Leading the Lean Enterprise Transformation
By Koenigsaecker, George
Publication: Manufacturing Engineering
Monday, March 1 2004
excellent article, highly recommended you find and read more than once.
Key points:
They had increased their product range by four-fold to grow out of the "oil crisis." This type of growth usually messes up productivity, but they actually doubled enterprise productivity during the same period, and reduced average unit cost by 26%.
They also could make every product every day, had 90% fewer customer complaints, etc.
Conversion of the operations side of a business typically proceeds in three waves…
One of the things that make this stage difficult is that you have to do it yourself. My sensei would deride us for buying equipment-"catalog engineer" was one of the worst things they could say about you. But you find that to do this on your own you need to build up a group of skilled associates who can design and build machines-and more importantly, conceive of different approaches to designing such machines. This means that you may need to add skilled trades personnel, and some key engineering/design folks. These people look like "overhead" in traditional manufacturing thinking, and are usually the first persons fired when business slows.
…calculations indicated that this feature alone increases the productivity of a cell by 140% -i.e. output per person is 2.4 times that of the basic cell
*Design to takt time. A machine was not to be able to make a part in less than 1/2 of takt time. Like many of the easy-to-understand aspects of lean, this one is hard because it is 180 away from normal practice, which is to design a bigger, more capable, and faster machine than we need-"just in case."