Thoughts and Insights from the Shop Floor
When operations or steps get omitted, a common countermeasure is to establish a checklist. A typical checklist has a list of items or questions – sometimes even written in the past tense. “Was the _______?” There are a couple of common problems with this approach. First, the time to actually, physically make the checks is …
I want to tack a similar issue onto yesterday’s post about normal operating mode vs. recovery mode. Listening to a team trying to understand a complex issue, I noticed three different threads intertwining in their conversation. They would discuss the actions needed to work through the issue and get the product to the customer. This …
The main purpose of an andon is to signal that some part of the system is no longer in normal operating mode. The immediate response should be to quickly assess the situation, and recover the process to the normal mode. Many organizations, however, do not make that mental shift. They don’t have a clear sense …
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? …
TWI Job Instruction is a structured process for breaking a job or task into teachable elements, and a 4 step process for teaching that job to someone. I am not going to try to explain everything about breaking down a job here, this post is primarily for people who use job breakdowns and job instruction …
I have been noticing a significant linguistic difference between those who still embrace the “implement the tools” paradigm, and a much smaller (but growing) group are are adopting the PDCA thinking structure as a framework for everything else. It comes down to how a problem is stated. We were looking at an operation with a …
The team was driving toward a consistently executed changeover process as a target condition. In the last iteration, the process was disrupted by a scrapped first-run part. The initial level cause was an oversize bit in the NC router resulting in an out-of-spec trim and oversize holes. This occurred in spite of the fact that …
As I work in the field, I continue to encounter a desire to get right to optimal results – “Why aren’t we working to eliminate all of the waste?” Once people start seeing opportunities, there is a great temptation to try to simply engineer a new process and implement it. This is especially true in …
Continue reading “Organize, Standardize, Stabilize, Optimize”
As I work with clients to get a “problem solving culture” embedded, one common challenge is the distinction between the short term work-around to remove the obstacle, and the long-term countermeasure that actually improves the process. I addressed this at a conceptual level in the “Morning Market” post a while ago. Last week I was …
Continue reading “Clearing the Problem / Solving the Problem”
Note – this post was written pretty much simultaneously with a post on the lean.org forum. Mike Rother has put up a compelling presentation that highlights a long-standing misunderstanding about the purpose of “standards.” Some time ago, a (well-meaning) author or consultant constructed a graphic that shows the PDCA wheel rolling up the incline of …