This sub-assembly line had a planned cycle time of 15 minutes. The most skilled and experienced assembler could almost get all of the work done in that time, but generally, two people were required to consistently deliver without stopping the main line. Among other obstacles identified, the first assembly step was being done on a [...]
Kaizen is largely a drive toward stability – that is a more consistent operation, producing a more consistent result. The key is the definition of “consistent.” Overproduction is a way to achieve the illusion of consistency in the face of inherently unstable operations. Your machines are unreliable? Run faster when you can run. Inconsistent quality? [...]
This sub-assembly line had a planned cycle time of 15 minutes. The most skilled and experienced assembler could almost get all of the work done in that time, but generally, two people were required to consistently deliver without stopping the main line. Among other obstacles identified, the first assembly step was being done on a [...]
“What is your target condition?” “One-by-one flow, meeting an 11 minute planned cycle time, with two people.” “What is your current condition now?” “We are making rate, but our lowest repeatable times add up to 28 minutes, and with that and the 32% variation we are seeing, we need 3 people on the line to [...]
I still see companies struggle to apply a financial return on every improvement proposed. PC has made an excellent analogy in a post on the forum. Rather than repeat it here, I’ll give you the link, maybe we can get a conversation started. http://forums.theleanthinker.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&p=903#p903 (Sidebar: I am pretty aggressive about deleting accounts that look like [...]
We had five sequential operations. Although the lowest repeatable times for each were well within the planned / target cycle time, there was a lot of variation. Though Operation 3 was working pretty continuously, Operations 4 and 5 (downstream) were getting starved on occasion, and the empty “bubble” was working its way to the output. [...]
“Experience by itself teaches nothing… Without theory, experience has no meaning. Without theory, one has no questions to ask. Hence, without theory, there is no learning.” –W. Edwards Deming, The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education – 2nd Edition The field of psychology, it seems, shares an issue with the field of operations management. Wilson [...]
Tommy raised an interesting question in his comment to Internalizing Outside Knowledge. He said: In my company we are working with the developing people concept. Our objective is to make ourselves redundant, but it is hard. What are the best ways of developing people? How do you do it? How do you do it indeed? [...]
In the last post I commented on Ron Popeil’s product development approach – to make the product easy to demonstrate drives making it easy to use, which creates more value for the customer. Let’s take the same thinking back to your internal customers. What if, rather than just writing a procedure, you had to go [...]
I will be the first to tell you that this is probably repetition of a fairly narrow theme you have seen here before. But I think of different ways to frame it, or get different thoughts, so I share them. “Problems first” is one of the mantras used by Phil Jenkinson, the CEO character in [...]
