"A Foundation for Continuous Improvement"
Circuits Assembly
July 2007, pp. 50-51
The author of this article is an Executive VP for Solectron, which in 2003 "dedicated itself to becoming the Toyota of the EMS industry. Combining Lean manufacturing principles from Toyota with the quality rigors of Six Sigma, we created the trademarked Solectron Production System."
Solectron focused on five areas in their deployment of their production system:
- Establishing a Lean culture—Solectron realizes the importance of Lean manufacturing being embedded in the company culture from senior management to the shop floor. Every day, a kaizen event takes place at one or another of Solectron's sites. A Kaizen Promotion Office has been set up.
- Leveraging the power of the visual factory—Visually seeing problems and taking action has reduced manufacturing rework by 75%. Three key methods used are sequencing boards (to view customer demand and material availability), production andon (electronic displays of real-time performance), and lookout towers (for supervisors to see the production floor to identify abnormalities or inefficiencies.
- The importance of combining Lean and Six Sigma—"Lean identifies inefficiencies and defects in the manufacturing process, addressing speed, flexibility and quality, while Six Sigma's data-driven analysis delivers precision and accuracy."
- Kaizen—improving work processes—Solectron adopted continuous flow U-shaped production lines to reduce material handling, improve quality, have less WIP, and have faster changeovers.
- Leaning out the supply chain—This is an essential step to assure quality and reliability of components.
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