Saturday, November 24, 2007
The third element of this organization’s successful drive to eliminate part shortages was a systematic approach to problem solving. They made it a process, managed just like any other process, rather than something people did when they had time. Even though this is “Part 3″ of this series, in reality they put this into [...]
Saturday, November 24, 2007
For kanban to work well, there has to be a solid foundation under it. That foundation is production leveling or heijunka.
Before I get to far into this, though, I would like to point something out: At the mention of leveling, people who are only just learning about kanban will point out all of the good [...]
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, [...]
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
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 [...]
Robert Johnston, now at the University of Melbourne, did his PhD work at Monash University. His dissertation, “
The Problem With Planning” presents a thought provoking thesis.
- Early robotics and computational intelligence models were built on a model which research at MIT debunked as unworkable in the 1980’s.
- The MRP algorithm uses the same model.
- Therefore, [...]