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Lean Production

By on April 16, 2012 in General, Lean Six Sigma, Uncategorized

Toyota is the most documented Lean Company, talking about Lean Production.

 

1991 – The machine that changed the world – This was the first time Toyota opened it’s doors to external consultants based on the TPS (Toyota Production System) developed by Womack and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The 5 Steps to Lean” (specify value, identify the value stream, make the value flow, let the customer pull, pursue perfection) were defined in this book.

1996 – Lean Thinking (Womack and Jones) – Easier to read, still based on TPS (Manu) with Case Studies

1997 – Concurrent Engineering Effectiveness – Jeff Liker and based on some of Toyota’s Engineering Principles

2002 – Lean Enterprise Value  –

2004 – The Toyota Way – Jeff Liker – Business Philosophy and 14 Management Principles

2006 – The Toyota Product Development System – Jeff Liker – based on the product development system not manufacturing. The product development system is the key behind the TPS and this is the first book that explores Toyota’s PDS and this is their main competitive advantage. Easier to replicate the TPS than the PDS. 13 Principles broken down, easy to read and you can dip in and out of the book.

2007 – Toyota Talent –  Jeff Liker – How to develop engineers

2007 – The Lean Product Development Guidebook –

 

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Lean Set Based Engineering

By on April 13, 2012 in Information Technology, Lean Six Sigma, Uncategorized

Detailed design  Variability in the process is reduced here through high levels of  standardisation of skills, processes and the designs themselves.  This helps eliminate waste and rework which allows greater  flexibility of capacity. Detailed standardisation also maximiseslearning and continuous improvement.

Prototype /Tools  Two sets of prototype tooling are usually produced, not to test solutions but to choose the different sub-systems and check their  integration. Engineering changes will not be accepted after this  phase. This is an intensive period for system design  manufacturing and quality engineers.

Set based engineering enables many different solutions for a design can be worked on and matured at one time.  As the development time increase and moves closer to the start of production unsuitable solutions are stopped but kept on file so potentially could be used for the next new product.  The main advantage of set based concurrent engineering is that if the design concept that is chosen fails to meet customer requirements it can be quickly replaced by a robust and mature alternative solution.

Conventional engineering usually starts with the generation of new concepts and ideas too, however the main difference is that the final solution is agreed at a very early stage of the development.  This could be before all the other component final designs are decided/understood.  Therefore, as the design stages mature if problems are found the solution may have to be reworked several times to ensure it still meets the customer requirements.  The major disadvantage of this process is that usually problems are not found until later in the development stages, sometimes as late as after the start of manufacturing.  Fixes problems that occur at this stage is much more expensive as you are now trying to change actual components instead of designs on paper.

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Lean Engineering in Lean Six Sigma

By on April 12, 2012 in Information Technology, Lean Six Sigma, Uncategorized
– Manufacturing has a relatively small influence on the overall cost and quality of the product or service supplied.  Remember the Value Stream?
– When Lean principles are applied across all the functions in the value stream,   true competitive advantage can be gained. This is sometimes known as Lean Enterprise
– Lean Product Development demands an integrated multi-disciplined approach.

A Lean product development process typically has four phases:

    1. Concept  The Vision for the product produced by the programme lead   who is a technical expert  and is responsible for the product   from concept to market
    2. System design   Set based concurrent engineering looks for all possible    problems and tries to resolve them early in the process. ‘Sets’   of possible solutions are generated (diverge) then gradually   narrow as learning and understanding increases i.e. design   converges. Progressively reducing specifications and   resolving ambiguity actually shortens development time.   The system design team will be multi-functional and often   located together.
    3. Detailed design.
    4. Proto type & tooling.

 

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Lean Engineering

By on April 12, 2012 in Information Technology, Lean Six Sigma, Uncategorized

Manufacturing has a relatively small influence on the overall cost and quality of the product or service supplied.

Remember the Value Stream?

When Lean principles are applied across all the functions in the value stream, true competitive advantage can be gained.

This is sometimes known as Lean Enterprise Lean Product Development demands an integrated multi-disciplined approach.

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Why Lean Development ?

By on April 9, 2012 in Information Technology, Lean Six Sigma, Uncategorized
  • Improving your service and manufacturing systems can only give you limited gains – this is only half the opportunity
  • There is more scope of improvement opportunities if you target the engineering of your service, products and process’
  • It can be more challenging as it is not as easy to see waste and flow
  • Many organisations have implemented lean and explored opportunities in all departments (design, purchasing, engineering, finance, HR etc)
  • They feel that this is what gives them an edge over their competitors
  • Assist in achieving swifter new products development

E.g., Toyota, Ford, Nokia and others,

We understand that we are not Toyota !!!!  However, it is important to understand some of the main differences between the Toyota culture and conventional business cultures when they develop new products as it will help you see where we can make changes to grow stronger as a company.  Also, it will enable you to understand where development systems have originated from.

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Lean Engineering in Lean Six Sigma

By on April 8, 2012 in Information Technology, Lean Six Sigma, Uncategorized

Lean Six Sigma challenges for Service and Product Development are

  • Short life cycles for service offerings, products and technologies
  • Integrated development and quality approach with suppliers
  • Customer expectations becoming more demanding
  • Technology (hard/software) becoming increasingly complex
  • Extremely high requirements for service and manufacturability
  • High impact of poor OTOQOC performance on confidence
  • High costs of development of complex services and products
  • High cost of post design changes, amendments & failures

Short life cycles for both products and technologies.

[Comment: This requires dynamic changes in product designs be managed at the sub-assembly level and coordinated across product lines to gain the most synergy for our development efforts.]

Customers have rising expectations for quality of total service [Comment: Customers don’t care if the problem is a handset or service provider.]

Increasing number of product development projects.

[Comment: Nokia has chosen to compete in all technology areas.  Since technology has not yet consolidated around one or two standards, we face the need to innovate and refresh all product lines on a regular basis.  Most of our competitors are not attempting this same approach.]

Products must be capable of manufacture in the millions.

[Comment: Mistakes cannot be made in production, right the first time is essential or we will not effectively compete in this business.]

Reliance on component parts quality from suppliers.

[Comment: We do not control our own destiny for quality but must seek exceptional partners who can contribute to our overall effort on behalf of our customers.]

Software is complex and interoperability is essential & interoperability is essential.

[Comment: Again, “right the first time” is the rule for software as well as hardware.  We also rely heavily on standards and industry partnerships to assure that we maintain seamless integration between hardware manufacturers and service providers.]

 

 

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Lean Six Sigma is applicable outside volume manufacturing

By on April 7, 2012 in Information Technology, Lean Six Sigma, Uncategorized
Volume manufacturing (automobiles) is where Lean thinking and tools were developed.
We use a volume manufacturing exercise (VSM)  to learn the techniques – we can visualise ‘things’ easier.
But Lean is not a ‘manufacturing’ concept, it is a volume concept.
Wherever you have volume you have processes which are dynamic.
Lean is being applied outside manufacturing; the potential is huge since for an advanced industrial economy:-
–80% non-manufacturing
–and of the 20% that is manufacturing, only 20% of that has prices driven by direct manufacturing labour.
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Lean Six Sigma with Poka Yoke

By on April 6, 2012 in Lean Six Sigma, Uncategorized

‘Poka Yoke’ is a technique for eliminating errors, used by Black Belts for solution generation and preparing implementation;

such that it is …Impossible to make mistakes, …Inexpensive, …Very effective, …Based on simplicity and ingenuity.

“poka” means an inadvertent mistake, “yoke” means to prevent, it originates by mr. Shigeo Shingo (1909-1990) in Japan.

Error proofing is a very simple technique.

You should keep it in mind at all times, but particularly when you are designing the solution or the improvement

Ideally you should prevent all possibility of the problem occurring, elmination;

If you can’t do this, you should then try to

  • flag (identify quickly, every time the problem occurs),
  • facilitate (make it difficult to create the problem)
  • mitigate (reduce the effects when the problem does occur)

…in that order!

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Lean Six Sigma Value Stream Mapping

By on April 3, 2012 in Information Technology, Lean Six Sigma, Uncategorized
During the Lean Six Sigma projects the Black Belts we learn them mapping a value stream, using symbols we understand, we have identified ways to reduce Lead time.
This means that the time spent on value add activities as a % of total time spent is increased,
But we haven’t changed any of the value add activities. We haven’t bought new high tech expensive equipment or tried to get people to work harder, we have simply improved the system.
We haven’t calculated benefits but you get the  feeling that the ‘future state’ system will perform better for OTOQD and cost.
We used a volume manufacturing example because it’s easier to visualise value streams with physical things; now let’s look at non-manufacturing.
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Lean techniques for Lean Enterprise

By on April 2, 2012 in General, Lean Six Sigma, Uncategorized

There is a long list of techniques that characterise the flow, pull and perfection parts of the Lean idea .

Notice how must time is always given to ‘Quick Changeover’; this is important since whilst things are stopped, the value stream is not flowing

Notice also that there isn’t any “Do this!”,  rather what we learn are techniques to improve the flow of value streams .

If you can’t flow then pull is the next step .

And you can not do it all at once, so every improvement is a step on the way to perfection, but you never get there .

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