Oct 2 2012
A Lean Journey: Meet-up: Michel Baudin
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
Interview on Tim McMahon’s A Lean Journey.
See on www.aleanjourney.com
industrial engineering
Jul 5 2012
Yet another (wrong) definition of takt time
This is from a blog post published today that claims to clarify what a takt time is:
Takt Time: This is the rate of time at which a product or service is being purchased. For example, a Nissan commercial mentioned that every minute, someone in the world buys a new Nissan. Selling a car every minute is an excellent example of takt time!
Writing a definition for a thing or an idea is tricky. Following Aristotle, I would say that you have done a good job if you have described what kind of a thing it is and how it differs from other things of the same kind, using terms your reader already understands.
In this definition, takt time is described as a “rate of time.” If there were such a thing as a rate of time, in what units would it be expressed? In production, a rate is expressed, for example, in pieces per hour; a time, in minutes or seconds. Takt Time, as its name suggests is a time, not a rate, and certainly not a rate of time, whatever that may be.
This definition then relates takt time exclusively to “a product or service [..] being purchased,” and gives the example of a Nissan being bought every minute in the world, suggesting that 1 minute is the takt time of a Nissan. Incidentally, if this figure were true, Nissan would sell about 500,000 cars/year, versus the 4 million it actually sells.
Takt time, as we use it in manufacturing and industrial engineering, is in fact not a parameter associated with just a product but with a production line making this product. Given the demand that is given to it and the amount of time that it actually works, the takt time of this production line for this product is the time that must elapse between two consecutive unit completions.
If a line is expected to produce 400 units of a product in a 400-minute shift, then, if you stand by the last station of the line, you will see one unit come out every minute, meaning that its takt time is 1 minute. If you switch from working 1 shift/day to 2 to meet the same demand, you double the takt time to 2 minutes.
This is why it is calculated as follows:
It has a numerator and a denominator, and both matter. They are obviously calculated for the same time period.
Mar 13 2012
How to eliminate “Muri,” or overburdening
“Muri, Muda, Mura” is often mentioned in the Japanese manufacturing literature as a trio of evils to avoid. Of the three, Muda gets the most attention. Usually translated as waste, it designates everything we do in a factory that is unnecessary. For a change, let us focus on Muri.
Muri, in everyday Japanese, means impossible, with the nuance of unreasonable or unsustainable. A person working exceptionally hard is said to be doing Muri. Other words are used to say that something would violate the laws of physics, or that it is socially improper or inopportune. When there is Muri in your process, it means that you are asking people to work too hard, which results in defects, burnout, repetitive stress injuries, or even accidents. Conversely, removing Muri means making your process humanly sustainable, so that is can be executed as well at the end of a shift as at the beginning, by a 50-year-old or a 20-year-old, a man or a woman, 5 or 7 feet tall.
It cannot be repeated often enough that Lean is not about making people work harder but instead, in the tradition of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, in making the work easier to do. When you observe a truly Lean plant, you do not see operators hurrying. Instead, you see them working steadily, at a sustainable pace, at jobs that are carefully choreographed for effectiveness and efficiency. A key example of Muri elimination is the raku-raku seat shown above. It is a device introduced at Toyota in the 1990s and now adopted by many car makers to remove the need for operators to crawl into car bodies in order perform assembly tasks inside.
There are many tools to remove Muri. You can easily notice that an operator is overburdened by direct observation in the shop. A more systematic approach is to use Toyota’s TVAL to rate jobs based on the weight operators have to carry and how long they have to carry it. TVAL establishes an equivalence between combinations, so that, for example, carrying 4 lbs for 200 seconds is equivalent in terms of fatigue impact to carrying 10 lbs for 4 seconds. You then focus on the jobs with highest TVAL ratings and improve these jobs to reduce it.
Once you know which job to focus on, you record it on video and review it with the operator to identify ways to make it easier or to offload parts of it to others with lighter burdens. If the job involves interactions between operators and machines, you analyze with with a work combination chart to improve task sequencing and identify tasks within the job that need better tooling or a better work station layout.
Jan 13 2012
Lean pharmaceutical plant design
Via Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
Global facility engineering company M+W Group and GE Healthcare announced last month a partnership to bring biopharma manufacturing capability to developing countries. The idea is to join M+W’s Read more…
Via www.fiercepharmamanufacturing.com
Nov 21 2011
Chaku-Chaku lines covered in the Manila Times today — When in the US press?
Via Scoop.it – Cellular manufacturing
Chaku-chaku lines are the second generation of cells, allowing a single operator to run15 or even 20 machines. The key concept is for all the machines to have automatic unloading, so that the operator focuses on validating each step through go/no-go gauges and loading the workpiece into the next machine. It’s a concept that deserves more attention than it has received so far outside of Japan.
Via www.manilatimes.net
Nov 22 2012
Finding local roots for Lean – Everywhere
Lean is from Japan, and even more specifically from one Japanese company. Outside of Japan, however, the foreign origin of the concepts impedes their acceptance. In every country where I’ve been active, I have found the ability to link Lean to local founders a critical advantage. The people whose support you need would like to think that Lean was essentially “invented here,” and that foreigners at best added minor details. Identifying local ancestors in a country’s intellectual tradition takes some research, and then you may need to err on the side of giving more credit than is due.
In the US, using the word “Lean” rather than TPS is already a means of making it less foreign, and it is not difficult to paint Lean as a continuation of US developments from the 19th and 20th century, ranging from interchangeable parts technology to TWI. Ford’s system is a direct ancestor to Lean, as acknowledged by Toyota. On this basis, the American literature on Lean has gradually been drifting towards attributing Lean to Henry Ford. Fact checkers disagree, but it makes many Americans feel better.
Elsewhere, it is not as obvious to find a filiation. Following are a few examples of what I found:
Britain, as the Olympic opening ceremonies reminded us, was home to the industrial revolution. In terms of worldwide share of market for manufactured goods, however, Britain peaked about 1870, and the thinkers that come to mind about British manufacturing are economists like Adam Smith or David Ricardo, whose theories were based on observations of early manufacturing practices, but whose contributions were not on the specifics of plant design or operations. They are too remote to be linked in any way to Lean.
For France, I have asked everybody I know there for nominations but have yet to receive any. The French have invented many products and processes, but I have not been able to identify French pioneers in production systems who could provide a link to Lean. And there are many other countries where the search may be fruitless.
Even though people in China and India have been making things for thousands of years,I don’t know any names of local forerunners of Lean in these countries. China has only emerged as a world-class manufacturing power in the last few decades and I have, unfortunately, never been to India. There are many other countries on which I don’t have this kind of information, and nominations are welcome.
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By Michel Baudin • Management • 6 • Tags: Ford, Gastev, Henry Ford, industrial engineering, Lean, Lean implementation, TWI