Four Stages of Manufacturing Improvement
Medium sized manufacturing organizations face a unique set of challenges in striving for operational excellence. They are not large enough to afford staffs of Black Belts and MBAs. They are not small enough for the key managers to be part of the same family or college class. They must evolve their way to excellence. GP Deltapoint's successful clients have progressed through the stages below. Where do you stand?
1. Starting Out: What's Lean?
In the early stages, companies focus on waste elimination. Quick changeover (SMED), continuous flow, Five S and Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) are implemented, often with the help of Rapid Improvement or Kaizen workshops. Expect that each of your employees, both in the office and the plant, will have actively participated in five or more events over a two year period and for up to one in ten managers to be engaged full time in process improvement.
2. Stepping up the Pace: Core Change
As current processes become leaner, leading companies dig into product and process design to improve the internal value of product development, examining how to balance marketplace needs with improved manufacturing processes to provide a competitive edge.
Improved products flow from such tools as Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) and Production Preparation Process (3P) that codify and standardize development efforts.
3. Analytical Excellence: Fast Thinking
While Six Sigma can be implemented independently of Lean, the two are better as complements to each other. Six Sigma is one of a family of organized, multi-step problem-solving methods. Quality Improvement Story (QIS) emphasizes visual communication and team involvement for deviations from standard work. The DMAIC method from Six Sigma encourages the use of analytical tools such as Designed Experiments to solve more intractable process problems.
4. Standardizing success: Re-Humanizing
Analysts and leaders are essential in a drive for improvement. But the gains can only be held if the production workers own and in fact continue the development of the improvement effort. Standardization is key to success here: but not a rigid adherence to engineers' rules. What is needed is a continuously evolving agreement to work in the best way; teach everyone to follow the agreed methods; monitor themselves for variation and failures; and then change the standards, starting the cycle again.
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