Author: Rick Bohan

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Visual Factory

I don’t run across good articles on Visual Factory very often (other than here in my own blog)but here’s one (The Language of Lean is Visual) at A Lean Journey.

If you put my arm up behind my back and told me I could pick just one lean method, it would be visual factory.  As Tom says in his post:

“The goal in Visual Factory is to create a “status at a glance” in the workplace. This refers to an operating environment where anyone can enter the workplace and:

See the current situation (Self-explaining)

See the work process (Self-ordering)

See if you are ahead, behind or on schedule (Self-regulating) and

See when there is an abnormality (Self-improving)”

It’s like I tell my clients: “You should be able to bring someone off the street, give them a 10-minute overview of the operations, then have them tell you the real time status of the process in front of them.”

In the Visual Factory, everyone (including new folks) know what to do, how to do it, when to do it and whether they’re doing it well or not.  All the time.

 

 

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Change Management 101

Change managementI was just reading a blog post over at Beyond Lean that asks, “What do you do when change is needed but no one will change?”  There are probably more articles and blog posts on this issue than just about anything other topic in change management, I’d guess.

After about 30 years in the field of change management, my answer is:  There isn’t much you can do other than to find someone else to work with.

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How to Implement Lean Manufacturing – Sort and Shine (5S): Part 3

Sort and Shine Teams

Each area will have a team associated with it that will be responsible for actually carrying out the Sort and Shine activities in the area.  Generally, the team will comprise those who actually work in the area.  Some peripheral areas might need a team assigned to them.

Each team should have a Sort and Shine Leader.  (One of my clients referred to them as Agile Leaders because the overall initiative was referred to as Agile Manufacturing.)  That Leader might be the present supervisor or team lead. Or it might be someone new.

A word or two about the Sort and Shine Leaders…they ARE NOT, alone, responsible for implementing Sort and Shine in their areas.  It’s important to get this across to everyone.  They ARE responsible for most of the administrative part of the initiative.

Continue reading “How to Implement Lean Manufacturing – Sort and Shine (5S): Part 3”

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Lean Manufacturing Implementation and Rubik’s Cube

My friends over at Wire-Net, here in northeast Ohio, recently posted an interesting article (The Rubik’s Cube Correlation) on their blog.

According to the article,  there are 43 quintillion possible formations for a Rubik’s cube.  So, if someone were to start15.0417RubicksCube-unsolved from scratch and try one formation per second, it could take…let’s see….10 million years or so if my math is right.  (Let’s say I’m off and it’s only a million years…that’s still a long time to figure out a toy puzzle, right?)  Here’s the thing…according to the article (and some others I found online just to verify), it’s possible to get the right formation in five moves, no matter what the starting formation.  And it’s not, “You can do this in five moves but you have to figure out what those moves are.”  It’s “There are five set moves, an algorithm of moves, in other words, that will provide the solution, no matter where you start. Here are the moves…”  In other words, no matter what you start with, someone can tell you the five moves to make and you’ll solve the puzzle.

I read the article and thought, “Lean manufacturing is like that.”

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My First YouTube Video! “What is Lean Manufacturing?”

I’ve always wanted to spread out into posting YouTube videos but was never quite sure how to go about it.  A few weeks ago, I came across a video that provided instructions for creating a Powerpoint slide show, attaching a sound track to it, saving it as a video, then uploading it all to YouTube.  (Here’s that instruction video, if your interested.)  Now, the video told me that it would take about an hour from start to finish.

Well, after nearly four days, I finally produced a finished product.  (Like everything involving computers, it was harder than was advertised.)

So, here’s my cinematic gem. (There’s a needlessly long pause before the audio gets started, so be patient.)

So there you have it.  Now that I know how to do these things, I’ll be posting more of them on YouTube.

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How to Implement Lean Manufacturing – Sort and Shine (5S): Part 1

In my next several posts, I’m going to be talking about good ol’ 5S.

I did a keyword search this morning on “lean manufacturing”.  I got a list of terms with data that told me how many times each term is searched for on Google.  Which term do you suppose has more Google searches, “5S” or “Lean manufacturing”?  Well, the winner is…5S.  Yep, I was surprised, too.  I think it says that, while folks are still eager to learn about lean manufacturing in general, they’re even more eager to learn how to implement the tools.

Shadowboard
Workplace organization is fundamental to any lean manufacturing implementation.

I’ll tell you now, I approach 5S differently from the way it’s usually presented.  I’ve found that supervisors and managers have a difficult time wrapping their heads and hands around 5S all at once.  I’ve also found that it’s hard to teach 5S all at once.  Yeah, it’s easy enough to go through each of the S’s and give a quick definition and a bit of overview but…then what?

So, I’ve broken it up into two phases: Sort and Shine, then Straighten and See.  What about Standardize and Sustain, you ask?  Well, as you’ll see they are embedded into those two phases.

Continue reading “How to Implement Lean Manufacturing – Sort and Shine (5S): Part 1”