Oct 5 2012
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
“…Something that most people would look at clearly as a manufacturing thing, setup reduction, turns out that it’s going to give me lower cost and better customer service, two very strategic things…”
See on business901.com
Oct 2 2012
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
Interview on Tim McMahon’s A Lean Journey.
See on www.aleanjourney.com
Sep 23 2012
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
In his 1951 novel Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut describes team building games that were eerily similar to the ones in this article. This approach has therefore been around US corporations for at least 60 years. But does it work?
We know that simulation games are effective as a Lean training tool, for example, but they are direct metaphors for the production work the participants do. The idea that generic games, unrelated to work, would be effective at developing teamwork is anything but obvious.
A promoter of this approach is quoted in the article as citing “research from MIT,” which I couldn’t find on Google. Experimental proof would require two groups of similar teams engaged in similar projects, with one group using these exercises and the other not. Then it would compare their performance on work projects.
We are also supposed to show respect for people. How respectful is it to an employee’s expertise to put him or her through this kind of experience? With the same time and money, you could send a machinist to a seminar on new cutting tools, with the duty to report on learnings to colleagues, or you could send a warehouse manager to learn about, say, RFID.
See on www.ame.org
Sep 19 2012
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
The answer may determine the success of your lean implementation. If it is ‘yes,’ what are you prepared to do?
See on www.industryweek.com
Sep 18 2012
Bodo Wiegand heads the Lean Management Institute, which is the German affiliate of the Lean Enterprise Institute. The following is a translation from German of a large excerpt from his September, 2012 newsletter, Wiegand’s Watch:
Lately I was again guided through a company that is Lean – according to its manager. How could I argue with him? After the obligatory tour he was quite euphoric when he asked me: “It’s Lean, right? What do we still need to do? ”
Well, what do you tell someone who had a super-neat and great looking production line? 5S at its best, so to speak. But he had led me from front to back rather than back to front through the production process. And he was also proud of his warehouse, which he described as a very Lean supermarket. Then he showed the wonderfully marked transportation aisles, which turned out as freeways for forklifts. Everything was transported out of the supermarket at maximum speed.
I asked him to take us to a place where you could see the whole production. Painstakingly, we then climbed onto a platform created earlier for the crane operator. Well, there we stood and took a look at his beautifully tidy company. Also from there you could see how much effort and energy was put into the 5S action, executed almost to perfection.
But then from the air we could see things that weren’t running so well. After 10 minutes with this a bird’s eye view, he still hadn’t noticed anything. So I asked him to put the forklifts on break for one hour. Soon he saw what happened. Some areas had used up their supplies in 20 minutes, while others were still not through with their stock after one hour.
The penny dropped. “Gee, Mr. Wiegand, it’s clear that not everything is matched.”
“Yes,” I said, “there is no flow in your production.”
The forklift traffic masked everything and made the production appear clean. No crates stood around, everything was in the supermarket. It balanced everything and covered the essentials. So, let’s not be fooled by operations without materials or nice tidy 5S islands of bliss. Believe nothing, without having seen and walked the value stream. Only then will you learn what is really going on.Afterward, we discussed flow kaizen intensively. At the end, he admitted that he wanted to test me, and that he really just wanted to have the seal of approval as and audited Lean company. But the manager could not have known that I don’t like forklifts.
Oct 11 2012
To journalists: if you write about Lean, check your facts!
An otherwise informative newspaper story about a company’s Lean approach in a local newspaper contains the following paragraph:
This is a remarkable paragraph. Other than saying that Kaizen is Japanese, every statement in it is inaccurate. Let us review them one by one:
The rest of the article is actually interesting, informative, and credible about the specifics of the case. It didn’t need a paragraph of background. If, as a journalist, you write about a case of Lean implementation, don’t write such a paragraph without checking the facts.
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By Michel Baudin • Press clippings • 2 • Tags: Deming, Kaizen, Lean