Heat Treat Industry News
June 11, 2008
Starting Your Job Shop on its “Lean Journey”
For a number of reasons, the heralded Toyota Production System – designed for a low-variety, high-volume shop – does not work equally well for a high-variety, low-volume operation, i.e. a job shop. Implementing a JobshopLean program in a smaller shop can improve performance significantly.
Lean manufacturing is “a manufacturing philosophy that shortens the customer wait time by eliminating waste between the receipt of a customer order and the shipment of that order to the customer.” Any time an order is delayed, the cost of one or more of the Seven Types of Waste is added to the cost and time for producing the order, thereby preventing on-time delivery to the customer and reducing the profits earned by the supplier. The Seven Types of Waste are:
Overproduction
Performance of non-standardized work
Queue time
Transportation (or material handling) time
Inventory (raw material, WIP and finished goods)
Unnecessary motions and travel
Defective products and underutilized (workforce) skills
Standard lean-manufacturing strategies, such as manufacturing cells, setup reduction, process standardization, visual workplace design and pull scheduling, that are ideal for a large OEM like Toyota are not ideally suited for custom forge shops. The key reason is that custom forge shops that supply customers such as the Defense Logistics Agency and the Department of Defense operate more like job shops. That is, their business model of high product variety and low volumes (HVLV) is unlike the business model of the OEMs and their top-tier suppliers, which operate with low product variety and high volumes (LVHV). This is where JobshopLean (JSLEAN) has proven to be better suited to the small and medium-sized HVLV forging companies.
This article was inspired by a question asked of the entire membership of the JSLEAN online chat group I moderate. The question I had posted was, “Where should a job-shop owner start his or her Lean Journey?”
Not surprisingly, some great answers to that question were posted on the JSLEAN online chat group, which can be accessed at http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/JSLEAN/. If you join the group, in addition to the discussion threads, you can also visit the files section to access and download a variety of useful documents.
If you are considering implementing a JSLEAN program in your facility, here is how a job shop, or high-variety, low-volume (HVLV) small-to-medium-sized manufacturer, ought to get started.
by Dr. Shahrukh A. Irani - April 7, 2008
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