Anyne Practice LEAN principles (Toyota Production System) ?

[Harry Radaza]

thanks scott. can you expound more on visual management ? we are into manufacturing jewelry.

I saw a youtube video of lean manufacturing which covered very briefly visual management. Topics about visual aids to help restocking inventory with colors and reversing bins. I think you are right, that visual management makes it very easy to identify and absorb information. Hopefully you can provide more information on this. I'm looking for more info on this quote of yours ...

"It's just so powerful to see what's in que, what's in process, what's happening in general, at a glance,..."

[Scott Shepherd]

Harry, I'll give you my definition of it, which may or may not be the actual definition. It's been a while since I read anything about it, so I'm dusting off brain cells to pull this info out

Visual management is a way to manage just about anything. It forces you to take things out of the computer or filing system and get them out in the open for all to see. A real life example would be a production report or schedule. Typically the manager or supervisor has a printed copy of a schedule or order book. So someone from another department comes down to check on the status of the order. The production manager is in a meeting, so they don't find anything out. Next step, they go to the next person that might know, and ask them. They don't know, but start looking for the production manager to ask him. He's in a meeting. Keeps working it's way around, so in the end, you can easily spend 1 hour of various people's combined time, just trying to ask a question about a schedule or order. Other people may have access to the same information as well, but it's either buried on a computer where people can't access it, or it's in someone's stack of paperwork on their desk. You can spend countless hours on stuff like this.

Take a magnetic dry erase board, put the schedule on that, use color coded magnets for the progress. Green means everything is okay, red means there is an issue. Now, the person walks to the same shop floor, they don't have look for anyone. They look up, see it's green, see the delivery date, and they return with their information.

The basic principle is if you make it visual, then there is no need for all this useless interaction caused by locking things away in reports or schedules. A computer system is great, but if only one person can access it, how effective are you in using the power of it?

We color coded job packets by the week. So you could walk to the shop floor any Monday morning and if you were looking at job packets, which hung next to the machines, then you could easily see what was left over from last week. You could immediately identify it just by looking. If all job packets were the same color, you could walk by a late or problem job 100 times and you'd never know it was a problem.

I was told by some trainers that your system should be understandable by an 8 year old. If you can walk an 8 year old through your shop and they understand the process, then you have done well. If it's more complex than that, you still had work to do. We actually borught kids through in a regular basis and asked them to explain our system to us, and they actually could.

You should be able to stand in your shop and tell if there is a single problem with any job or person in the shop at that moment.

Make any sense?

[Roger Myers]

Harry...this is a significant part of what I am responsible for on a global basis for my company...pm me with your e-mail and I can help.
Roger

[Tom Delaney]

Harry - another example ... in a prior life I was CFO of an electronic manufacturer. We issued batch orders to the production floor and then 'eventually' they found their way to finished goods. The problem was that sales engineers kept pushing their orders to the front of the que and the cycle times of inventory flows got all messed up.

We simply changed the color of the work order sheets weekly - and posted the colors on a board in each production floor. If you walked thru the work area and saw a purple sheet and knew that this week was green - you could look at the 'board' and know if the purple was one, two, three weeks old and start questioning it. After a month or so... color consistenty became the norm because everyone knew old colors raised concerns.

[Scott Shepherd]

I think the term for what visual management helps clean up all the "Muda". Muda is the Japanese term for "anything that does not add value" or something like that. So if you can make it all so people know by looking, they don't have to go ask.

Also, if you can visually schedule your shop floor, you'll cut out the people who go looking for the boss to get their next job and the boss isn't there or is in a meeting, so they just wander around until they find him.

Put it all visually and the people can somewhat manage their own work flow.

It's a lot more to it than what we have mentioned here, but that's one of the powerful parts of it.

Tom, great example of real world use of it.

[Harry Radaza]

great posts guys! I'm excited already. Although first things first, I have to do some major cleanup. Then do the bin systems for the inventory.

So it would be natural then for mondays to have leftover colors from last week maybe right?

Also, we have been doing more of a push system for the production line. Batching and batches are waiting. What would be the easiest way to explain the difference between a push and a pull system as even I cannot somewhat really discern a big difference between the two as seen in a production line. Is it more of just smoothing out the processes so the widgets doesn't "wait" for the next production line?

And as far as visual colors go... do I assign a color due for each week (example, jobs due on first week are red, second week are blue)? Like that? If thats the case, then the due dates aren't really very specific as a due date can fall on the teusday of the first week. by the time it is friday of the first week, it is overdue, but still can't be identified since it still is conforming to the correct week color?

[Scott Shepherd]

Harry, let me say we didn't follow anything to the book. We made it our own system that worked for us and our company size. I'd say it's a big mistake to follow everything you read point by point. Use the principles and let your employees help refine the details and the system will be your own and it'll work for your company. I was told to implement it, read books, went to training, went to some very large companies (Danaher owned companies), and studied what they were doing. Came back, told them we needed to spend $5000 on magnetic dry erase boards and other things and got shot down in flames and was told I had zero dollars to spend. So we had to make it our own and we did.

As for the color coded system, we certainly had orders due on Monday, Tuesday, Wednsday, etc. So let's say the color for this week is Blue, next week is green. Each workstation would have a board for scheduling their work. That was the Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday due date information. The people at the cell were responsible for maintaining those details. The colors for job packs was more of a visual for everyone, including supervisors to make sure things didn't slip between the cracks. If you wanted to stop by a cell and look at their current job board, you'd see something more like a job listing, a red,green, or yellow dot, and maybe a note. For instance if they had a job coming up next and they knew they didn't have the tooling or material, they would put a red dot on the board and put a note "Need material". That way they have listed a problem situation, and now it's up to the supervisor to make that problem go away and back to green. On Monday morning of the next week, which would be green packs, there should be no blue packs left. In fact, towards the end of the blue week, you should be working on green packs.

We had a huge discussion on whether the color matched the due date for the job or the release date of the job. After working through it, the color needs to make the due date, not the release date. Some jobs take a few days to complete, so you wouldn't want to make that the release date color, it would need to be the color of the due date.

When I got there, we had job packs that had been open for 4 years. Yes, 4 YEARS. Still active sales orders, open 4 years, and the average time it took to complete an order was 35 working days. We had 45% on time delivery. After we implemented all of this, we had 99% on time delivery and the average time a work order was open was 4 days from opening the order to it shipping. It really is a miraclous system if you have people who buy into it. We could have done better, but we didn't have senior management buy in.

Want to know the best way to make your products? Ask the people who make them and listen. That's the best advice I can give. No one knows how to do things better than those who have to do it. The problem is, most management ignore them, so they shut up. Ask them, listen, and even if you know they are wrong, let them try it, and they'll figure out it's not the best, and they will discover the best way on their own, which means they will own the process and they will make it happen.