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INDUSTRY
- August 2001 by Dr. Arlie Hall A
Manufacturing Failure Formula A former manufacturing systems engineering student, Jon Little (not his real name) recently invited me to visit with him at a manufacturing site where he is currently doing his masters thesis research. Before I visited the plant with him, he gave me his interpretation of the current situation. Jon said, “There is not enough information on the shop floor for me to be able to tell how these people get a job out the door. It looks like one big job shop to me.” We scheduled a time and I showed up as planned. As I stepped into the lobby of the organization I thought, “This place is sure nice. Here is a nice carpeted, living room–style, comfortable place for visitors.” My first impression: “Jon must be mistaken about this organization being disorganized.” We stepped into the “factory.” As I took in the first breath of air, it felt like my body temperature went up to about 110 degrees in less then ten seconds. I thought as I walked along listening to Jon, “Can I survive this tour without having to head for the 72-degree office area?” Jon had told me during our initial discussion, “The employees on the shop floor don’t seem to have too much leadership. They just figure out what to do on their own.” As I walked along in the “sauna” environment of the factory I thought to myself, “The leadership is spending too much time in the office area where it is comfortable.” Jon knew the technical details of each operation and understood how the machines and the people produced products at each operation. But he could not figure out how things finally got shipped to the customer within an efficient delivery schedule; he knew that most orders were late to the customer. The linkages of visible communications from operation to operation were too confusing for him to understand how the organization built some 500 different products. He was correct in his assessment. It looked as though the place had just evolved over the years without much engineering purpose other than Frederick W. Taylor’s idea, “Build large batches in order to capture employee and machine efficiencies.” As Jon and I walked along I found we were “swimming in a sea of inventory” but we were unable to determine which way the current of the sea was going. Two
types of overproduction Excessive process delays occur in two ways. (1) Organizations can have quantitative process delays resulting when defect rates are overestimated, which results in excess production. (2) Scheduling process delays occur when production proceeds ahead of schedule. This can occur when organizations decide to “build ahead.” Lot delay is best described as a “batch” of material sitting beside a machine waiting while only one item from the batch is being processed. It is a pickup-process-store operation. This results in two containers of parts in storage, one on each side of a typical machine. The shortest manufacturing cycle time is achieved when one part is made then moved to the next operation in a continuous flow process. The maximum storage between operations should never be more than one. The test for efficiency is quite easily determined. The larger the work-in-process inventory, the greater will be the inefficiencies of the organization. A manufacturing failure formula is a strategy that builds larger and larger batches in the name of efficiency. The organization, sooner or later, drowns in its own sea of inventory.Body Copy goes here
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