Nov 27 2013
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Ken McGuire: “My humble observation is that the degree of enthusiasm about all things Lean is in direct inverse correlation to how recently the enthusiast has discovered it.”
Enlightening account from participants in the invention of the Kaizen Blitz in the US in the 1990s.
See on sites.google.com
Oct 24 2013
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So it’s a bit of a surprise to hear, as we did last week in Toyota’s Nagoya headquarters, that the company has been a bit less effective when it comes to parts standardisation, platform sharing and common parts strategies.”
I was taken aback by the article’s original title, describing Toyota as a “master of mass production,” but read on nonetheless and found the rest intriguing.
In essence, it asserts that Toyota paid for the autonomy of its product development teams in the form of too many different parts and platforms, and is undertaking to change this for the future.
The article does not say how Toyota proposes to do it.
See on www.autocar.co.uk
Oct 18 2013
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“Any single failure anywhere in the supply chain can bring operations and profits to a standstill. From the 2011 tragedies of the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan to last year’s devastating Hurricane Sandy closer to home, Mother Nature has a way of reminding us to reexamine catastrophe preparedness.
These events, and the tragic aftermath that follows, also serve to remind the insurance industry of the challenges in quantifying risk and accounting for exposure in an increasingly complex supply chain environment. As a result, risk managers are being asked new questions as insurance underwriters require them to seek information from a broader range of stakeholders within and outside of their organizations.”
The article is limited to a list of questions an insurer might ask about a supply chain, some of which cannot be pratically answered. The supply chain management literature often states the need to know your suppliers’ suppliers and your customers’ customers, but most companies don’t, and practically can’t.
After all, the point of buying from suppliers is to delegate responsibility for the whole upstream supply chain. If you have to worry about it all the way to mining raw materials out of the ground, you might as well make it all in-house from scratch, like at Ford’s River Rouge plant in the 1930s.
Asking the right questions is fine, but providing answers is better. Supply chain disruptions come in many degrees of severity and a variety of frequencies, from trucks delayed by traffic accidents to earthquakes and tsunamis.
You can, and should have preplanned responses to small, frequent disruptions. That may involve building some slack in milk run schedules, keeping small buffers of stocks, or having contingency plans for alternative transportation…
But you cannot practically have preplanned responses to all possible catastrophes. What you need is to monitor operations with vigilance to get early warnings, and develop relationships with your suppliers and customers that are strong enough that they come together and develop an ad-hoc, rapid response when disaster strikes.
This is the lesson I see in Toyota’s response to emergencies, from the Mississippi flood of 1993 to the Aisin Seiki fire of 1997 and the Fukushima earthquake of 2011.
See on www.industryweek.com
Sep 20 2013
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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 …
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
Dec 6 2013
Confusion Over Standards: Limits or Basis for Innovation? | Industry Week Blogs | Jeffrey Liker
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“As an undergraduate engineering student I spent a term in the offices of a nuclear power company writing standards. I sat at a desk, with a typewriter, and nuclear engineers fed me information while I wrote the standards. Standard 300.47.3.1. I had never been to a nuclear power site and had no idea what I was writing about, and I am pretty certain nobody at the site had memorized the tens of thousands of standards. They were aimed at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission who audited the company so we could prove we were safe. To the best of my knowledge pieces of paper never prevented a nuclear crisis.”
Jeffrey Liker chimes in on the issue of standards. While efforts to clear up the confusion on this topic in the context of Lean are praiseworthy, I think the terminology of “Standardized Work,” and “Work Standards” itself is hopeless.
Every author uses them differently, there is no hope of achieving consistency, and the word “standard” comes with too much undesirable cultural baggage, as illustrated by Jeffrey’s anecdote quoted above. As a result, every discussion of this topic is Tower-of-Babel project review.
Just because Toyota in the US uses terms doesn’t mean we have to, as they often are mistranslations of its own, Japanese terms, which themselves are not necessarily clear.
That’s why I prefer to talk about “work combos” for specifying how different tasks performed at different stations are combined into an operator job that fills the takt time, and “work instructions” for the breakdown of each task into steps with key points.
Then we can reserve the word “standard” for external mandates and internally generated rules and protocols used, for example, in quality problem-solving with suppliers.
See on www.industryweek.com
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By Michel Baudin • Management • 0 • Tags: Lean, Standard Work, Standards, Toyota