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:
“The heart of lean is kaizen, a Japanese term. ‘Kai’ means to take apart, and ‘zen’ a striving toward perfection. Kaizen is a process in which a team of employees is brought together to focus on a problem that needs solving or a process that needs improving. Improvement is continual, and that’s the striving for perfection. Edward Deming, a statistician from the U.S., brought the idea to Japan after WW II when he struggled to get American manufacturers to listen to his ideas. Lean and kaizen principles were widely adopted by Japanese manufacturers and helped Japan rebuild after the war.”
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 heart of lean is kaizen,..” Well, not really. It’s only part of it. You can’t implement Lean with just Kaizen, and you can practice Kaizen without being Lean.
- “‘Kai’ means to take apart,…” Not in my copy of Nelson’s Japanese dictionary! ‘Kai’ means change, renew, mend, not “take apart.”
- “…and ‘zen’ a striving toward perfection.” In the same dictionary, Zen means good, goodness, right, virtue, not “striving” for anything, let alone “perfection.”
- “Kaizen is a process in which a team of employees is brought together to focus on a problem…” What about Kaizens done by individuals through a suggestion system?
- “Edward Deming, a statistician from the U.S., brought the idea to Japan after WW II…” It’s W. Edwards Deming, and what he brought to Japan was not Kaizen but statistical quality control.
- “Lean and kaizen principles were widely adopted by Japanese manufacturers and helped Japan rebuild after the war.” Assumes Lean and Kaizen existed before Japan’s post-war reconstruction.
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.
Oct 15 2012
Lean in a press shop
Andrew Turner, Managing Director at Ramsay Engineering, in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa posted the following question on The Lean Edge on 9/22/2012:
To date, he has received responses from the following authors:
Of these, Art Byrne’s is the most specific and actionable. None of them, however, address the issue of skills development. At the outset, neither the press operators nor their managers can be expected to have a working knowledge of Lean or how to implement it. Therefore, feasibility by the organization you have is key in your initial choice of projects.
This is why, in shops where people work with machines, the first pilot projects are so often about SMED. This includes not only press shops but machine shops, injection molding shops and diecasting shops, with different technical specifics. On press operations, see Chapter 7 of Sekine & Arai’s Kaizen for Quick Changeover. Keeping in mind the skills development goal, you don’t start with your largest machine that currently takes 8 hours to set up, but with a small one that takes 30 minutes and that you can take down to 4 minutes in 2 months. This kind of success fires up your teams to take on tougher challenges.
After a successful pilot, when you want to apply SMED as appropriate in the entire shop, you need to analyze your activity to establish where it is most useful and easily achievable, and you need to realize the engineering implications. You usually cannot achieve SMED on presses with organization and standard work only; you also need to modify the machines, standardize the dies, and improve the flow of dies to and from the machines, including die maintenance, storage and retrieval. You have to know what and how long it takes to do it. This is not the sort of goals you reach with a few Kaizen events.
Peter Handlinger is the only responder to mention the issues of high- versus low-volume items, but only in the context of setting up daily schedules. I prefer to refer to this as demand analysis, and do it upfront, far upstream from production scheduling, with the objective of breaking down the output of your press shop into the following:
You use this breakdown to drive changes in the layout of your shop. In particular, it tells you which presses or press lines you can integrate with an assembly line, as Art Byrne recommends. Then you apply different approaches to production control for the different types of lines.
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By Michel Baudin • Technology 0 • Tags: Lean, Lean implementation, Lean manufacturing, Manufacturing engineering, Press shop