Lean for high skilled manufacturing industries
When we think about lean manufacturing we think about car manufacturers, pharmaceutical manufacturers, chemical industries and so on. But in today’s context lean is tried everywhere and almost in every manufacturing industry. Among this are apparel manufacturers, footwear manufacturers are prominent. These industries have a considerable difference to the industries we listed before. They rely mostly on human skills in their manufacturing process. Even though they have many machinery involvements in production, these machinery are not fully automated and requires considerable human skill to operate to get the desired results.
Skill of a person is very hard to measure. It is not constant with the time and more importantly difficult to predict. Even the best skilled worker can perform badly on a given day. This provides an important additional challenge to the lean efforts.
Balancing the workloads in the manufacturing facility based on TAKT time of the facility is not simple. Additional attention must be given to the people working in the facility. With the differences of their performance, changes must be done so that the WIP accumulation will not take place. This will ensure smooth operation of the manufacturing facility. This requires application of visual controls and teamwork. Visual controls will help in identifying bottlenecks. Teamwork is required to smoothen the flow of manufacturing process without getting external help. Having multi skilled people in every team is very important in these kinds of manufacturing industries. In addition having extra machinery within work cells is not a waste in this context.
Below is an example for this kind of workload balancing.
A manufacturing unit has 5 people working in it. All are multi skilled. That is everyone is trained to do other persons job. History of this team suggests that everyone can finish their jobs in 1 minute per piece. So this team is expected to give a single piece as the output in every minute.
But let’s say person who is working in the second work station is creating only 4 pieces in 5 minutes. If this continues there will be a WIP accumulation of 1 piece every 5 minutes near the second workstation. This will reduce the output of this work cell to 4 units for five minutes.
In this scenario people in other work stations probably with some extra skill can help the second work station to pick the phase up to meet the requirement. Then the production can run smoothly. Having extra machine in the work cell is very handy here.
Application of lean manufacturing is different to different industries. Although the concepts are not going to change, execution does.
Skill of a person is very hard to measure. It is not constant with the time and more importantly difficult to predict. Even the best skilled worker can perform badly on a given day. This provides an important additional challenge to the lean efforts.
Balancing the workloads in the manufacturing facility based on TAKT time of the facility is not simple. Additional attention must be given to the people working in the facility. With the differences of their performance, changes must be done so that the WIP accumulation will not take place. This will ensure smooth operation of the manufacturing facility. This requires application of visual controls and teamwork. Visual controls will help in identifying bottlenecks. Teamwork is required to smoothen the flow of manufacturing process without getting external help. Having multi skilled people in every team is very important in these kinds of manufacturing industries. In addition having extra machinery within work cells is not a waste in this context.
Below is an example for this kind of workload balancing.
A manufacturing unit has 5 people working in it. All are multi skilled. That is everyone is trained to do other persons job. History of this team suggests that everyone can finish their jobs in 1 minute per piece. So this team is expected to give a single piece as the output in every minute.
But let’s say person who is working in the second work station is creating only 4 pieces in 5 minutes. If this continues there will be a WIP accumulation of 1 piece every 5 minutes near the second workstation. This will reduce the output of this work cell to 4 units for five minutes.
In this scenario people in other work stations probably with some extra skill can help the second work station to pick the phase up to meet the requirement. Then the production can run smoothly. Having extra machine in the work cell is very handy here.
Application of lean manufacturing is different to different industries. Although the concepts are not going to change, execution does.
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