Manufacturing Excellence

Lean – What are you really optimizing?

After spending some time around lean, it occures to me that the way we are taught to produce lean cells, that is optimizing the labor content means that labor must be your most expensive input from that cell.  What about if the cost of capital is the highest cost?  Say, you are producing very close toleranced precision components on a multi-million dollar system.  Do you really want to optimize labor at the expense of optimizing the productivity of your most expensive resource, the equipment?

Lean, are you ready?

Lean, it’s a religion.

Lean, it’s a journey.

Lean, it’s a lifestyle.

Lean, you can’t get there by just wanting it.

Lean, you can’t buy it.

Lean, if your leadership it’s on board, forget it.

Lean is a discipline.

Lean is tough love.

Lean is never finished or complete.

Are you ready?

If so, sign up for my newsletter and you will have exclusive access to strategies, tactics, tools and methods to begin on your journey.

Forget about Cycle Time

Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE)is a good tool to help you measure capacity.  It combines the rate of raw production, the  efficiency of the operator’s input, the scrap rate and the uptime of the equipment.  So if your equipment can cycle at 100 pieces per hour and your operators are working to 92% rate, your scrap rate is 1% and equipment uptime is 94% the OEE is 100 x  .92 x .99 x .94 or about 86 pieces per hour.

OEE is a good start to understanding your processes, but it’s a mean.  It’s just the beginning of the story.  To really understand your process you need to understand the variation that your process produces.

We measure dimensional capability of processes by Cpk.  Cpk is a measure of targeting and variation against a target feature in a dimensional sense.  We should be measuring our production output in a similar manner.  I’ve got a simple tool to help you do this.

Here’s an action you can take to predict what your system output will be based upon real history.  Collect the number of hours you tried to run your system and how much output you actually produced.  Enter the data in the Production Capacity Prediction Tool to determine what you should be expecting from your production.

Production Capacity Prediction Tool Rev 1.0

Theory of Constraints – Continued…

Check out this article in Industry Week.  It highlights the fact that after you identify bottlenecks, you’ll need to use another tool, such as Kaizan, to improve.  http://www.industryweek.com/articles/the_theory_of_constraints_exposed_13669.aspx

Ed…

Theory of Constraints and Pipe Diagrams

The Theory of Constraints is based upon the idea that for any system there is a constraint.  As we operate and improve our manufacturing systems, we must too understand and control that constraint.  Use of a graphical representation of our manufacturing system can provide assistance in understanding and communicating constraints.

I have created a simple Excel program to help identify, analyze and communicate a constraint through the use of pipe diagrams.  Click the chart above and you can download the Excel spreadsheet and modify it for your system.

Welcome to Manufacturing Excellence

Welcome to Manufacturing Excellence at www.mfg-excellence.com. The goal of this site is to become a content rich location for manufacturing engineers who are looking for knowledge, tools and methods to make their work stand out. If you can be a better engineer and make your company more competitive, everybody wins.

You may be skeptical on how a website could help. We here at Manufacturing Excellence will be working hard on creating a community for manufacturing engineers to share their problems and successes to help each other out. Along with this community, we will supply tools. Tools like software that helps you organize and optimize Lean Cells. Excel spreadsheets that help you optimize in-process tolerances through the use of simulations and Monte Carlo analysis.

The idea is that we all have developed tools along the way, let’s share and improve them together. That’s the idea of community.

Sure, our target is manufacturing engineers that are just getting started, but as we grow, I’m certain there will be content here that even the most seasoned manufacturing engineers will find useful. Also, the small manufacturing company that doesn’t necessarily have a manfuacturing engineering department may also find our home useful. If they are looking for improvements that help efficiency and improving agility and reduce cost, this will be the place.

So let’s get started by opting in to our email list and dropping us a line at editor@mfg-excellence.com or commenting below and let us know what tools or information you would find most useful.

Looking forward to the future…. Ed