“We are a job shop.”
“We never do the same thing twice.”
These are common truths spoken by people who are struggling with how to apply lean production principles to their operation. They want to do better, but don’t see how something that originated in the relentless repetition of an automobile assembly line can work for them.
This [...]
We were down on the shop floor watching an assembly operation. The takt time was on the order of three hours. The assembler was new to the task, and the team leader periodically came by and asked if he was “doing OK.” The reply was always in the affirmative.
As the takt time wound down to [...]
Yesterday’s post on vendor managed inventory touched on a couple of things about “lean” and reducing inventory that I’d like to explore further.
All too often “inventory reduction” has been a way to “sell” a lean manufacturing implementation. The reduction of inventory becomes the objective. While this isn’t inherently a bad thing, it is all to [...]
Operations that work to the “push” are well known for complex and interdependent problems. What looks like a problem in one area often has causes, or parts of causes, in other areas. Quality problems, delivery problems (late, too much, too little, wrong stuff), sub-optimizing attempts to reduce local cost.. all of these things propagate unchecked [...]
The Essence of Just-In-Time
This is a working paper by Steven Spear of Harvard Business School. Spear’s PhD work was summarized in a landmark and well-circulated Harvard Business Review article titled “Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System.” I will leave it to the reader’s Google savvy to turn up the DNA article for yourself.
This [...]