Lean

Sep 25 2013

The Term “Lean Production” is 25 Years Old – Some Thoughts on the Original John Krafcik Article | Mark Graban

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Krafcik article front page“The term “lean production” arguably was first used in a MIT Sloan Management Review article by John Krafcik that was published 25 years ago this fall (Fall 1988), titled “Triumph of the Lean Production System.” In the 1980s, Krafcik, who worked with The Lean Enterprise Institute’s Jim Womack in the MIT International Motor Vehicle Program is now president and CEO of Hyundai North America.”

Michel Baudin‘s insight:

Mark Graban’s throughts on the article that first used the term “Lean.”

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Sep 20 2013

The top ten lean manufacturers | Manufacturing Digital

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From the automotive philosophers of Toyota to the makers of Kleenex tissues, Lean manufacturing principles have been exemplified by some of the world’s top companies. Here is a list of some of the best practitioners in the …

Michel Baudin‘s insight:

Top ten by what criteria? What is the measure of leanness on which these companies outperform everybody else? The article doesn’t say. Most “top ten” lists don’t either, but you want to see who is on them anyway. If you know the inner workings of some of these companies, you may be surprised to find them there. You may also wonder what the actions described in the paragraph about Nike have to do with Lean.

See on www.manufacturingdigital.com

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Sep 18 2013

The Legacy of Eiji Toyoda | Businessweek

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Washington Post
The Legacy of Eiji Toyoda
Businessweek
He transformed Toyota into a global powerhouse with management and manufacturing processes that transcended the auto industry.

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Karakuri doll serving tea

Sep 17 2013

What is Karakuri Kaizen?

Google “Karakuri Kaizen,” and you see a small number of Youtube videos from Japan, Thailand, Italy, and Hong Kong showcasing materials handling devices that rely on gravity, levers, cams and inertia to move bins in elaborate ways, transfer parts between machines, or deliver a controlled number of small parts to an operator’s hand.

Here is one from Japan’s JMAC with multiple examples:

Such devices have long been used as part of TPS and Lean, but now we have a generic name for them. The principles of Karakuri Kaizen given at the end of this video are as follows:

  1. Don’t use the human hand. Move objects automatically.
  2. Don’t spend money.
  3. Use the force of your equipment.
  4. Build it with the wisdom and creativity of the people of the shop floor.
  5. For safety,  don’t just rely on paying attention but build a device that stops automatically.

While “Karakuri Kaizen” is an alliteration that rolls of the tongue almost as easily as “cash for clunkers” or “toys for tots,” you may still wonder where “Karakuri” comes from and what it means. Until “Karakuri Kaizen,” I had never heard it stand-alone but always as part of “Karakuri Ningyo,” or Karakuri Dolls, which are wind-up automata with wooden gears and levers developed at toys in 18th-century Japan. The best known are tea-serving dolls, like the one in the featured image.

As Karakuri dolls are a reminder of ancient ingenuity, the term has a positive connotation in Japan. I once used a picture of one in a magazine ad for US-made automation software, to connect the product with the local culture. But the term, obviously, means nothing to anybody who is not Japanese.

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Sep 13 2013

A defense of old-fashioned WIP accumulation | Manufacturing Digital

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“Toyota pioneered modern lean manufacturing and created a highly efficient and reliable manufacturing system that the rest of the world sought to adopt with huge variations in success. A main thrust of Lean philosophy is to closely examine manufacturing processes, find unnecessary steps and eliminate them. The same philosophy suggests that we should only allow room for value adding steps – in terms of value perceived by the customer – as this drives up efficiency and enables us to manufacture simpler and faster. It is said that accumulating work-in-progress through the process ties-up resources and can obscure problems and is therefore deemed to not add value, so conventional Lean thinking is to eliminate this wasteful step.With this thinking comes a generally held view that Lean manufacturing and Accumulation cannot coexist…”

 

Michel Baudin‘s insight:

The gist of this article is that you should hold just enough WIP to meet your production requirements with the changeover times you currently have and protect your bottlenecks against malfunction in other resources. So far, this is stating the obvious, and a visit to a Toyota plant or even dealership is enough to see that the Toyota system is not one with zero inventory. You see shelves of stampings, bins of bolts, and trees of wire harnesses. The Kanban system involves some inventory, and, in fact, the only approach that doesn’t is just-in-sequence. What is considered waste is not all inventory, but unnecessary inventory, accumulated for no valid reason anyone can explain.

The article, however, goes further and asserts that it is cheaper to accumulate WIP than to expose and solve the problems that make it necessary, which is a return to the mass-production thinking that was prevalent in pre-Lean operations management.

What the Lean successes of the past decades have shown is (1) that the overall costs of WIP were understated and (2) that the ingenuity of production people and engineer was underestimated. You operate today and next week with the resources that you have, dysfunctional as they may be, and you hold WIP as needed to sustain production. As you do this, however, as an organization, you keep working at solving your problems so that you need less and less WIP month by month and quarter by quarter. This perspective is missing from the article.

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Sep 6 2013

SKU Reduction – Reverting to 1913 Thinking | Bill Waddell

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‘The customer can have any color they want, so long as it is black – and white in the middle.’  That seems to be the latest mantra at a growing number of companies as they wrestle with the philosophies of lean and the lack of responsiveness in…”

 

Michel Baudin‘s insight:

Bill seems to exclude the possibility that a product mix could be trimmed without reducing customer satisfaction, but isn’t that exactly what Steve Jobs did when he returned to Apple in 1997? Microsoft has a confusing array of product “editions” which actually make it difficult to figure out what  will meet your needs. To this day, Apple’s product lineup is comparatively simple.

Furthermore, “SKU” covers parts as well as products, and all companies, including Toyota, have suffered from an unnecessary proliferation of parts, simply because software makes it often easier to design a new part than to reuse an existing one.

According to Bill, also: “That Henry Ford pioneered lean in the modern era is not up for debate.” In fact, the term Mass Production was coined specifically to describe what came out of Ford. When discussing Lean, the proper focus is on the ways it differs from Mass Production, not the many things it has in common with it, because they are not what makes it work better.

See on www.idatix.com

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