Lean manufacturing?

2 Comments

1. Angie_UT_vol08 says:

   February 13, 2010 at 4:16 PM

   Well, what I have learned about lean manufacturing at my engineering co-op is that it deals with assembly lines and implements processes that pull a product through the assembly line. It basically means that your first process of assembly must take longer than your second process, and your second process must take longer than your third process, etc. This creates a ‘pull’ system within your assembly line, or whole plant for that matter. It greatly reduces the amount of time needed to manufacture/assemble a product thus increasing production capacity and reducing cost. This concept also deals with takt time, the minimum amount of time needed to produce an item either as a whole or at each process of production. This takt time depends on how many operators/machines are available to help with production, customer demand, and the amount of time that is available for work, either man hours or machine hours.

   These are just a few topics that relate to lean manufacturing. I hope that helps!
2. Jay says:

   February 13, 2010 at 4:25 PM

   I’ve been through two plant implementations so far and first thing you must have is strong leadership inside the facility. Weak management will stall it forever. The next thing is pick out how many S’s you want to use and get three rapid events rolling a month on this and don’t stop for about two years. 6S seems to be the norm and this involves mostly just getting the place straightened out then with the people you pull out of the process bring them into lean and train them to run the 6s events while you get started hard on visual management. Get some good charts up, that measure and display for the world to see the where you where, are, and going as far as production, overtime, scrap, man hours, the stuff that matters. Get your inventory, all of it, visually managed, the idea here is can you hire someone at 7AM and hand the inventory over to them by two thirty and now everything will be fine for the month. These are your big players, these two alone should take the better part of six years to get good at. You gona paint every sticking thing fifty times, someones gona label the water fountain and the place on your desk for the stapler until everyone learns and your gona have people spending an hour a day filling out stupid charts but eventually you start to see how it needs to be done and things will take off. You will learn how to 6S without fourteen gallons of paint and you will learn to display three good indicators for everything. You can run a country on fifty good laws or 50 million weak ones heres where good leadership is vital. There’s no need to let anyone go, staffing has to be maintained and simply not hiring will bring your staffing down faster than your ever gona weed people out so no one needs to get nervous if you have a job you get to keep it as long as your doing it until you decide to leave. You have quality tools, ergonomic tools, all the major money pits have some special tools and should be given special attention from the beginning, you can find most of this in bookstores and the internet. Get the place and the jobs, cleaned up, sorted out, simplified and organized so you can start to see the flow and then the waste. Both places I’ve seen the starts involved million dollar investments with consultants and honestly all that did was scare management into doing whatever it takes to keep them happy. I don’t feel like either consultant really deserved more than about 10% of the annual savings. In our case plant one which is now closed would have been nothing and plant 2 which is doing well would have owed them $100K for year one. The savings are there and anyone can do it but getting people to invest more than showing up, doing what there told, and preaching this is not my job is a struggle until they see that life is better on the other side. Be patient, be nice, but keep the pressure up. Good luck the first year sucks. Play nice.