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IndustrialManufacturing Process Improvement: Eliminating waste in waiting
Whenever your parts, materials, or finished goods aren’t actively being worked on, or being moved somewhere, they are waiting. While most companies treat this as “inventory”, or “work in progress”, Lean principles consider this a form of waste.
How is waiting a form of waste? Lean manufacturing focuses on delivering to the customer. When parts or finished goods are sitting in your factory or warehouse, they are not providing any value to the customer. They have also cost you time and money. Therefore, they represent an expense to you. While many companies like to consider inventory as an asset, they really don’t represent any value to you or a customer until they are delivered and paid for. You also have waste when a machine, or an operator, is waiting to receive parts to work on. If you run an eight-hour shift, and an operator waits an hour for parts or raw materials to be delivered, you’ve lost 12.5% of the benefits of that worker for the day. That’s time, and opportunity, that you can never get back. You don’t necessarily want every workstation running at 100% capacity all day – that can lead to excess inventory, another form of waste. However, if you have finished goods to be delivered, you don’t want to leave people idle who could have been performing their work on them. How can you decrease the waste of waiting? One common way to reduce waiting is to plan your production steps to run as a “pull”, instead of a “push”. When you do this, you consider the final stage of the process as a customer requesting work from the previous stage. However quickly it can complete its task is roughly the maximum that you want the previous workstation to deliver. This way, you don’t have large piles of inventory sitting around. Be sure to consider delivery and customer demand as part of your process. If you run your machines at peak efficiency, but you don’t have enough customers, you end up with a warehouse full of finished goods (that cost you time and money to produce). When moving parts from one workstation to another, you can decrease the size of your batches to decrease the amount of time spent waiting. Let’s say that you have two machines involved in producing an item. The first machine makes one part per minute, and you deliver a batch of parts to the second machine once the first machine has finished making 100 parts. In this situation, the first part waits 99 minutes until the second machine works on it. You may also have the second machine sitting idle, if it can complete its task faster than the first machine, but it hasn’t received any parts to work on. If you decrease your batch size to 25, the parts spend less time waiting, and can be worked on quicker. This can lead to faster delivery of finished goods (assuming the second machine works as fast as or faster than, the first machine). Of course, you need to consider setup time for the machines and the other demands they may have on them. You can talk about... Manufacturing Process Improvement: Eliminating waste in waiting Tags: • excess inventory • workstation • waiting • waste • manufacturing • customer demand • process improvement • production steps • lean manufacturing • raw materials • manufacturing process • work in progress • inventory • finished goods • Related articles:
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