Lean

Jan 30 2015

Lean six sigma the oxymoron | Troy Taylor | LinkedIn

“In the beginning Toyota created TPS, then came Motorola in 1986 with their six sigma process. In 1988 John Krafcik coined the term Lean in his paper entitled“Triumph of the Lean production system” which was quickly popularised by Womack, Roos and Jones in 1991 with the publication of their book “The machine that changed the world”. Then in 2002 Michael George and Robert Lawrence junior published their book entitled “Lean Six Sigma: Combining Six Sigma with Lean Speed”.

Ever since this point organisations have been attempting to mesh the 2 methodologies into one business improvement technique and failing.”

Source: www.linkedin.com

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

Troy speaks from experience. Mine is similar, but I am not as negative on Six Sigma as he is. I think of Six Sigma as an approach that is useful within a range of applicability and is limited in scope.

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Jan 18 2015

Does Historical Accuracy Matter?

Cuckoo clock from the Black Forest

The most famous line in The Third Man is Orson Welles’s addition to the script:

“In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

65 years later, Paul Krugman opened his editorial in today’s New York Times with:

“Ah, Switzerland, famed for cuckoo clocks…”

With all due respect to Paul Krugman, I believe this fame came from the movie, because cuckoo clocks are not from Switzerland but from the Black Forest region of Germany.

Continue reading…

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Nov 27 2014

Setup Reduction Methodology | Alejandro Sibaja

“We may think, based in all the information about Lean Manufacturing, that many tools and methods are well understood, unfortunately on real live there is many misunderstanding about them, that’s why I decided to write this article, for one of the most popular and known tool, SMED.”

Source: alexsibaja.blogspot.mx

 

 

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

It’s good to see that not everyone has forgotten SMED or is taking it for granted. When you bring it up with manufacturing managers nowadays, they often respond with “Oh yeah, we had some consultants show us how to do this three years ago.”

“And how long do you take to set up this machine today?”

“I am not sure. Maybe 90 minutes…”

They think SMED is yesterday’s news, but they are not doing it, and they are often confused about its purpose. They think it is to increase machine utilization, as opposed to flexibillity.

Sibaja’s article is a valuable introduction to the subject. I would have called it “Setup Time Reduction” rather than “Setup Reduction,” which might imply that you are making fewer setups, or spending less time on setups overall. It’s not what SMED lets you do. Instead, your total setup time budget remains the same, but you are using it to make more setups and produce smaller lots of more different products.

I would also have put more emphasis on the use of video recordings in analyzing setup processes. You don’t just show up on the shop floor with a camera; instead, you have to prepare the ground carefully, secure the consent of the participants upfront, and know how to use the camera to capture the relevant details.

Sibaja’s last sentence is about using the information “in your next Kaizen Event,” which implies that Kaizen events are an appropriate method to manage SMED projects. It is not my experience. You might kick start a SMED project with a Kaizen Event, but not to finish it. Often, to achieve quick setups, you have to make changes to the machine and the tooling that require patient work over time. Standardizing the dimensions of 300 dies, for example, may take a year of incremental progress.

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Nov 10 2014

Change your production leveling strategy to achieve flow | Ian Glenday | Planet Lean

“…What I came to call Repetitive and Flexible Supply (RFS) is based on the idea of manufacturing the largest products in the same sequence at the same time every week. To many people, this sounds ridiculous and stupid at first.

My analysis consistently showed that, typically, 6% of a company’s products represent 50% of the volume it produces.

I started to see this happen in every factory, hospital, or office I went to. And that’s when it hit me – why not simply focus on stabilizing the plan for that 6% of the products?…”

Source: planet-lean.com

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

Ian Glenday’s idea of RFS is fine, but not quite as original as presented in the article. Making it easy to do what you do the most often is the motivation behind the Product-Quantity (P-Q) analysis I learned in Japan in the 1980s.

To use the terminology introduced  in the UK by Lucas Industries about that time, it breaks the product mix into Runners, Repeaters, and Strangers. You make each Runner is an dedicated production line, because it has a volume that justifies it.

Then you group Repeaters in families and make them in flexible lines, and you keep a residual job-shop to make the Strangers — the long tail of your demand — products in large numbers but with low and sporadic demand.

This method is described, as prior work, in Lean Assembly as a foundation for assembly line design, and in Lean Logistics for warehouse/supermarket design and for production scheduling, in particular heijunka.

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Oct 24 2014

Lean-Lite versus Lean-Deep: Interview with Michel Baudin | Pete Abilla | Shmula.com

Lean-Lite versus Lean-Deep: Interview with Michel Baudin where he helps us better understand superficial versus deep lean.

Source: www.shmula.com

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Oct 21 2014

Is Lean A Science Based Profession or Tool Based Craft | Steve Spear | LinkedIn Pulse

“Is lean a bona fide management science based profession or a tool based craft? I’ll suggest that current practice and teaching is more the latter than the former and because of that, the influence of lean is far inferior to its potential.”

Source: www.linkedin.com

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

Within Manufacturing, management, engineering, and even consulting are professions. “Lean” per se is not a profession, but a loosely defined body of knowledge that all manufacturing professionals should possess to some extent.

Like Spear, we all tend to think of mechanical engineering as an application of Newtonian mechanics. In reality, however, it is not as if the field had developed from scratch based on Newton’s theories.

People had been making mechanical devices long before, and mechanical engineering as we know it actually came from the grafting of Newtonian mechanics onto an existing body of craft-based, empirical know-how.

As Takahiro Fujimoto pointed out, the Toyota Production System (TPS) was never designed from first principles but instead emerged from the point solutions and countermeasures Toyota employees came up with to overcome a succession of crises in the development of the company. What is remarkable is that they did coalesce into a system.

Lean is supposed to be a generalization of TPS to contexts other than car manufacturing at Toyota. The challenge of developing Lean is to reverse engineer principles from tools.

Over the past 35 years, many Japanese publications have described TPS, with authors like Taiichi Ohno, Shigeo Shingo, Yasuhiro Monden, Kenichi Sekine, Takahiro Fujimoto or Mikiharu Aoki…

These publications have made many of the tools of TPS accessible to anyone willing to study them. They have been less effective, however, at showing how the tools work together as a system, and even less at spelling out underlying principles. It is something I have attempted in my books.

Little of the content of TPS has made its way into Lean, as promoted and practiced in the US and Europe, where it boils down to drawing Value-Stream Maps and running Kaizen events that have little to do with TPS.

TPS still needs to be studied, and its essence abstracted into a theory that is neither false nor trivial and provides principles that can be practically deployed as needed in new industries. I agree with Spear that there is great value in such a theory, but it has to exist before we can use it.

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