Archive for the ‘manufacturing’ Category

According to February’s Monthly Survey of Manufacturing, released on April 16th, done by Statistics Canada, manufacturing sales increased once again.

Some quick stats:

1. In eight of the previous nine months, sales have been increasing.
2. Dollar manufacturing sales have increased every month for the past six months. In February, that increase was 0.3%
3. Durable good (electronic products, appliances, furniture, etc) sales dropped by 0.3%, but non-durable (foods, clothing, paper, petroleum, etc) good sales increased by 0.3%
4. Most sales increases were in Ontario and in Western Canada. Quebec, Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia all saw a decline in sales in February

Source

A while back, I posed about Lean Manufacturing Principles. Today I wanted to go a little bit more in depth with how you can prepare a Lean implementation plan.

First of all, let’s take a look at what exactly a lean implementation plan is. A lean implementation plan is how you are going to bring about making your business more lean. This sounds like it should be easy, but there are actually a number of problems with actually implementing lean manufacturing. As Wikipedia says, “The discipline required to implement Lean and the disciplines it seems to require are so often counter-cultural that they have made successful implementation of Lean a major challenge.”

So, if it’s so difficult to implement, how can you create a successful plan?

First, you need to remember that there two aspects that you need to focus on. The first is the actual hardware portion: the machinery, equipment, etc. The second is the human aspect. Just improving one of these aspects will not result in a successful lean implementation – you need both. Once you realize that, you can really start with your implementation plan.

Firstly, you want to focus on everything that is absolutely necessary to run an effective system – this is where all of the big changes are made.

Next, you want to build upon what you did when you made those big changes – this would include implementing the 5S system, for example.

Lastly, you want to work on continuous improvement, where numerous small changes are constantly being made.

Doesn’t sound too difficult, but it’s always more challenging to actually implement the plan than it is to make it. Remember that if you find something in your plan is not working as you would like it to, that your plan is not set in stone – if you find something isn’t working, then revisit that part of the plan. Is it feasible? Is there another way to get to your goals?

What have you been doing for your lean implementation plan?

We’ve spoken about Lean Manufacturing many times on our blog, and it’s a term that most people are familiar with. There are many different ways that lean manufacturing can be implemented in a business; Takt Time is one of the fundamental aspects of it.

But what exactly is Takt Time?

It can be used in all areas of business, but is more relevant in manufacturing – specifically in production lines. The basic definition of Takt Time is the maximum amount of time allowed per unit for production in order to meet customer demand. So, if there is a lot of demand for the unit, then your maximum allowed time to make the unit is very small, however, if there is not a lot of demand for the unit, the maximum allowed time to make it is a lot larger.

To discover exactly what your Takt Time is, you would need to figure out the amount of time in total that you have to work on your order – remembering to take into account employee breaks, lunches, machine downtime, etc. – and divide it by how many units you need to produce (again taking into account the fact that there may be test parts and defective units).

So how does Takt Time help you implement lean manufacturing? Simply, once you have Takt Time in place, you can look at your process and see what is inefficient and non-value-added, and decide from there what can be improved upon. Ways that this can be done include reducing idle time, set-up time and eliminating waste. One of the biggest benefits of Takt Time is that you will easily be able to see where any bottlenecks are in the production process and can quickly fix that.