Articles

Value stream analysis is an effective way to identify improvement opportunities within a product or service family’s value stream, envision a leaner future state and develop an actionable value stream improvement plan to achieve the future state. It's bread and butter stuff for the lean practitioner. Most folks are well acquainted with the value stream map’s lead time ladder. And many people are familiar with the concept of rolled throughput yield.

The plan versus actual chart is one of the most powerful and simple visual process performance metrics. In fact, it’s a sort of Swiss Army knife of charts in that it not only provides insight into process performance but, by the virtue of its comment field, begs and shares information as to when and why there is a variance from plan. Ultimately, it is about problem identification. The chart is often positioned at the pacemaker process or at the output end of a line or cell (which can be the same thing).

Pick’s Theorem is a simple way to calculate area. This theorem is particularly useful when calculating the reduction of square feet (or square meters) that was achieved by improving a process layout. To use Pick’s Theorem, overlay a sketch of the area that you want to calculate onto a square grid of points. The grid of points should be fine enough that any bend on the boundary coincides with a grid point.

What do bus schedules have to do with a lean management system? Quite a bit…even though, obviously, the notion of a bus schedule i

Let’s suppose there are three BIG potential orders in your sales pipeline. What are your chances that you are going to win an order? This is a question that faces manufacturing and service industries all the time. If they chase too much business, they run the risk of winning the business and not being able to fulfill the request but if they don’t chase any business, they run the risk of being idle.

Plan-Do-Check-Act is the key learning cycle that is at the foundation of lean thinking. But how do you make a good plan, and more specifically, how do you estimate how long the tasks in the plan will take?

If you have historical data, or you can accurately estimate the work content, the task of estimating task duration is very straightforward. But if you are doing something you have never done before, estimating the task duration can be very challenging.

Available time for changeovers per period (T_a∆), also called available time for (internal) set-ups, represents the time per a given period day, shift, week, etc. during which a machine, equipment, or resource (i.e., room) can be changed over from one product to another, prepared for a different medical procedure, cleaned for another customer, etc. T_a∆, is foundational to every part every interval (EPEI), changeover distribution, and kanban sizing calculations.

I remember, years ago, watching my oldest child struggle in his attempt to loosen a bolt. This was one of those all too few, brief, and shining child-rearing moments where I could easily and quickly share some trusty words of wisdom. “Righty tighty, lefty loosey.” I’m pretty sure that my son’s response was somewhere in the vicinity of, “Huh?” Not the effect that I was looking for necessarily. …Nevertheless, I’m going to try to apply the same advice, but to a different subject (totally without threaded parts). Strategy deployment (a.k.a. policy deployment, hoshin kanri, etc.). Huh?

So, you have been asked to lead an enterprise wide transformation. How many kaizen events should you plan on conducting in order to achieve sustained improvement?

A rather simple sounding but often vexing challenge that faces lean practitioners is: What is the optimal physical route for pickups and/or deliveries? This is especially true for a fixed interval, variable quantity material replenishment system design for water spider (a.k.a., waterspider, material handler, mizusumashi, etc.) conveyance. 

Interestingly enough, the same question and logic applies when designing the best neighborhood snow plow route.