Lean manufacturing

The pursuit of concurrent improvement in all dimensions of manufacturing performance through projects involving both the production floor and support services.

Mar 16 2013

Introduction to Lean – 2013 Michel Baudin

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Introduction to Lean Manufacturing by the takt times group’s Michel Baudin

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Mar 14 2013

Lean and the corporate culture | LinkedIn

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LinkedIn’s Lean groups currently host several discussions about the cultural dimension of change in organizations in general, and Lean implementation in particular. This topic attracts many comments,

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Mar 12 2013

The baton-touch approach

The following question came this morning from Diogo Cardoso:

What is baton-touch in terms of product oriented manufacturing systems? I have made a deep research about this on Science Direct and other resources but I can find nothing more than an inconclusive paragraph.

Your researched the wrong sources. You could have found your answer in Working with Machines, pp. 140-142. Baton-touch is one of three approaches used to design operator jobs in cells, the other two being the caravan/rabbit-chase and bucket-brigades. The key differences are as follows:

  • In the baton-touch method, each operator performs a fixed subset of the cell’s operations, organized in a fixed sequence. It is commonly used in cells requiring three or more operators making a narrow range of products with similar work content.

    The baton-touch
    The baton-touch
  • In the caravan or rabbit-chase method, the operators follow each other through the entire sequence of operations in the cell. It requires each operator to be skilled in all the operations of the cell, and works well with up to two operators but breaks down with three or more operators, as they queue behind the slowest member of the team.

    The caravan/rabbit chase
    The caravan/rabbit chase
  • In the bucket-brigade method, the operators are in sequence, but the scope of each operator’s tasks varies. When the last operator finishes a unit, he or she takes over the next unit from the preceding operator, who in turn takes over from his or her predecessor, and so on, until the first operator, who starts the next unit. Bucket-brigades are used with a broad mix of custom or configurable products, and work when the faster operators are always downstream from the slower ones. For details, see John Bartholdi’s article on bucket brigades.

    Bucket brigades
    Bucket brigades

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Mar 6 2013

Wanna Sabotage Your Lean Implementation Effort? Try This | Lonnie Wilson | IndustryWeek

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Most facilities that fail in a lean implementation have failed to create stable process flow. And by stable I mean statistically stable — a process that is predictable. (Wanna Sabotage Your #Lean Implementation Effort?

Michel Baudin‘s insight:

The way I read Lonnie’s article, he is saying that neglect of the engineering dimension of Lean manufacturing is the primary cause of implementation failure. I agree. It is a long article, but worth reading.

See on www.industryweek.com

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Mar 1 2013

Production Pacing | Jeffrey Liker

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Is production pacing oppressive or can it promote joy? Dr. Jeffrey Liker examines this lean manufacturing principle through two stories from a lean journey.

See on www.manufacturingpulse.com

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Mar 1 2013

Stop the Music! | Bill Waddell

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Harley-Davidson has announced a no music in the factory rule – period – no exceptions – no ifs, ands or buts.

“Hundreds of Harley-Davidson employees learned through a memo last week that their radios and music being piped onto the factory floor would be kaput by Wednesday — part of a continuous effort to improve safety.”

“‘It’s a distraction,’ said Maripat Blankenheim, director of external communications for Harley. ‘It’s really important for people – no matter what they do – to be focused on what they do.’”[…]

Behavior policies for working adults & the lean principle of treating people with respect are polar opposites: http://t.co/jqAk0y8cdQ

Michel Baudin‘s insight:

Bill Waddell takes exception to a policy recently issued by Harley Davidson to stop piping music onto the factory floor. According to him, such policies are demeaning. I can’t follow him there, for the following reasons:

  1. In my book, respect for people includes allowing each person to work without being bothered by somebody else’s music. If you love Country, working all day to Wagner operas would be torture, and vice versa. If you recall Mars Attacks, humankind is saved by the discovery that yodeling makes Martians’ heads explode.
  2. Sound, on a manufacturing shop floor is used for communications. In some factories, specific tunes are used to mark the start and end of shifts and breaks, and to signal alarms coming from different areas. Piping music for entertainment through the public address system interferes with these messages.
  3. If you allow distractions at work, where does it stop? I once visited a car assembly plant in the US, where I saw an operator watch Oprah on TV while screwing on a dome light, and immediately resolved never to buy a car made in that plant. Does music diminish performance? Software engineering guru Tom DeMarco described an experiment where multiple computer programmers were given the same assignment in two rooms, one with music and the other one without. The assignment was to write a program to execute a given series of calculations, which ended up always coming out to zero. Half the programmers in the quiet room noticed it and wrote a program that just printed “0.” None of the programmers in the music room did, and all of them implemented the given series of instructions to calculate 0.
  4. Music plays different roles in different circumstances. When you are driving 100 miles alone on Highway 35 from Minneapolis to Albert Lea, the radio can save your life by keeping you awake. If you need music to stay awake on a production shop floor, it means that your job has been badly designed.

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