How a Lean Manufacturing Consultant Identifies Waste
Over time incremental changes can creep into organisations, which whilst they provide a benefit at a local level, actually can have a detrimental impact on the entire business. For more detail see our article: Lean Manufacturing Consultants - a Holistic Approach. To address such issues a lean manufacturing consultant will typically analyse the processes which need improving.
For example: in order to improve the machining processes required to manufacture different types of rotors for pumps, a lean manufacturing consultant will often begin by flow-charting the manufacturing routes of representative types of each family of pump rotor using say ASME (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) flowcharting symbols. These identify added-value "operations", (such as machining) and non-added-value activities, (such as: "inspection", "delay", "storage", "transportation" etc.).
Having documented the series of activities in this way, it is often the case that the sum of the value-adding operations (e.g. in this case the total time spent machining the rotors) comes to typically less than 10% (yes ten percent) of the total lead time from the start of the production to the finish. This means that typically for more than 90% of the lead-time that it takes to manufacture a rotor, a rotor will be delayed in queues waiting to be machined, delayed waiting for the right tooling, delayed because when it arrives at another group of machines they have other priorities to work on, delayed whilst being inspected, delays because of poor quality (scrap or rework), being transported between different machines, and sometimes being booked back into stores before reappearing for more machining.
Don't believe it? Try it. For batch manufacturing environments a lean manufacturing consultant will tell you that the best practise benchmark is quoted as only 50%. When the entire process has been mapped a lean manufacturing consultant will know exactly how much non-value-added activity is inherent within it. This can be identified quantitatively, and then the causes can be identified say with simple quality tools such as Ishikawa diagrams.
The Waste Inherent in Functional Manufacturing Architectures
However, as any lean manufacturing consultant will tell you, often the most significant cause of the proliferation of non-value-adding activity is a higher than necessary number of changes in ownership throughout the process. If for example our pump manufacturer's machine shop is organised into functional groups of five different manufacturing processes:
- Lathes
- Grinders
- Milling Machines
- Drills
- Reamers
And our rotors follow the following manufacturing route:
- Raw Material Stores
- Lathes
- Grinders
- Milling
- Grinding
- Drills
- Reamers
- Component Stores
Then as each batch of rotors moves from one set of stores then amongst the five processes and into the other set of stores, there are as many changes of ownership, as there are movements. Each of these teams has different priorities and so inevitably when a change of ownership occurs, the flow of components will, to some extent, be delayed. This of course increases work in progress and the cash needed to fund the additional working capital. Furthermore, when each change of ownership occurs the level of accountability for the performance of the entire end-to-end manufacturing process is blurred; not only in terms of lead time, but also in terms of quality and cost. Across the entire pump manufacturing machine shop, it simply becomes organised chaos, and that costs a lot to manage.
Implementing Cellular Manufacturing Architectures
Often the solution proposed by a lean manufacturing consultant will involve regrouping the machines, perhaps simplistically for the sake of this example, by taking one machine from each of the groups of manufacturing processes and forming them into a multi-functional cell dedicated to producing rotors, under the ownership of one team with the same priorities, immediately eliminates a key cause of considerable delay that is inherent with the original manufacturing system architecture. Instead of travelling in some cases for miles within a general machine shop, a typical rotor moves a few metres from one end of the cell to the other which means any issues with producing rotors, whether they be cost, quality or delivery problems are inherently very visible and much easier for the team to deal with. In fact a cellular manufacturing architecture becomes an ideal environment in which continuous improvement can flourish in such a way that small incremental changes do absolutely no harm and only good to the larger manufacturing system as a whole. Accountability for performance is no longer blurred. By making such changes a lean manufacturing consultant brings accountability into sharp focus. In fact a production cell of this sort behaves like a small business, within a business.
The Practical Benefits of Using a Lean Manufacturing Consultant to Cellularise
Furthermore, by applying the same principles across the other component families manufactured, e.g. pump stators etc. a lean manufacturing consultant can equally dramatically simplify the entire manufacturing system architecture. No longer is it necessary to try to track & prioritise thousands of component movements using sophisticated closed loop shop floor scheduling systems. Each team can track its performance and adjust its own priorities by visually seeing where the components are and if necessary tracking them on a simple white-board. Customer service levels automatically improve. Gone is any need for armies of "chasers". Gone is the need for large numbers of fork-lift trucks and gone is the need for a lot of otherwise unnecessary intellectual horsepower or IT to make it all work. That explains to a large extent why such an environment is referred to as a lean manufacturing environment.
The Financial Rewards of Using a Lean Manufacturing Consultant to Cellularise
Such simplifications of entire systems results in the elimination of an enormous amount of non-value added activity, which means that a large number of the previous resources become unnecessary. In such cases typically manufacturing indirect labour (including store-men, fork-lift truck drivers, chasers, administrative assistants etc.) can be reduced almost entirely, which means head-count reductions of between 20% - 30% are not untypical. At exactly the same time, lead-times and work-in-progress are conservatively reduced by 50%, and often quality problems fall, because visibility and accountability is improved. Oftentimes just the resulting reduction of working capital can pay for the entire programme of change, the including the cost of a lean manufacturing consultant, but with head-count reductions of between 20-30% payback is often substantially larger.
Using a Lean Manufacturing Consultant in Nonn-Manufacturing Environments
Although it may not seem obvious at first, many of the same principles can be applied equally by a lean manufacturing consultant to office based processes, where for example pieces of paper or emails move between different departments throughout their life-cycle. Siimilar benefits can be delivered. See our article: Implementing Lean Manufacturing in Non-Manufacturing Environments.
Other Lean Manufacturing Articles
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