Offer additional information based on your professional experience or research and Post an article or website and summarize why it might provide further insight for each of the following posts:
Post 1: "At my current company, there is a well-established lean program. My company has locations all over the world so they understand the benefits of lean. The assembly line I am the lead on has had a lot of work put into it. There is a restructuring being done over the next few months and there is a plant closing. This makes it very difficult to identify three initiatives to implement. Since that is the case I am going to cover the last three that were done on my line. The three initiatives that were utilized to be most beneficial were value stream map, 5S, and standardized work. The value stream map was performed to clearly identify every step in the process. From there we investigated all non-value-added processes and removed the ones we could. We also give times to each step to level every step. The goal was to group steps into 7 hours. That is a basic work day. The next lean process performed was 5s. Now since the line has been leveled to maximize flow it is necessary to perform the process of 5s. All the benches need to be set up properly for the new steps. Tools will be organized for point of use and any tool not needed will be removed. The same goes for hardware on every bench. Another benefit will be to make sure all benches have the same basic layout. Since the tools and hardware changes somewhat between benches they will not be identical. As long as they are similar it will make it easy to move from one bench to another. The final step is standardized work. This step is difficult and very time consuming. It took over a year to find the time to complete these. Currently, every operation and variation to that operation has a clear written work instruction. There are pictures and instructions along with the relevant bill of materials that could be needed. This is in the form of a hyperlink to ensure that it is always the most up to date version. It is easy to analyze the results because these have all been done. They were all implemented over a similar time span so it is hard to differentiate which one had the greatest impact. The throughput time decreased dramatically. The starting time was between 85-90 hours. The year-end average for this year is 45 hours. Along with the drastic improvement in throughput, another benefit was quality. With the work instructions created and used the defects reduced. The troubleshooting and checking of work has decreased from 3-4 hours down to less than 1. Most of the time spend now is from part and work that is performed from an external vendor.
Post 2: "Standardized Work
One of the areas that we need to improve on is standardized work. As an automotive company we are becoming more global each year. Other regions other than North America seem to have their own manner in running their plants and designing specific components to a car. Although some of these procedures are good, they are not all the best. The same goes with the standard work in North America, there are some standard work from other regions that can truly benefit us as a company. I would suggest that there be implemented a global team that would have the job to analyze all the standard work and test them to choose one that would be the best for all regions. In this way, our company could follow one standard work and the outcome in terms of quality, performance, and safety requirements of our automotive products will be the same. As a global company we need to assure that we are being lean in all regions by following kaizen projects and standard work that could help us do that. ISO standards are a perfect example of how global procedures which in the end give the consumers' confidence that their products are safe, reliable and of good quality (The Main Benefits of ISO Standards, n.d.).
One-Piece Flow
Working in an automotive company you will find yourself in a plant where there are many processes throughout the floor. Although many of our processes do follow one-piece flow, this can still be improved to eliminate further waste. One of the ways we can improve our one-piece flow cells are by adding more autonomous mechanisms. Autonomous and flexible machinery can help us react efficiently and quickly to customer demands and market changes. Our overall flow can have fewer hindrances due to wasted time of travelling from one station to another and help reduce human error. One piece flow can also help our employee's moral since they gain faster feedback on the product they help create. Working in a work cell also increases the need for cross-training employees within and between the cells and therefor more growth opportunities for employees (Panneman, n.d.). Overall there are many cells that need to be reviewed to improve cycle time on each station and by changing our layout to a one-piece flow can be one of the methods to do this.
A3 Reports
One of the interesting tools that were used in this course was the A3 report. Prior to this course I have never heard or used the A3 Report. This type of report is a tool that can most definitely help our company in finding solutions of current processes that hinder flow, as well as, as bases on how to introduce a lean plan to higher management. I would train all employees that are leaders in cells on the A3 report and will ask them to give an A3 report monthly to help continuously improve on our current process. One of the drawbacks of meeting takt time in our cells is the lack of leaders to try to improve the cell even further. By training them on the A3 report and giving them the assignment to have one every month done on the cell they supervise will be a way to continuously improve their lean thinking, as well as, improve our flow."