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Lean Manufacturing
Jamie's Answers to Your Lean Manufacturing Questions
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Jamie Flinchbaugh, a well-known lean expert from the Lean Learning Center in Novi, Michigan is happy to get your lean questions. He appreciates your input and has provided answers to a few of your lean questions below.
> NEW! Question from Paul of Arizona:
How can we do lean when we do not have control over the flow of incoming and outgoing work, leading to huge variations in workload?
Jamie Flinchbaugh's Answer:
Many companies do not control their flow of material the way that a very large discrete manufacturing company such as Toyota can. Does that mean that lean does not apply? Certainly not. But you must begin from the conditions you are handed.
Many companies struggle with uneven flow for various reasons. Maybe they are so small that the company takes what it can get and it comes in spurts. Maybe demand is heavily varied or highly seasonal. Maybe supply is varied. Consider a milk plant. Whether you are just bottling milk or turning it into cheese, butter, and ice cream, milk is a very difficult supply. You have to take the milk. It can't sit in a silo somewhere for a few weeks. And its not like the dairy farmers are the most sophisticated supply chain. And milk production varies with all sorts of things such as the weather. You don't know if you're going to get 6 trucks of milk or 106 trucks.
Whatever part of the system you have that you can't control, use lean thinking to design processes that respond to those changes. Understand how the system produces the results you are getting. Understand the activities, connections, and flows. And use lean thinking to redesign those systems. For example, in a hotel you have no idea how messy and dirty a room will be when you walk in to clean it. As a result, cleaning schedules are highly varied and uncontrollable. One hotel, in pursuit of a steady and predictable schedule, changed their system. When the cleaning person would walk into the room, they would first assess the situation and ask themselves if it would take them longer than the standard time to clean the room. If yes, they would immediately call the team leader who would drop whatever they were doing (usually parallel work such as laundry or restocking) and come and help. Yes, the room took two people but it was done within the alloted time and the schedule was maintained.
The world is not perfect. It never will be. We can't rely on the forces outside our control to stabilize or simplify. We must work within those constraints, and build our systems to respond to that variation, not fight it.
> Question from Norman of Michigan:
Recently while reviewing one of our operations in another country, we were highly impressed by the degree of cleanlines and general workplace organization in the manufacturing operations. However, we debated among ourselves whether we would truly consider this a great example of a 5S plant. There were numerous violations of market limits per their signage in both lineside racks and in supermarkets. Pull systems did not exist but there was a very high degree of scrolling for material but again, violations existed in many places. There was an audit system and a reward/recognition system for the group deemed best each month by their scoring system. Machine cleanliness varied by department although none were in bad shape and many were outstanding. While impressed by their overall cleanliness and organization we all felt "something was missing" but found it difficult to pin it all down. What would truly determine if a plant could be considered to be a sustainable 5S facility?
Jamie Flinchbaugh's Answer:
It is very easy to confuse cleanliness with functionality. Because of how 5S is taught, it often focuses too much on cleanliness and organization. But what are we trying to accomplish? We are trying to make it easy to get what we need at the point of activity. And most of all, we are trying to make it easy to spot a small problem from an abnormal condition before it becomes a big problem.
Recently I was visiting a company that was spotless. You couldn't find one thing out of place. It was in part because of good 5S, but it was also because all the stuff was hidden. It was in drawers or behind doors. It was still organized and sustained, but the point is that it was away. It was not at the point of use. It was not easily accessible. It was not easy to see if something was abnormal.
Better would have been: No Doors, No Drawers! That might be a bit of an idealistic statement, but I think it's a good guideline and more realistic than we probably think. Why do we want things in drawers? So we don't have to look at them. Get them out of drawers and to the point of activity. Instead of leaving screwdrivers and wrenches in a drawer, put them on a hook on the tool(s) where it is used. Put it on a rack that you can move to the PM task. The goal is not to be "tour ready" (I once saw this on a set of slides on why to do 5S). The goal is to make the area functional. Test your 5S efforts against this filter, not just how things look.
Looking good is what we call "aisle lean." But looking lean from an aisle tour isn't really lean. Genuine lean is practicing, application, and internalization. Some of the best lean organizations I've seen don't have "aisle lean." If your first 15 minutes you would think they are very much not lean, but after you dig deeper and deeper, you see how genuine the efforts really are.
> Question from Mary Anne of Lancaster:
What are the Green Implications of Lean Manufacturing?
Jamie Flinchbaugh's Answer:
This is a great question. The green movement has picked up steam, some based on moral grounds and some practical. But in lean, green efforts have found economic return as well. Even the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has issued a report on lean to help companies better connect lean and green (www.epa.gov/lean.)
From a lean perspective, the focus on green is waste elimination. Where are the waste streams, from an environmental perspective? Examine your garbage removal. Is it filled with cardboard and plastic packaging? How can you remove that? What about your water use? Energy use? Do you have excessive but small leaks throughout your air pressure system? In one project we found that the losses in air pressure, and therefore the energy in maintaining pressure, totaled 25% through a very large number of small leaks throughout the system. All of these waste flows are not only bad for the environment, they cost you real dollars. Find the waste and eliminate it, the same way you would go after other wastes. The only trick is, these waste flows are just a little harder to find. You have to look in some unusual places.
> Question from Kenny of Weatherford:
When you lean out a production line does this mean that some of the quality of the product on that line gets leaned out as well?
Jamie Flinchbaugh's Answer:
Lean is mistakenly thought of, and applied, as mostly less of stuff. Lean is not just less. Lean is also about building more: more value to the customer, more capability within the organization, more engagement from employees. And, again if done right, it means more effective and higher quality processes. But, quality may be achieved through different means. Traditional process quality control is about what, where and when to inspect. Well known customer-advocate consultants will provide input on what different things to inspect to get the customer what they want. A lean process will reduce inspection, but not quality, by replacing it with two different aspects: standardization and feedback loops.
Standardization means many things: standard work instructions, visual display and control, 5S, and error proofing. All are designed to reduce variation and reduce or eliminate the opportunity for an error or defect. Using error proofing as an example, how hard is it to leave your bank card in the automated teller machine? Many of them incorporate a swipe, meaning the card never leaves your hand, and the mistake is now impossible. If your machine does accept the card and you leave it in, it will beep loudly to alert you of the error. And if you still happen to leave it behind, the machine will eat the card, preventing that error from propagating any further. A strong belief and practice of standardization makes defects less likely, makes them more visible when they do occur, and makes corrective action more effective once solved.
Quick feedback systems is the second element. Although still a form of inspection, it is less about find and repair, and more about filter, feedback and fix the process. At each of four stages there should be the ability to feed forward issues and feed back for improvement. These four stages, or loops, are the workstation or activity, the zone or process, the factory or value stream, and the customer. At each loop, quality must be defined within the loop and how that connects to the other loops.
Quality is central to lean, primarily because you can't provide value to the customer, be efficient and waste-free, or enable flow, in the absence of quality. Lean is not just less. It is less waste, more value. And value requires strong quality.
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