Oct 17 2012
Fab manager tries Lean with no support from the top, by starting with 5S…
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
Tim Heston reports a conversation with the manager of a low-volume/high-mix fabrication shop who wants to implement Lean, without top management support, and starting with 5S, and it’s not working.
Two thirds of the article are not just about 5S but about the tool hoarding behavior of operators. Yes, organizing workstations with commonly used tools makes sense, but, if the manager starts by addressing this head-on, he will have a mutiny on his hands and his bosses won’t back him up.
To be successful, changes in tool management policies should be part of more major changes, such as the implementation of SMED on a machine, or the development of a machining cell. Once you have a team of operators who move between stations and rotate positions, then tools naturally become attached to stations rather than individuals.
What should the manager do? I am currently reading Art Byrne’s Lean Turnaround, and, maybe, getting his CEO to take a look at it might be a good idea to get him or her on board. Next, he should get better advice getting started than focusing on 5S. Much of the literature recommends it because it looks easy. It’s not, and it almost never works as a first step.
See on blog.thefabricator.com
Nov 20 2012
5S and multiskilled operators
In a Lean plant, we expect to see a tidy, uncluttered shop floor with high visibility as a result of 5S, and skills matrices on performance boards that track the cross training of the operators in the different tasks performed in that shop. 5S and multiskilled operators are both features of Lean that we do not, a priori, consider as linked. But in fact they are, and the feasibility of implementing certain aspects of 5S is in fact contingent on having multiskilled operators.
For example, assume you are running a traditional machining job-shop. You have a turning center, a milling center, a drilling center, a grinding center, etc. In each of these centers, you have a farm of machines performing only one type of operation and working in parallel. Each job follows its own path from center to center, with a document called traveler showing the list of operations with check marks for the operations done to date. And each center has single-skilled operators, usually able to operate just one machine, or a bank of identical machines, as seen in Figure 1, with the orange areas showing WIP locations.
If you try to implement 5S in this context, you will be telling a machinist with 15 years on the same machine to put hand tools on a shadow board and label every location. But the machinist knows where everything is, and sees no value in this exercise. The only clear point is that 5S would make it easier for somebody else to take over the job. And since this machinist doesn’t know how to do anything else in the plant, it is not an attractive proposition.
On the other hand, assume you first set up cells in which each job makes a machinist operate several machines, and the cell operators rotate between jobs, as shown in Figures 2 and 3.
Then the shadow boards and labels come in handy and are well received. The tooling is shared among several operators, none of whom “owns” any of the machines (See Figure 4).
In other words, if you try to have assigned and labeled locations for tooling in a traditional job-shop, you will get nowhere with the machinists. On the other hand, it is indispensable when you operate with multiskilled operators, and they will cooperate in making it happen.
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By Michel Baudin • Management • 5 • Tags: 5S, Cellular manufacturing, Lean implementation