industrial engineering

Jan 2 2014

Lean and Management Processes

An online sparring partner of 15 years, Bill Waddell, concluded our latest exchange with the following:

“Lean is comprised of three elements: Culture, management processes and tools. While you obviously have a keen awareness of the culture and tools, you continually under-appreciate the management processes, Michael.”

It is a 3-step progression: first, Bill makes a general statement of what Lean is, then he points out a serious shortcoming in my thinking, and finally he misspells my name.

As I am not trying to go global cosmic with Lean but instead remain focused on Manufacturing, rather than Bill’s three elements, I see Lean as having the four dimensions identified by Crispin Vincenti-Brown. Whatever you do has some content in each of the following:

  • Engineering, in the design, implementation, and troubleshooting of production lines.
  • Logistics and Production Control, covering both physical distribution and the processing of all information related to types and quantities of materials and good.
  • Organization and People, covering the structure, sizing, responsibilities and modes of interaction of departments in production and support, to run daily operations, respond to emergencies, and improve.
  • Metrics and Accountability. How results are measured and how these measurements are used.

Attention must be appropriately balanced in all of these dimensions and, if one is under-appreciated in the US, it is Engineering, not Management. Metrics and organization issues hog the attention; what little is left over goes towards Logistics and Production Control, and Engineering is taken for granted. The tail is wagging the dog, and reality bites back in the form of implementation failures.

What is a management process, and how does it differ from a tool? The term sounds like standard management speak, but, if you google it, the only unqualified reference to it that comes up is in Wikipedia, where it is defined as “a process of planning and controlling the organizing and leading execution of any type of activity.”

Since Henri Fayol, however, we have all been taught that the job of all managers is to plan, organize, control, and lead. In those terms, there doesn’t seem to be any difference between a “management process” and just “management.” All other Google responses are for the processes of managing different functions, like the “Project Management Process,” “Performance Management Process,” “Change Management Process,” or the “A3 Management Process.” The corresponding images are a variety of box-and-arrow diagrams, pyramids, wheel charts, dish charts, and waterfalls/swim lanes, as in the following examples:

A manufacturing process is the network of tasks to make a product from materials — with routes that merge, branch, and sometimes even loop. A business process, likewise, is a network of tasks to turn inputs into outputs, like the order fulfillment process that turns customer orders into deliveries. A political process  is also a network of tasks leading to a particular result, like the election of a president or the approval of a budget. So, what about a management process? And what is the level of appreciation that it deserves?

Bill is the one who should really explain it, but, if I were to use this term, at the most basic level it would be for what I have been calling protocols, by which I mean the part of management work that is done by applying sets of rules or procedures rather than making judgement calls. They are pre-planned responses to events that might occur but are not part of routine operations. It can be the arrival of a new member into a team, the failure of a truck to show up, or a quality emergency.

This is the spirit of Toyota’s Change Point Management (CPM), in which the pre-planned responses are prepared by the teams that are potentially affected by the events and posted in the team’s work place. When the event occurs. all you have to do is retrieve the plan and you know what to do. And it is usually a better plan than what you would have improvised in the heat of the moment.

At a higher level, I would call process a protocol used to organize the way you make judgment calls. You can’t set the strategy of a company by applying rules, but you can use Hoshin Planning to organize the way you do it. A process like Hoshin Planning is akin to the rules of a game; it doesn’t determine how well the managers play. If they just comply with a mandate and go through the motions, they will produce a certain result. If, on the other hand, they understand what they are doing, connect it to their own work, and see the value in it, then they will produce a different result.

A good process does not guarantee a good outcome, and great teams have been able to coax performance out of dysfunctional processes. What is the proper level of appreciation for these management processes? Clearly, there is more to management than processes, and the best managers are those who excel at endeavors for which there is no script.

I learned to appreciate the relationship between management and engineering in Manufacturing from working with my mentor, Kei Abe. When he took me on as a junior partner in 1987, one of the first things I learned from him was to approach problems in a holistic manner, simultaneously at the technical and the managerial levels. I saw him coach a shop floor team on the details of SMED in the morning, and the board of directors on company strategy in the afternoon. It’s not a common mix of skills, but I believe it is what a manufacturing consultant should have.

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Jun 21 2013

Using videos to improve operations | Part 6 – Quick simograms

Here, we finally start collecting measurements from the video, focusing on what we can collect while watching without stopping. In this mode, we can break down operator time by broad categories like  “Waiting,” “Walking,” or “Assembling,” but we don’t have the time to name each task and collect comments or improvement ideas. This will require a more detailed and time-consuming analysis. 

One method, developed by Christophe Caberlon, involves two analysts, one viewing the video and the other one filling out an electronic spreadsheet. Instead of looking for state-change events in the video, we look at it in 5-second increments. Every five seconds, the analyst viewing the video calls out the state the operator has been in since the previous call. Each 5-second. Interval is assigned one column in the spreadsheet and there is one row for each state. Based on the call, the second analyst switches the color of the cell for the state and time interval.

Counting in 5-second intervals involves aliasing, but it is not a problem for a rough-cut estimate. The rows in the spreadsheet do show the state transitions in a Gantt-chart like format called “simogram,” and can summarized into proportions of time spent in each state, as in the following example:

Simogram example

This example uses cell background color to express content, which is not generally recommended because Excel does not provide built-in tools either for quick input or for analysis. The result, however, is graphically much more attractive than filling the cells with Xs. Changing the background color of a cell requires multiple steps, which cannot be repeated every five seconds. These steps, however can be recorded as a Macro. In this example, the macro has Ctrl+q as a hot key to mark a cell and Ctrl+w to unmark it. Also, each 5-second time segment must be assigned to one and only one category. When working your way through a video, it is impossible to avoid cases where one segment will be missed and another accidentally assigned to more than one category.

To detect these errors, we need to count the gray cells by column, and to summarize the times into relevant aggregates, we need to count them by rows. While Excel provides no built-in function to do this, you can find add-on modules to do it. The modules used above are due to C. Pearson. 

This method is also restricted in the number of states to track. It is feasible for two or three but not fifteen. With the limited number of choices, it is a good idea to include an “Other” state. The states should also be clear and unambiguous, such as:

  • Walking: the operator’s legs are moving.
  • Working: the operator’s hands are moving.
  • Waiting: all the operator’s limbs are still.
  • Touching: One of the operator’s hands is touching the product.

Categories that are abstract and subject to interpretation, like “Value-added” should be avoided. Note also that an operator who is Working or Touching, may be handling the work piece or transforming it, and we don’t have enough categories at this level to make the difference. 

Timer Pro provides a method called “Non-stop timing,” in which the analyst simply clicks on a category when observing a state transition, and the time since the previous click is automatically assigned to this category. This eliminates the aliasing due to using 5-second intervals, and relieves one analyst from the task of clicking the right spreadsheet cell every 5 seconds.

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May 29 2013

Using videos to improve operations | Part 2 – Management Preparation

Whether on the shop floor or elsewhere, starring in a video makes people nervous, particularly when they don’t know how it will be used and when it is done by strangers. On the shop floor, particularly when unions are present, operators fear that the videos recordings will simply be used against them and to  justify layoffs. Unless these fears are put to rest before the shoot, it will be tense and, if it happens at all, the quality of the data will be affected.

Following are key steps to follow:

    1. Have a clear objective. Videos can be used for many purposes:
      • Setup time reduction. This is the most common current use in Lean implementation.
      • Work Sampling. A time-lapse video of a work area can be used as a series of snapshots on which to count the people and machines by category of activity, providing rough estimates of proportions of time spent walking, waiting, carrying parts, processing work pieces, etc.
      • Analysis of team coordination. You record from a distance the movements and state changes of multiple people and machines. You don’t see the details of what each one does, but you identify situations where they:
        • Walk long distances, empty-handed or carrying heavy parts,
        • Cause others to wait,
        • Deadlock each other,
        • Fix the work done by others,
        • …
      • Details of work done at an individual station. You focus on the hands of one operator through a sequence of steps at a work station, with the goal improving both individual steps and their sequencing.
      • …

      This is necessary not only to plan the shoot so that the video supports the objective, but also to identify the people who will be recorded and the ways in which the analysis may affect them.

    2. Secure the consent of the participants. The people recorded in the video are not the object of a project but participants in it. It should only be done if they and their management agree. This entails the following:
      • Review the project with the direct supervisor of the area first, and proceed only if he or she supports it. The supervisor needs to agree to let operators participate in video analysis sessions, during work hours if they can be temporarily replaced in production, and in overtime otherwise.
      • If the plant is unionized, review the project with the union leadership. Unless prevented from doing so be constraints external to the plant, unions support the project once they are reassured that:
        • The purpose is not to make people work harder.
        • It is no threat to job security.
        • It usually improves safety.
      • Review the project with the operators, in the presence of their supervisor and a union representative if applicable.
      • There must be a clear policy on the handling and dissemination of videos after the analysis. The principle to follow is that what happens on the shop floor stays on the shop floor. The videos are not to be shared with any outsider to the project. VHS cassettes were easy to safeguard; MPEG files on hard disks are a different challenge. They need to be organized in a video database with proper indexing and safeguards, which is a whole other subject.

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May 24 2013

Using videos to improve operations | Part 1 – Overview and Motivation

This is the first in a series of posts about  the use of video technology to improve operations. This technology is now so pervasive that it is nearly impossible to buy a phone that does not include a camera capable or recording footage that is good enough for broadcast news. Journalists use amateur videos to show storm damage or expose human brutality. We use it to identify improvement opportunities in operations.

For long-time followers of this blog, this is closely based on comments I posted 18 months ago about a news article on the application of a sports video analysis package to manufacturing. The forthcoming installments, on the other hand, are completely new. 

Contents:

Frank and Lillian Gilbreth did it 100 years ago

Motion pictures have a long history in manufacturing. In 1895, the first film ever publicly projected onto a screen showed women leaving the Lumière Brothers factory in Lyon. In 1904, the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company shot several scenes in Westinghouse factories. In 1913, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth were probably the first to use this new technology to analyze operations, and a compilation of their films is available on line, which shows that, from the very beginning, the camera was much more than a substitute for the stopwatches used by Taylor. As is obvious from watching the Gilbreth films, where Taylor measured in order to control, the Gilbreths observed in order to improve. Taylor’s greater fame or notoriety, however, obscured this fundamental difference in the public mind, and made workers as wary of cameras as of stopwatches.

According to psychologist Arlie Belliveau:

“The Gilbreths used workers’ interest in film to their advantage, and encouraged employees to participate in the production and study of work through film. Participants could learn to use the equipment, star in a film, and evaluate any resulting changes to work practices by viewing the projected films in the labs or at foremen’s meetings. Time measurements were made public, and decisions regarding best methods were negotiated. By engaging the workers as participants, the Gilbreths overcame some of the doubt that followed Taylor’s time studies.”

In other words, these pioneers already understood that, unlike the stopwatch, this technology enabled the operators to participate in the analysis and improvement of their own operations.

Until recently, however, the process of recording motion was too cumbersome and expensive, and required too much skill, to be massively practiced either in manufacturing or in other types of business operations. In addition, most managements failed to use it in as enlightened a way as the Gilbreths, and manufacturing workers had a frequently well-founded fear that recordings would be used against them. As a consequence, they were less than enthusiastic in their support of such efforts.

Use in Setup Time Reduction

Setup time reduction is probably the first type of project in which it was systematically used, first because the high stakes justified the cost, even in the 1950s and second because its objective was clearly to make drastic changes in activities that were not production and not to nibble a few seconds out of a repetitive task by pressuring a worker to move faster.

The Vanishing Cost of Shooting Videos

Technically, the cost of shooting videos has not been an issue since the advent of the VCR in the 1980s. Analyzing a video by moving forward and backwards on a cassette tape, while it appears cumbersome today, was far easier than dealing with film. The collection of data on electronic spreadsheets also eliminated the need to use counterintuitive time units like “decimal minutes.” Adding columns of times in hours, minutes and seconds was impractical manually but not a problem for the electronic spreadsheet.

With videos now recorded on and played back from flash memory, and free media-players as software, not only is moving back and forth in a video recording is easier, but the software maps video frames to the time elapsed since the beginning. We could manually transfer timestamps read from the bottom of the video player software window into electronic spreadsheets and have the spreadsheet software automatically calculate task times as the differences between consecutive timestamps.

Analyzing Data in Video Form

While this approach has been a common practice for the past 15 years, video annotation software is available today, which helps break down the video into segments for steps, label them, categorize them, and analyze them.

You can also use it to structure the data and generate a variety of analytics to drive improvements or document the improved process through, for example, work instructions. Over the previous approach, video annotation has the following advantages:It automates the collection of timestamps. Reading times on the video screen and typing hem into an Excel spreadsheet is tedious and error-prone. Plowing through the details of a 30-minute is tedious enough already.

  1. Within the annotation software, each video segment remains attached to the text, numeric or categorical data you attach to it. One click on the data brings up the matching video segment.
  2. Using parallel tracks, you can simultaneously record what several people and machines do. Of course, you can do that without annotation software too, but it is more difficult.
  3. You can still export the data you collect and analyze it in Excel, but you can also take advantage of the software’s built-in analytics.

“Video time studies” is too restrictive a name for what we do with videos. It implies that they are just a replacement for a stopwatch in setting time standards. But what we really do with videos is analyze processes for the purpose of improving them, and this involves more than just capturing times. The primary pupose of the measurements is to quantify the improvement potential to justify changes, and to validate that they have actually occurred.

Remaining Challenges

Putting this technology to use is not without challenges. Video files are larger than just about any other type we may use, be they rich text, databases, or photographs. And they come in a variety of formats and compression methods that make the old VHS versus Betamax dilemma of the VCR age look simple. More standardization would help, and will eventually come but, in the meantime, we have to learn more than we want to know about these issues. Functionally, the next technical challenge is the organization of libraries or databases for storage and retrieval of data captured in the form of videos. The human issues of video recording and analysis of business operations, on the other hand, remain as thorny as ever.

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