved.
This is actually what psychiatrists do when they tell patients “Your 50 minutes are up.” But that is because these patients would otherwise linger on indefinitely. At the opposite end of the spectrum, a general practitioner I know who is an excellent diagnostician once explained that she knew what was wrong with 90% of her patients almost the second they walked into her office, and could confirm it within minutes but stayed longer with each patient just so that they would feel cared for and would trust her diagnosis.
In general, however, I don’t see the concept of takt time as applicable in situations where the work content of transactions varies in a way that cannot be anticipated. An MD can’t know how much time a patient will need. Likewise, a maintenance technician cannot know how a long a work order will require, even in preventive maintenance, because you can’t know exactly what you will find when you open a machine.
Incidentally, takt time is not “the rate of customer demand,” first because it is a time and not a rate, and second, because it is not only a function of demand but also of work time available. It is the time that must elapse between two consecutive unit completions at every operation in order to meet demand within the net available work time. It takes 26 words rather than 5, but the definition really cannot be simplified further.
It is an extremely useful concept to plan repetitive sequences of operations done by different people and machines during a shift. But I don’t see much value in applying it, for example, to people who are on call 24×7 to respond to emergencies, particularly when they do it individually. An MD in an office treats a patient end-to-end; it is in not similar to an assembly line, even if patients sometimes feel that way.
There are other approaches to managing such situations. For example, a takt-based approach to computer networks called “token ring” had its day 30 years ago. A token was passed around between computers in a loop at fixed intervals, and only the computer that had the token was allowed to speak while the others listened.
This takt-based approach was abandoned and superseded by Ethernet, in which computers essentially “grab the mike” whenever they have something to say, with a protocol to resolve confilcts when two or more speak at once. It was a better fit to the way computers communicated and is still the basis for your local office or home network today.
See on www.leanblog.org
Jun 6 2013
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
See on www.foodprocessing.com
Jun 19 2013
Factory to Forecourt |Burnaston Plant | Toyota UK
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
Yesterday, Toyota UK posted eight videos on Youtube, showing various stages of production of an Auris at their Burnaston plant. So it is a current look at their production process.
See on www.youtube.com
Share this:
Like this:
By Michel Baudin • Web scrapings • 0 • Tags: Burnaston, Business, Lean manufacturing, Michel Baudin, Toyota, Youtube