Apr 16 2013

Lean = Green? | ThomasNet Industrial News Room

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ThomasNet Industrial News Room
Is Lean Manufacturing Green Manufacturing?
ThomasNet Industrial News Room
Can lean manufacturing, as exemplified by the renowned Toyota Production System, be a path to greener manufacturing?

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Apr 11 2013

What About Lean Machine Safety? | Industrial Automation

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“There are common misconceptions that keep manufacturers from integrating safety into lean manufacturing, McHale said. ‘People think there’s no place for safety in lean,” he said. “Safety will just impede things; all of my processes will slow down. Implementing safety doesn’t necessarily result in lost production.’

McHale believes safety and lean manufacturing principles can reinforce one another.”

 

Michel Baudin‘s insight:

I agree with McHale. If, in implementing Lean, you give the proper amount of attention to the engineering dimension and focus first on the design of the production lines, in the details of operations you see risks that were overlooked before, from accidents waiting to happen to movements and postures that generate repetitive stress.

As you improve the line, you also improve its safety and its ergonomics. It shows respect for people in a concrete way, ensures that you retain them, and secures their support of your efforts.

When you reduce the hand carrying distance of a car battery from 50ft to 2ft, you not only make the job safer and less tiring, but you increase productivity and reduce handling damage at the same time. You don’t improve one dimension of performance at the expense of another. Instead, you improve all of them concurrently. This is the essence of Lean.

See on www.controldesign.com

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Apr 9 2013

Flow improvements called “5S” at Avanzar | Jeffrey Liker

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“Recently I revisited Avanzar, Toyota’s interior and seating supplier for their San Antonio, Texas truck plant.  Most major suppliers are on-site delivering directly to the factory which in the case of seat assembly is right across a wall. Avanzar’s CEO, Heriberto (Berto) Guerra, was very excited about their Japanese advisor, formerly of Toyota, and all he had been teaching them about real kanban.  I had visited a year earlier and Mr. Guerra was very excited about their Japanese advisor, formerly of Toyota, who was teaching them kanban. A year before that, he said they were making progress in a few model areas and now there was kanban everywhere. Mr. Guerra also raved about the way their advisor was teaching them 5S, which again I found confusing.”

Michel Baudin‘s insight:

A well-documented case of Lean implementation at a just-in-sequence supplier ot seats to Toyota’s plant in San Antonio, TX. An oddity of this case  is that they lump under the “5S” label all sorts of changes that are well beyond it, such as redesigning part presentation at assembly to make frequently used items easily accessible, or kitting parts.

Of course, as long as it works for them, they can call it whatever they want. For communication with the rest of us, however, as Jeffrey found, it is confusing.

See on www.manufacturingpulse.com

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Apr 8 2013

Lean efficiency pays dividends | Packaging Digest

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“Aerofil Technology Inc. (ATI) began its operations in Sullivan, MO, in the fall of 1988 with two small aerosol lines and less than 50,000 sq ft of space. Since then, ATI has greatly expanded and now serves clients around the world. Its capabilities, customer base and facility size have grown exponentially during the past 25 years. Today, ATI is a Lean contract packager with a continuous-improvement culture with approximately 350 full-time employees and 16 production lines in a 400,000-sq-ft facility.”

See on www.packagingdigest.com

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Apr 7 2013

The Truth about Lean Failures | Vivek Naik

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The truth is, most lean implementations are a failure over long duration.Some of them are the major causes, as identified by the people involved in the implementation. They may be the right or maybe these are just the symptoms.

Michel Baudin‘s insight:

In this post, Vivek Naik presents the results of a survey about the causes of Lean implementation failures conducted among the readers of his blog.

The respondents, of course, are not representative of anything except a self-selected subgroup of followers of a blog on Lean, but Naik, to his credit, asked open-ended essay questions like:

  • What is your Biggest problem to implement lean in your organisation?
  • What would help you overcome this challenges?

And he didn’t tally percentages of responses, which would not have been meaningful. What he does is simply list and categorize the causes that the respondents have put forward.

What I find striking in this list is that no one mentioned insufficient mastery of the engineering and management tools of Lean. ‘Lack of understanding” appears only under Culture. What about the ability to achieve SMED, generate heijunka schedules, or design a bonus system that supports improvement without turning employees into bounty hunters?

Along with the majority of Lean implementers in the US, Naik’s responders take the tools for granted. In that attitude, I see a major cause of Lean failures.

See on viveknaik.net

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Apr 5 2013

How Toyota brought its famed manufacturing method to India | The Economic Times

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“…Nakagawa, who has been a TPS practitioner for four decades, doesn’t believe in seeing things on his computer screen -he prefers to go where the action is. “Can a computer smell? Genchi Genbutsu is very important because only on-site will your sensory organs be alert – smell, sound, vision,” he says….”

Michel Baudin‘s insight:

Perhaps, Mr, Nakagawa has not heard of Google Nose, the app announced on April 1.

In all summaries,TPS has two pillars, but never the same. In this article, the pillars are “respect for people” and “continuous improvement.” To Ohno, they were Just-in-time (JIT) and Jidoka, with JIT covering production control, logistics, and supply chain management, while Jidoka was a complete approach to the engineering of production lines where humans interact with machines.

You could try to implement Ohno’s JIT and Jidoka without respect for people or continuous improvement, but it would not work well. Conversely, if all you focus on is respect for people and continuous improvement, you won’t get TPS either. You need both, and, perhaps, two pillars are not enough.

Broadly speaking, the two pillars in this article are about management; Ohno’s pillars, about technology. As TPS is based on the interplay of management and technology, perhaps these are its real “two pillars.”

See on economictimes.indiatimes.com

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