Tuesday, November 20, 2007
The short story of assembly problems is lack of parts. Part shortages drive all kinds of waste, including: juggling the schedule; expediting; bigger lots or batches - and all of these things end up causing shortages later on in a self-reinforcing death spiral.
So how did an assembly shop which built about 10 units / day, [...]
Those of you who are familiar with Shingijutsu’s materials and teaching (or at least familiar with Nakao-san’s version of things) have heard of “The Seven Flows.” As a brief overview for everyone else, the original version, and my interpretations are:
The flow of people.
The flow of information.
The flow of raw materials (incoming materials).
The flow of sub-assemblies [...]
The textbook purpose of visual controls is “to make abnormal conditions obvious to anyone.” But do your visual controls pass the Sticky test, and compel action?
Simple: Does your control convey a single, simple message? Or does it “bury the lead story” in an overwhelming display of interesting, but irrelevant, information. According to Spear and Bowen [...]
“Stop the line if there is a problem” is a common mantra of lean manufacturing. But it is harder than first imagined to actually implement.
The management mindset that “production must continue, no matter what” is usually the first obstacle. But even when that is overcome, I have seen two independent cases where peer social pressure [...]
As I said in a
previous post, I am spending the majority of my time in China right now.
As part of his preparation for attending a corporate class, one of my kaizen specialists was reviewing some of the training materials. From the other side of the cubicle wall he asks “What is ‘hoopla?” Although his [...]
SME: The Essence of Jidoka
This link is to an article I wrote for the SME online “Lean Directions” site back in 2002. I am including it on this site for the sake of completeness. I noticed that the Wikipedia article on the same subject is largely plagiarized from this, which I simply consider flattery.