Now is the time for ‘Lean Manufacturing’
The current economic strife calls for cost efficient operations said Darren Bassett, operations manager for FormaShape, of Kelowna, B.C., Canada.
In his presentation titled “Lean Manufacturing: the Path to Survival,” Bassett demonstrated how his company used the Japanese theory of Kaizen, or team-based continuous improvement, produce more product in less time, reduce inventory and more than double the production capacity of plant resulting in lower costs and more profits.
Lean production is not a new concept going back to Henry Ford’s mass production and time and motion studies in the early part of the last century. The concept was taken up by the Japanese in automobile manufacturing in the ‘40s and “for 25 years, North America has been playing catch up,” he said.
The basic principals of Kaizen involving developing teams of employees and recognizing that those employees are experts on your production process. Next, those teams must be empowered to question methods and act quickly to make improvements. “You don’t want to wait till the competition pulls ahead of you,” he said.
The first step in tightening the production process is observation; just standing back and watching the employees at work will identify many areas of “waste” defined by Bassett at any time spent that does not add value for the customer. Another valuable source of information is interviewing employees who know the product and production process intimately. It is also important to conduct time studies to determine exactly how much man power is needed to perform each step in the process.
The idea is to identify actions that do not add to the value of the product but instead might produce defects, wasted motion or time or most important, according to Bassett, overproduction representing a waste of production capacity, manpower and materials.
All this information together is used to develop a TAKT Time, another Japanese term that relates to heartbeat. Bassett defined TAKT time as available production time divided by customer requirements. A simplistic example would be to say two workers have 80 available hours to produce a product and the company can sell 20 of those products each week. Then the TAKT Time, or the time allotted to make each unit, is 4 hours. If the workers can produce more than four units in an hour, production capacity is wasted, if they produce less, then more labor is needed. That is, if there is no waste of time.
After time studies and examination, FormaShape, a company that produces huge water slides, was able to consolidate five work stations into three balancing out the time needed in each of the three areas. A materials team was developed to make sure all workers had the resins and molds needed without having to interrupt production. Once the TAKT time and goals were established, meters were installed throughout the plant to keep workers aware of how the “heartbeat” of the production line was going.
All the changes did not come easily. There was a lot of trial and error in the process and some employee resistance, Bassett said and at first the product quality went up but production when down. But once the Lean Production system was fully implemented, everyone agreed that the improvements were worth the trouble. He did caution that it was important not to layoff workers whose jobs might be eliminated in the process because “it kills the incentive to participate.” He also said it was important to build in a 25 percent buffer when establishing TAKT Time in consideration of employees’ morale.
The Lean Manufacturing process combines old-time production values with a new attitude that Bassett summed up.
“The optimist says the glass is half full and the pessimist says the glass is half empty but the lean manager says ‘I have more glass than I need.’”
COMPOSITES 2010: Discover the Future of Composites Today. February 9-11. Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas.www.acmashow.org
