VSM

StadiumConcertBlog

Dec 30 2023

Greatest Hits of 2023

This blog’s greatest hits of 2023:

  1. Nissan’s Quick Response Quality Control (QRQC)
  2. Runners, Repeaters, and Strangers among Components
  3. Where do “Value Stream Maps” come from?
  4. The Fox Knows Many Things, But The Hedgehog Knows One Big Thing
  5. Deming’s Point 4 of 14 – End the practice of awarding business on the basis of a price tag
  6. Does Amazon Use Lean, Six Sigma, or Lean Six Sigma?
  7. Does Toyota Use SPC?
  8. Deming’s Point 3 of 14 – Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality…
  9. Deming’s Point 5 of 14 – Improve Constantly and Forever the System of Production and Service
  10. Deming’s Point 11.b of 14 – Deming versus Drucker
  11. Metrics in Lean – Chart junk in performance boards and presentations
  12. Why “Smart” part numbers should be replaced with keys and property lists
  13. Wrong things ChatGPT says about me
  14. Project Manager Versus Chief Engineer: What’s The Difference?
  15. Deming’s point 1 of 14: Create constancy of purpose…
  16. Why 5S fails
  17. Quality in a Manufacturing System
  18. Why we Need a Quality Department
  19. Orbit charts, and why you should use them
  20. What is an A3?

#greatesthitsof2023, #quality, #VSM, #ValueStreamMap, #deming, #toyota

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VillageDistanceChartMarieNeurath

Jan 30 2021

Of Bubbles and Arrows

[The featured image is an ISOTYPE from Marie Neurath (1936)]

Maps of symbols connected by lines are the most common form of graphic communication about operations, next to bar charts, pie charts, and time series. The symbols may be a variety of pictograms and there may be different types of lines, including arrows, double-headed arrows with a variety of arrowheads, with dashed lines of varying thicknesses…

This is about what you can do with such maps beyond communicating, and the challenges of mapping systems that don’t fit on one slide. It is also about improving current practices.

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Dec 7 2020

More About VSMs From Jeffrey Liker

Thanks to Jeffrey Liker for providing additional details on the transformation of this tool. Initially, Toyota used it occasionally with suppliers. The Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI) turned it into the Value Stream Maps (VSM) that it has promoted as foundational to Lean.

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Nov 22 2017

Why do we call it “value stream”?

On LinkedIn, Dinesh Vasandani, Director of industrial engineering and manufacturing operational excellence at Boeing, asked “Why do we call it value stream? Most value streams have minimal value added work rates. Should we start calling them waste streams?”

To date, Dinesh has had responses from, besides myself, the following: Humaid Abubakar, Ray Ardahji, Andrew Brown, Mauro Cardenas, Evaristo Dominguez, Prakash Gadhar, Jacqueline Hartke, Jun Nakamuro, Salvador D. Sanchez, Mark Searcy, Oliver Tamis, Ravi Vaidiswaran, Matt Wehr.

Toyota alumnus Salvador Sanchez was first to point out that Toyota doesn’t use the term “value streams,” which was echoed by other past and present Toyota employees, like Evaristo Dominguez and Ray Ardahji.

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Apr 8 2017

Wacky Lean House | Bob Emiliani

 

“This year is the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI). There will surely be a big celebration. But in my view, there is less to celebrate than meets the eye. Here’s why:

LEI has controlled the progressive management agenda for the last 20 years. That means they own the failures as well as the successes. By LEIs own reckoning (as well as its sister organization, the Lean Enterprise Academy in the U.K.), success has been much less than they had hoped for.”

Sourced through Bob Emiliani’s blog

Michel Baudin‘s comments: Overall, I agree with Bob’s assessment, but I think American manufacturers deserve more of the blame than the LEI, for faddishly latching on to one tool after another and mistaking it for a panacea. For example, in his introduction to “Learning to See,” Mike Rother explicitly warns the reader that, at Toyota, Materials and Information Flow Analysis (MIFA) is not a major tool. Yes, he repackaged it with the attractive but nonsensical name of “Value Stream Mapping” (VSM), but his audience didn’t have to elevate it to the status that it did.

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Sep 2 2016

Why I don’t like Lean houses, except one | Christian Hohmann | LinkedIn Pulse

Christian Hohmann

“I never liked the (Toyota inspired) Lean houses and their many variants. First all these models are generally understood as prescriptive rather than descriptive, thus those new to Lean tend to adopt and copy one model without necessarily understanding its real meaning. The building blocks of Lean houses are principles, methods and tools, reinforcing the feeling that it’s all about “techniques”.

The house building metaphor also suggests a beginning with sound foundations, robust pillars and when the roof is atop, the organization is done. We’ll see later it is not in this way. To add to the confusion, with the broad choice of variants, which is the right one to look at?”

Sourced through LinkedIn Pulse

Michel Baudin‘s comments:

tps-house-300x244I share your reservations about the many “Houses of Lean” floating around, but my main concern with them is vagueness. The descriptive versus prescriptive confusion that you bring up is one concern. In one diagram I am looking at right now, “Heijunka” sits on top of “Stability” and underneath “Pull System,” “Takt Time” and “Continuous Flow.” Whatever it is intended to mean, it can’t be that you should implement Heijunka as soon as your processes are stable. Given that there are very few companies outside of the Toyota supply chain that have even implemented Heijunka, it is clearly an advanced topic, not to be tackled until you have done many other things, including items listed above it.

The basic operation when drawing a house of Lean is stacking. It has a well-defined meaning in computer networks, where you talk about “protocol stacks.” For example, the worldwide web sits on top of the internet, and it means that, behind the web face it shows you, your browser uses the internet protocol to communicate with the world, in ways that would be unintelligible to you. The meaning is obviously different in a “House of Lean,” but what is it? And what does it mean to draw a manager inside?

Continue reading…

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