Jun 18 2012
Art Smalley: Standardized Confusion » The Lean Edge
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
Another substantive contribution from Art Smalley, this time about standards.
See on theleanedge.org
Jun 18 2012
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
Another substantive contribution from Art Smalley, this time about standards.
See on theleanedge.org
By Michel Baudin • Blog clippings • 0 • Tags: Manufacturing engineering, Standards, Toyota, Toyota Production System, TPS
Apr 27 2012
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
This guest post on Mark Graban’s blog treats an important but often neglected subject. It forgets, however, what I see as the number one problem with tool cribs: operators leaving their work stations to fetch tools. In some machine shops, you see a line of machinists waiting in line at the tool crib while machines and work pieces stand idle.
Instead, in a Lean shop, the tool crib sets up milk runs to pick up worn tools and deliver fresh ones. The tool crib is a support organization with the purpose of supporting production, not disrupting it.
See on www.leanblog.org
By Michel Baudin • Blog clippings • 0 • Tags: Lean manufacturing, Manufacturing engineering
Apr 18 2012
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
This article quotes Paul Myerson as saying that manufacturers preferred to “lean out within their four walls before working heavily with customers and suppliers.”
While I have heard this from many sources, I do not believe it is true. Having worked both within the four walls of plants and on their supply chains, I have repeatedly seen manufacturing managers conclude that their manufacturing needed no improvement, and that all the problems were with suppliers.
Before Paul Myerson, I also wrote a book on Lean Logistics. In 2005, it was the first on this subject. But I also wrote books on Lean Assembly (2002) and Working with Machines (2007), both of which deal with what happens “within the four walls.” Guess what? Lean Logistics sells more copies than the other two combined, and I don’t think it is a better book. To me, it just means that its subject is getting more attention.
Actually, it is getting a disproportionate amount of attention, and too early. Manufacturers should focus on what happens within their walls first, and fix it. The vast majority, including many claiming to be Lean, have not. Until they do, they have no credibility with their suppliers and no business telling them how to improve.
See on www.industryweek.com
By Michel Baudin • Press clippings • 71 • Tags: Lean assembly, Lean manufacturing, Logistics, Manufacturing engineering, Supply Chain Management
Mar 13 2012
“Muri, Muda, Mura” is often mentioned in the Japanese manufacturing literature as a trio of evils to avoid. Of the three, Muda gets the most attention. Usually translated as waste, it designates everything we do in a factory that is unnecessary. For a change, let us focus on Muri.
Muri, in everyday Japanese, means impossible, with the nuance of unreasonable or unsustainable. A person working exceptionally hard is said to be doing Muri. Other words are used to say that something would violate the laws of physics, or that it is socially improper or inopportune. When there is Muri in your process, it means that you are asking people to work too hard, which results in defects, burnout, repetitive stress injuries, or even accidents. Conversely, removing Muri means making your process humanly sustainable, so that is can be executed as well at the end of a shift as at the beginning, by a 50-year-old or a 20-year-old, a man or a woman, 5 or 7 feet tall.
It cannot be repeated often enough that Lean is not about making people work harder but instead, in the tradition of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, in making the work easier to do. When you observe a truly Lean plant, you do not see operators hurrying. Instead, you see them working steadily, at a sustainable pace, at jobs that are carefully choreographed for effectiveness and efficiency. A key example of Muri elimination is the raku-raku seat shown above. It is a device introduced at Toyota in the 1990s and now adopted by many car makers to remove the need for operators to crawl into car bodies in order perform assembly tasks inside.
There are many tools to remove Muri. You can easily notice that an operator is overburdened by direct observation in the shop. A more systematic approach is to use Toyota’s TVAL to rate jobs based on the weight operators have to carry and how long they have to carry it. TVAL establishes an equivalence between combinations, so that, for example, carrying 4 lbs for 200 seconds is equivalent in terms of fatigue impact to carrying 10 lbs for 4 seconds. You then focus on the jobs with highest TVAL ratings and improve these jobs to reduce it.
Once you know which job to focus on, you record it on video and review it with the operator to identify ways to make it easier or to offload parts of it to others with lighter burdens. If the job involves interactions between operators and machines, you analyze with with a work combination chart to improve task sequencing and identify tasks within the job that need better tooling or a better work station layout.
By Michel Baudin • Technology • 6 • Tags: industrial engineering, Lean, Lean manufacturing, Manufacturing engineering
Jul 5 2012
Yet another (wrong) definition of takt time
This is from a blog post published today that claims to clarify what a takt time is:
Writing a definition for a thing or an idea is tricky. Following Aristotle, I would say that you have done a good job if you have described what kind of a thing it is and how it differs from other things of the same kind, using terms your reader already understands.
In this definition, takt time is described as a “rate of time.” If there were such a thing as a rate of time, in what units would it be expressed? In production, a rate is expressed, for example, in pieces per hour; a time, in minutes or seconds. Takt Time, as its name suggests is a time, not a rate, and certainly not a rate of time, whatever that may be.
This definition then relates takt time exclusively to “a product or service [..] being purchased,” and gives the example of a Nissan being bought every minute in the world, suggesting that 1 minute is the takt time of a Nissan. Incidentally, if this figure were true, Nissan would sell about 500,000 cars/year, versus the 4 million it actually sells.
Takt time, as we use it in manufacturing and industrial engineering, is in fact not a parameter associated with just a product but with a production line making this product. Given the demand that is given to it and the amount of time that it actually works, the takt time of this production line for this product is the time that must elapse between two consecutive unit completions.
If a line is expected to produce 400 units of a product in a 400-minute shift, then, if you stand by the last station of the line, you will see one unit come out every minute, meaning that its takt time is 1 minute. If you switch from working 1 shift/day to 2 to meet the same demand, you double the takt time to 2 minutes.
This is why it is calculated as follows:
It has a numerator and a denominator, and both matter. They are obviously calculated for the same time period.
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By Michel Baudin • Blog clippings • 0 • Tags: industrial engineering, Manufacturing engineering, Takt time