Expanding your Production Line

Better ways to manage your production line (products)

Producing quality products and offering quality services in the most efficient way is today's key to business success. Quality management and improvement has evolved from merely sorting out defective products or spot checks. It is now a comprehensive and essential process that helps innovative companies increase their competitiveness in the global marketplace.

Some factors that account for the popularity of the "lean manufacturing" approach are: an increase of demanding customers; the integrated logistics chain from raw materials to the consumer; the outsourcing of increasingly sophisticated components; and more intensive local and global competition. Also called "lean production", its main goal is to eliminate or simplify work processes that add no value to the product or service from the customer's perspective.

Dedicated to continuous improvement, lean manufacturing seeks to eliminate all forms of waste. Initially developed for the automotive industry, it has since proven itself useful in almost every industrial area.

Lean manufacturing is a demanding approach, the implementation of which can take many years and requires complex techniques. In order to assist small businesses in this endeavor, the Lean Enterprise Research Centre, founded by Professor Jones and attached to the Cardiff Business School in Great Britain, has published a guide identifying the six steps to lean manufacturing.

Waste Management (minimize waste)

There are several sources of waste:

• Overproduction;
• Errors, including manufacturing defects and delivery delays;
• Unnecessary inventory;
• Overly complicated manufacturing processes;
• Excessive movement of goods, people, or information;
• The repercussions of delays affecting people, goods, or information;
• Unnatural movements caused by ergonomically deficient equipment.

Work processes are divided into three categories:

• Processes that add value and should therefore be maintained, if not improved;
• Processes that add no value and should therefore be eliminated;
• Processes that add no value but are integral components of the processes already in place.

In order to quickly increase your productivity, it is recommended that you concentrate first on the second category. The processes in the third category are more difficult to eliminate and usually involve a reorganization of the production process. One example of this is the use of unreliable equipment for mandatory inspection of parts.

Production Planning

Failed efforts to implement lean manufacturing processes are mainly attributed to poor planning and to difficulties with the sequence of steps; rarely are failures the result of poor understanding of the tools or techniques.

To succeed, you will need to:

• Develop critical success factors;
• Define the measures necessary to implement these factors;
• Establish targets for improvement over time;
• Define the key processes requiring improvement;
• Establish links between processes and the corresponding targets for improvement;
• Determine which processes should be mapped on paper.

Some examples of critical success factors are: faster inventory turnover, new customers, and development of new products. Rather than make radical improvements over the short term, it is better to focus on continued improvement over a three- to five-year period, with reasonable objectives to be attained every six months. In the long run the impact will be the same but based on a much stronger foundation.

There are three types of processes:

• Strategic processes, which establish the overall direction without directly affecting the targets;
• Core processes, which have a direct impact on targets for improvement, such as customer acquisition, production cycle management, supplier integration, etc.;
• Support processes, which contribute indirectly to achieving targets, such as human resources development.

To facilitate the involvement of your personnel at the desired time, it is recommended to establish a diagram of those core processes easiest for everyone to understand or that have an effect on the entire organization's operations. Order processing is a good example. A diagram is very useful as it helps you pinpoint the processes that are not valuable.

Understanding the Production Process

Before producing a detailed map of a particular process, you will need to draw up a simplified diagram that includes the key elements of the process. You must be careful to represent the situation as it really is, rather than the situation you consider to be ideal.

This exercise enables you to:

• Visualize the interrelation between physical and information;
• Pinpoint the sources of waste;
• Cover the principles of lean manufacturing;
• Select the members of the implementation team;
• Garner the support of senior managers highly involved at this stage.

The diagram should indicate the necessary actions to ensure customer satisfaction, as well as the physical and information flows. Using arrows, it should then link the physical and information flows that are interdependent. Lastly, the diagram should indicate the time required to carry out each step.

Detailed Process Mapping

At this stage, it is a good idea to involve all the supervisors and employees directly assigned to production. As they know what is going on, these key people are more likely to buy into the lean manufacturing objectives if they have a say in producing the detailed map.

The authors of the guide describe six tools for reducing different types of waste:

• Process activity mapping: waiting, unnecessary or movements, complicated processes;
• Supply chain response matrix: waiting, unnecessary inventory;
• Production variety funnel (separating the steps specific to one product from the steps for all products): waiting, complicated processes, unnecessary inventory;
• Quality filter mapping: production errors;
• Demand amplification mapping: unnecessary inventory;
• Value adding time profile: overproduction.

It is not necessary to ask the employees to use these tools since they are more the province of a production engineer or technician. However, the latter will need everyone's cooperation in order to obtain an accurate map of the process.

Feedback from stakeholders

To eliminate the sources of waste, lean manufacturing requires you to work with suppliers and customers once you have made enough progress internally.

In their relationships with suppliers and customers, companies face two kinds of waste or opportunities related either to supply chain coordination or to supply chain development. In the first case, the relations with suppliers can be improved by both using quality standards or electronic data. In the second case, suppliers' internal processes are the issue; these must be corrected by working with the managers in order to review the equipment configuration or reduce set-up time.

When expanding the map of a process to include suppliers or customers, you can use the tools mentioned above. Use them to identify possible changes in the relationship between partners and also within each partner's internal processes. Begin with the process activity map, demand amplification map, and quality filter map as they will produce the best results.

Implementing the necessary changes

The project team now has all the information to determine intervention. It should establish improvement objectives that can be achieved gradually over a three- to five-year period. You will naturally start with the easiest projects.

Despite your serious planning efforts, you will inevitably have to review the parameters of the selected projects as you go along. The authors point out that even lean manufacturing experts, when faced with a concrete situation, must come up with a detailed plan that incorporates a certain amount of flexibility.

Planning is important. If you have made the effort to clearly understand where the problems lie, your chances of success are much greater.