Beyond Lean: It's About Time! – Dr. Rajan Suri, 2011
This excellent article by the founder of the Center for Quick Response Manufacturing (QRM), focuses on the value of a relentless focus on reducing Lead Times. While it can be argued that QRM is nothing more than well directed Lean Production, the impact of reducing lead time on profitability is well accepted. The article lists the many indirect costs due to long lead times, and describes the benefits of measuring and reducing lead time over the more common practice of focusing directly on reducing costs. Dr. Suri describes the importance of several key concepts:
1. Reducing the amount of time in which no value is added to the product or process;
2. Realizing that correlation between indirect costs and labor hours is not causation, indirect costs are more directly caused by the amount of time in which no value is added to the product;
3. Cells, for most companies, need to be designed to handle a variety of products in a product family;
4. Employees need to be cross-trained to enable them to work on several processes, and allow flexibility in the operations they can do within a process;
5. Operating machines at near full capacity quickly degrades lead time;
6. The same concepts should be applied to office and NPI operations.
Reliable Plant: It's not easy to sustain those kaizen results
Mike Wroblewski of Kaizen Institute lists a number of simple but often overlooked items that can be done to ensure that improvements made during a kaizen event are sustained. Much of these methods are simple project management, but in the excitement of doing something new and surprisingly effective, like kaizen, project management activities are not always put in place or done. One example is simply to add a 30-day out column to any target sheets, so that progress is remeasured 30 days after the event.
QRM and POLCA – Dr. Rajan Suri, 2003
POLCA, or Paired-cell Overlapping Loops of Cards with Authorization, is a material control system that communicates the existence of downstream cell capacity to a paired upstream cell in a process. It is similar to Kanban, is a signal of downstream capacity rather than of inventory replenishment. POLCA cards are only used between – and not within – cells, and applies to all products that move between the cell pair. Though POLCA does not require integration with an electronic MRP system the author likes to combine the two, using the signal from the MRP system to authorize (though not to require) the start of production.
"10 Questions: How Lean is Your Operation?" – Gary Conner, 2009
Ten thought-provoking questions to help you determine where your facility stands and where you need to be, to ensure success in today's world.
Lean Thinking in Aircraft Repair and Maintenance Takes Wing at FedEx Express – Doug Bartholomew, 2009
The FedEx Express lean initiative at its repair and maintenance facility at Los Angeles International Airport just began in December 2007 but has produced some big savings. For example a major check that used to take 32,715 man-hours was cut to 21,535 hours in six months. That translated into a $2 million savings, which dovetailed nicely with the company’s emphasis on finding ways to reduce costs during the recession. Find out more about this facility’s lean transformation and how managers are involving mechanics and other employees.
Among many concepts FedEx implemented was the breaking of time into four-hour increments. By understanding each four-hour block of mechanics' time, FedEx' Managing Director explains, “They learned how to pass the baton without dropping it, so that one mechanic can pick up on a task exactly where his predecessor on the last shift left off.” Determining the durations of the many tasks done enables a scheduler to package those tasks into blocks of time so that no matter what the variety of tasks, the work can be predictable and performance to schedule can be measured immediately.
NUMMI, on "This American Life"
A car plant in Fremont California that might have saved the U.S. car industry. In 1984, General Motors and Toyota opened NUMMI as a joint venture. Toyota showed GM the secrets of its production system: How it made cars of much higher quality and much lower cost than GM achieved. Frank Langfitt explains why GM didn't learn the lessons—until it was too late.
Factory Physics® Principles for Managers—Fourth in a Series
Excellent explanation of the impact of variability, utilization and effective process time on lead time.
The Factory Physics approach recognizes that variability in both production rate and demand, and that Lead Time increases quickly as capacity of the process approaches 100%. It defines Kingman’s equation or, in laymen’s terms, the “VUT equation,” which states that the cycle time in queue is equal to a variability factor (V) times a utilization factor (U) times the effective process time (T), or CTq = VUT.
The utilization factor (U) depends on the effective utilization of the station but in a highly non-linear way. Capacity is the upper limit of utilization. For the VUT equation, in simple cases, U = u/(1-u) where “little u” is the effective utilization. Thus, if you try to schedule your process or line to 100% utilization, u goes to 1, the U factor goes to infinity, and so do your cycle times!
The article goes on to combine Kingman's equation with Little's Law, WIP equals Lead Time times Throughput to show that large variability at highly utilized work centers results in lower throughput.
Balancing Operators – Chris Harris and Rick Harris, 2009
This short article shows you the value in creating an Operator Balance Chart; determining the output of a cell or process for each number of employees staffing that cell or process. With such a chart, rules can be created so that the optimum number of operators to staff a cell (or any process) can be determined from demand by the operators themselves. Predetermined rules such as these significantly ease the role of the manager who otherwise must assess, analyze and communicate every change that affects him.
"Getting in gear with CHAKU CHAKU" – Kathleen Hanser, 2002
Boeing uses this quick production method in which machines are located close to each other and the machine operator leads a part through a sequence of load and unload operations until it is complete or is handed off to the next operator for another series of operations.
"Moving Beyond 'Event Lean'" – Jamie Flinchbaugh, 2007
Kaizen events can lead to temporary improvements, but to have sustained meaningful improvement there has to be more.
Jamie Flinchbaugh explains the danger in having occasional Kaizen events without Lean focus and support between them. "The unintended result is you may create a pattern of turning the Lean light switch on and off. The event is over, so you turn the lean switch off. When times get tough, you may even leave the switch off for a while. The longer the switch is left off, the harder it is to turn it back on."
The article gives importance to the level of thinking driven by lean principles and rules as a catalyst for a change in behavior amongst the employees and how continuously providing experiences that reinforce those rules solidifies the change. An effective idea program and leader standard work were both mentioned as critical to sustaining the gains.
"Why Did That Idea Flop?" – Brian Crownover, MD
This article, from the medical field, explains that to implement change in any organization, you must first change individuals' behavior, not just their level of knowledge, through interpersonal, face-to-face communication and feedback.
The article gives several steps in the change leadership process, and explains the various responses people may have to change.
The author has found that change agents achieve more success if they cooperate with opinion leaders, have interpersonal relationships with those affected by the change and are perceived as “customer-oriented." The change agent must be able to diagnose the problem with the status quo, help develop a vision of the preferred reality, cultivate tension between “what is” and “what could be,” translate the organization’s intent into action and stabilize the change. Eventually, the change agent must also help the organization transition away from reliance on the change agent to institutionalization of the innovation.
"The Human Side of Change Leadership" – Jim Folaron, 2005
A comprehensive article that explains how to identify potential resistance and introduces a method to separate the capability to change from the desire and address either aspect. The author asks the reader to look at change from the workers' perspective, identify potential resistance to the planned changes, and design motivation into the new process.
"Groupthink, the Brainstorming Myth" Jonah Lehrer
Perhaps the best recent article on creating and sustaining high-performing teams was written by Jonah Lehrer in the January 30, 2012 edition of The New Yorker (by subscription). In “Groupthink, the Brainstorming Myth” Lehrer details team design – but especially workspace design – elements that make teams more creative than simple brainstorming sessions can.
Lehrer includes work by sociologist Brian Uzzi who attempted to determine the optimum level of intra-team familiarity that would result in highest levels of creativity. Uzzi had correlated success of Broadway musicals to the level of “incumbency” of its collaborators, and found that teams were most creative when they had a mix of relationships; some “old friends,” but also a number of newcomers.
Work by Isaac Kohane is included to argue that scientific teams that worked in close proximity to each other – within 30 meters of each other – produced more frequently cited results than others.
Incorporating the familiarity and proximity findings of Uzzi and Kohane, Lehrer goes on to explore the creativity of people working in Steve Jobs’ Pixar headquarters and in MIT’s Building 20 and postulates the following factors in successful building design:
