Lean manufacturing

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

Feb 28 2013

2nd Tour of Toyota in San Antonio, Texas | Mark Graban

Toyota Tundra powertrain assembly in San Antonio, TX
Toyota Tundra powertrain assembly in San Antonio, TX

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Blog post at Lean Blog :

“…The plant has performance measures, safety crosses, Kaizen improvements, training schedules, team pictures, and all sorts of information posted everywhere. Our tour guide said, “We love visual management here” — and that includes information sharing.  The boards were all labeled “FMDS”  – or “Floor Management Development System” (see a quick description of it here from a book). That label seems to illustrate Toyota’s focus on developing people… interesting thought that what some people might call “metrics boards” aren’t just for managing and improving company performance, but they’re also for improving people….”

See on www.leanblog.org

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Feb 27 2013

Kaizen management in Central Asia | Times of Central Asia

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BISHKEK, February 26 (TCA) — The market economy requires new competitive advantages to develop companies and retain leadership in a particular industry. Part of the solution is to attract investments and loans, but it still does not guarantee success and stable profits. International donors have volunteered to help Central Asian businessmen, offering to introduce the concept of Japanese management called Kaizen. The author of the concept of doing business which excludes loss is Masaaki Imai, and it is based on the idea of “continuous improvement”.

“The principles of lean production are becoming fundamental in some enterprises in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan,” said Anatoly Maslov, an expert…

Michel Baudin‘s insight:

News about Lean fron Kyrgyzstan! The author can’t tell the difference between Lean, Kaizen, and ISO 9001, but this kind of confusion also occurs outside of Central Asia.

Most interesting, as usual, are the examples of companies achieving performance improvements so spectacular that they make you wonder about the starting point.

See on www.timesca.com

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Feb 25 2013

3 reasons why you need a [your-company] Production System

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Do you need a company-specific Production System (XPS) to boost your operational improvement? Yes you do. Here are three reasons…

 

Michel Baudin‘s insight:

I agree with  Torbjørn Netland’s post, with one caveat. In any XPS, effectiveness should always trump standardization. Many XPS’s turn into premature standardization efforts that stifle creativity in plants and turn the implementation effort into an exercise in formal compliance.

In a company with many plants worldwide, making different products for different markets by different processes, local teams need to be allowed to find their own solutions. What the XPS must not allow them to do is to keep these solutions to themselves. Instead, it must organize the sharing of knowledge and skills across sites by such means as periodic technical conference hosted in turn by each plant and a private collaboration web site with wikis and forums.

See on better-operations.com

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Feb 13 2013

Decoding Jeff Immelt and GE’s New Act: U.S. Manufacturer – Forbes

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“Decoding Jeff Immelt and GE’s New Act: US Manufacturer: Can GE reinvent itself as a Agile manufacturer with a radical capacity to innovate? Is manufacturing back? At the very least, manufacturing is back in fashion, judging from the high profile conference last Thursday at the Newseum in downtown Washington DC. Amid panoramic views of the historic monuments and buildings of the Capitol, a bevy of high profile speakers, including Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer, Chairman and CEO of General Electric [GE] Jeff Immelt,…”

Michel Baudin‘s insight:

A sarcastic, iconoclastic take on GE’s top management and its strategy, particularly on Manufacturing and Lean, and a spirited debate in the comments that follow. And not a word about Six Sigma.

See on www.forbes.com

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Feb 11 2013

Lean Manufacturing at Thomson Reuters Eagan Manufacturing, Distribution & Engineering Plant

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Michel Baudin‘s insight:

Employees talk about “Lean Manufacturing,” and what it means to them. They talk about continuous improvement, and participating in events, but what do they have to show in terms of changes made to operations? What they discuss most is 5S, and second to that is standard work. The say nothing of setup time reductions, improvements in flow, pull systems, mistake-proofing, or equipment modifications.

No numbers are given about achievements. The customers find the plant appealing, which is good marketing, They say they have reduced costs and improved quality, but they don’t say how much for either. The only number quoted is that an employee was able to cut his lawn mowing time at home from 3 hours to 2 by better planning his mowing route, using what he had learned at work.

See on www.youtube.com

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Feb 9 2013

RICKS versus 5S

In the TPS Principles and Practices discussion group on LinkedIn, Frederick Stimson Harriman started a thread about why it is silly to translate 5S into English.

I think the main problem with the commonly used translation of 5S is that it is wrong and misleading. I don’t think it is silly to translate if you can get the meaning right. What is truly silly and hopeless is trying to find 5 English words with the right meaning and starting with “S.”

Back when 5S was only 4S, I heard the following in the UK: “Remove, Identify, Clean, and Keep clean” or R.I.C.K., and I thought it was both reasonably accurate and mnemonic.

For the fifth “S,” Shitsuke, I see it as the state you achieve when you have done the first four S’s long enough for the activities to become second-nature. If telling your kid every day to brush his teeth is Seiketsu, what you have accomplished when he does it on his own without prompting is Shitsuke. So I would translate Shitsuke by “Second-nature,” which happens to start with S.

With that, we could have R.I.C.K.S. as an improved translation. What do you think?

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