Lean kanban Point of Use Example

Found this great video on Lean Kanban on YouTube and thought it is worth sharing here for the readers!!!

Lessons from The Goal

The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt is one of the book, which has influenced my thinking a lot. This book introduced the Theory of Constraints to the world of business and has made its way to B-Schools as a textbook. Eliyahu Goldratt has done an excellent job in explaining his theory using a novel-style writing. It is a story of a struggling plant manager to improve his plant's performance and save it from closure. The expert in this story provoked the main character to "derive his solutions by supplying the question marks instead of exclamation marks".

If your organization/plant faces the classic problem of Quality, Cost & Delivery: "why can't we consistently get a quality product out the door on time at the cost that can beat the competition?" or if you have a plant manager who is "always promoting some new thing he's doing, and most of the time what he's doing isn't any different from the things everyone else is doing", then you better read this book and make others to read it as well.

The important lessons one will learn from this text are summarized below. This will be beneficial to you only if you have read this book once and would like a recap. If you have not read the book yourself, then do not expect to gain the understanding of these concepts from this post.

• The goal of an organization is to make money by increasing net profit , while simultaneously increasing ROI and cash flow.
• Three critical measurement to achieve this goal and develop operational rules to successfully run a business are: throughput, inventory, and operational expenses.
• Inventory is turned into throughput by incurring operational expenses.
• So, the real goal is to: Increase throughput while simultaneously reducing both inventory and operating expense.
• Every process is a set of dependent events...in combination with statistical fluctuations.
• What's happening isn't an averaging out of the fluctuations in our various speeds, but an accumulation of the fluctuations.
• And mostly it's an accumulation of slowness - because dependency limits the opportunities for higher fluctuations.
• Balance flow, not capacity.
• A system of local optimums is not an optimum system at all; it is a very inefficient system.
• The numbers are meaningless unless they are based upon the constraints of the system.
• Bottlenecks dictate inventory as well as throughput.

So, the Theory of Constraints is postulated as:

1. Identify the system's constraint(s).
2. Decide how to exploit the system's constraints.
3. Subordinate everything else to the above decision.
4. Elevate the system's constraint(s).
5. If in the previous steps, a constraint has been broken, go back to Step 1, but do not cause inertia to cause a system's constraint.
   

Identifying a Bad Design

Recently I found a good article while going through my archives of Machine Design. "Telltale signs of bad design" is authored by Mike Hudspeth, ISDA from the issue dated March 8, 2007. The direct link to this article on their website is not active, so I thought to share it here with appropriate mention.

"Most industrial designers have seen a bad design or two in the course of their careers. Bad designs are difficult to disguise. they are hard to figure out..."

The negative attributes of any design are sometimes difficult to identify for a designer. This is partly because of the sense of ownership and pride. A designer can get so much deeply involved in the designing process that (s)he may go father than the customer requirements or the intended purpose of the product.

" A few telltale signs to watch include:

• Form without function
• Useless features
• Unidentifiable controls
• Knobs, buttons or switches that are too far away
• Instruction labels can be helpful when they inform users where to stick plugs or connectors."

Now when I think about the products I use in my everyday life, I occasionally see some of these bad design features. Similar features can be found in processes too. A badly designed process can be a result of improper controls, instructions labels not at correct place or not legible, knobs not identified or calibrated properly or function without desired form resulting in rework/scrap.

Deming Prize 2007

Recently I read on the Curious Cat blog about the Deming Prize for 2007. This prize was awarded to Rane (Madras) Ltd., a company based in India. Being a manufacturing professional, involved in process improvement, I got interested in the statistics provided by this post, which claims that in last 8 years, 14 of prestigious Deming Prizes have been awarded to companies in India. Being curious, I did some search and found that it is indeed true. In last 7 years, 14 Deming Application Prize have been awarded to manufacturing companies in India. This shows their commitment to quality and a recognition of Indian manufacturing industry at global level. Companies in these countries are no longer using older machinery and processes as perceived in west. They are now using sophisticated production techniques and quality management processes to achieve world-c;ass quality products.

My current company is also sourcing parts from other countries and we are having problems in getting the desired level of quality in various products. Most of these products include castings and sheet metal assemblies. Products from China have numerous casting defects whereas products coming from India lack the desired machining quality. These issues result in internal reworks which affect the productivity and scraps which are a nightmare to supply-chain. This is the hidden caveat behind outsourcing and we got to live with it.

Click here to see the list of Deming Prize winners from Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) website.