Time Out: Using Visible Pull Systems to Drive Process Improvement
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Time Out: Using Visible Pull Systems to Drive Process Improvement
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Overview
In a series of five logical, carefully structured segments, Smith takes you step-by-step through the entire Visible Pull process, including:
- Making the Decision—helps you decide if Visible Pull is appropriate for your organization through a high-level overview of its goals, resource requirements, and potential benefits
- Assessing and Planning—explains how to identify and assess opportunities for improvement, choose the right tools, and develop a specific plan for change
- Pull Systems—demonstrates how to use Pull Systems as the primary tool for managing time in a process and how to apply them to your specific environment
- Visible Management and Continuous Improvement—describes how to use Pull Systems to institute an ongoing improvement process, build employee involvement, measure your organization's evolving capabilities, and guide your future growth.
Replete with examples drawn from the experience of world-class manufacturers, Time Out in-cludes a full range of simulation techniques, as well as detailed, real-world application methods set within the context of an integrated enterprise.
Designed for manufacturing, operations, and distribution managers, supervisors, team leaders, design engineers, and others concerned with manufacturing processes, Time Out offers an immediate and unprecedented opportunity for truly breakthrough improvement.
Time Out offers a detailed roadmap for dramatically improving manufacturing cycle time in your company by using Visible Pull Systems to integrate and focus the complex array of competing management techniques. The book details how world-class businesses like DuPont, Union Carbide, and others have benefited from implementing cycle time techniques and how you can draw from the toolbox to meet your company's unique needs. With Visible Pull, companies learn how to maximize the use of their manufacturing workstations, allocate resources better, and link time-on-line to business goals. With a full range of real-world examples, simulation techniques, and application methods, Time Out offers manufacturing managers, supervisors, engineers, and others a dynamic new way of raising overall manufacturing performance.
"Wayne Smith has an obvious depth of technical and conceptual knowledge together with a breadth of manufacturing experience rarely found these days. Our members know the genuine article when they see it and Wayne Smith is asked back after every presentation."—William H. King, President, AME Northeast Region.
"The principles set forward in this book apply to every plant. Wayne Smith describes the basic principles of cycle time reduction, Visible Pull Systems, and bottleneck identification and protection, which are easily grasped from the CEO office down to the shop floor."—P. J. Boyle, Operations Manager, UOP LLC.
"By applying the simple, straightforward methods championed by Smith, your organization will see benefits pouring to the bottom line."—Alan Goodman, Corporate Quality Manager, ISP Company.
"Wayne Smith's cycle time reduction strategies and Visible Pull Systems are the glue that unifies all functions of the operation in all critical performance areas. Time is clearly the enemy of efficiency, and this is the best program I've seen to get the organization after it."—David E. Rousse, Vice President and General Manager, FiberMark, Inc.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780471192145 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wiley |
| Publication date: | 01/29/1998 |
| Series: | National Association of Manufacturers , #2 |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.34(w) x 9.29(h) x 1.02(d) |
About the Author
About the NAM
The National Association of Manufacturers is the nation's largestbroad-based industrial trade association. Its more than 14,000member companies and subsidiaries, including more than 10,000 smallmanufacturers, are located in every state and produce roughly 85percent of U.S. manufactured goods. Through its member companiesand affiliated associations, the NAM represents every industrialsector, 185,000 businesses, and more than 18 millionemployees.
The NAM is headquartered in Washington, D.C., and has regionaloffices across the country. For more information on the NAM, callDavid W. Walker, Assistant Vice President, Marketing and MemberServices, at (202) 637-3186.
Read an Excerpt
Time Out: Using Visible Pull Systems to Drive Process Improvement
Wayne K. Smith
ISBN: 0-471-19214-7
Note: The Figures and/or Tables mentioned in this sample chapter not appear on the web. Introduction
Perhaps because I've spent my life involved in it, I consider the manufacturing discipline to be a high calling. All our goods and services come from manufacturing. Our position in the global economy is largely determined by our manufacturing capability. Most innovation is born by the desire to compete and succeed. Consider the pocket calculators we take so much for granted. When I studied engineering at the University of Michigan, all engineering students were marked by the slide rules they carried for doing calculations. The best and most prized, made of bamboo and having (perhaps) 20 scales for doing exotic logarithmic work, cost about $40. With no advance in technology and with normal inflation, that slide rule today would cost more than $200. Yet a fine pocket calculator with business and statistical functions can be had for a fraction of that amount. The drive for manufacturing excellence and financial success has delivered that benefit to us all.
Literally millions of people in this country derive their very welfare from the manufacturing sector. Moreover, they derive meaning and purpose of life from their effort; more waking hours are spent in the execution of their job than any other activity.
If manufacturing is that fundamental to our lives and welfare, we had better do it well! This book is about that, performing the manufacturing function well, and continuing to learn how to do it better. We're going to do that by trying to make a complex subject appear to be simple. It isn't! But if we can learn how to recognize the few really critical considerations, if we can make those considerations visible to everyone, and if we can focus or concentrate on doing those few things excellently, then we will have made complexity and difficulty to appear as though they were simple.
One of the primary points of this book is that success is tied to rigorously following a methodical process. My usual experience is that people try to do too much, that they are not careful about what is critical, and that they therefore don't do anything with any degree of excellence. Little wonder that the bottom line doesn't change.
This book lays out the details of the process that I have found effective, and it does that in depth; nothing will be held back. Your first impulse may be to scan through the chapters, pick out the specifics that excite you, and charge out to do only those. Please resist! To help your discipline and understanding, the process is broken into five logical segments that provide the structure of this book:
1. Making the Decision. This involves a high-level view of the entire process. It is a road map showing where the process will lead, the resource requirements, and a method for estimating what benefits you might expect. After reading this section you should have a good basis for deciding whether to dive in.
2. Organization and Metrics. Establish the direction, metrics, and guiding organization for a Time project.
3. Assessing and Planning. Identify opportunities for improvement by mapping and modeling. Assess opportunities, choose Time tools, and condense the assessment into a specific plan for change.
4. Pull Scheduling. The primary tool in managing time in a process is a Pull System. Unique adaptations and special methods result in successful application within your specific environment.
Visible Management and Continuous Improvement. Use the base provided by Pull Systems to institute an ongoing and focused continuous improvement process. Build employee involvement through employee empowerment. This section ends with an over-all Time Benchmark to continually measure your organization's evolving capabilities, to compare your company to world-class organizations, and to guide your ongoing growth.
Each section includes all the specifics you need, and each ends with a detailed checklist of tasks to be completed before moving on. I firmly believe that you'll maximize your final result if you force yourself to move faithfully through each segment, completing each before you step into the next.
So What? Why Should I Care?
Right now, you may be wondering "Why should I bother to read this? What's in it for me?" To answer that, I'll give you a very high level view of what you can expect to experience if you meticulously follow the road map that this book lays out.
1. You will reorganize a portion of your global business team into a cycle time Steering Team. That team will do the following:
Revisit the critical business issues
Define strategy and revise performance metrics in support of that strategy (The metrics-setting effort is a first key; metrics will guide and measure the detailed execution.)
Identify a four- to eight-person full-time cycle time Core Team
Provide for Core Team facilities
Meet periodically (every 2 - 4 weeks) to monitor, guide, and facilitate Core Team work
2. The Core Team will spend two to three months analyzing the operation on the basis of time trapped in the operation and non- value activities required by the operation. They will develop a Change Plan (including costs and benefits) and present that to the Steering Team. You will gain few benefits (if any) during this period.
3. Assuming the Steering Team approves the Change Plan, the Core Team will require about two to three months to implement those changes. The changes will be shop floor changes aimed at stabilizing, simplifying, integrating, and optimizing the daily operation. Objectives will be in inventory control, capacity optimization, customer service, and quality. You will get only minor benefits during this period-"low hanging fruit" that you can pluck easily and quickly, without interfering with the main project.
4. Upon implementation, you can expect benefits to flow back rapidly and surprisingly. As every implementation is different, specific benefits can't be projected for your case, but with my experience over many implementations, I find the following to be typical benefits:
Capacity: 10%- 20% Gain (by bottleneck optimization) Inventory: 30%- 40% Reductions Cycle Time: 50% Reduction Quality: 5%-15% Increase in Final Yield 23 to 103 Increase in 1st Pass Yield Service: Improved Lead-Times and/or On-Time % Said another way:
$ Benefits 1st Year: 2X-30X project resource costs Some of these benefits will be onetime inventory reductions. Many will be continuing benefits that will roll in every year.
5. At the end of that five- to six-month effort, you will be in a continuous focused improvement mode, extracting waste and time from your process based on information flowing up from an involved and empowered workforce . . . forever. (Cycle time is not a onetime project that is completed from which you move on. It is an ongoing and continuous process for improving the process incrementally by ruthlessly extracting time from it. This implementation will set you up to pick fruit every day!)
If all that sounds appealing to you . . . please read on. Why Haven't I Seen This? (Why Breakthrough Improvement Doesn't Happen)
I contend throughout this book that these techniques are revolutionary, that true breakthrough improvement can result from disciplined application. If that is true, the old question-"If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?"-surely applies. Or, more directly, if these ideas are so powerful, why isn't everybody using them? The answer is that a number of very powerful inhibitors must be overcome. Among them are the following:
The power of the paradigm
Traditional metrics: traditional behavior
Issues of power and control
Power of the Paradigm
Dr. Joel Barker 1 has published extensively on the subject of paradigms, the rules or models that we use to understand and to work with our surroundings and environment. He (and others) have observed that our personal paradigms are so powerful that, when confronted by evidence that our paradigms are wrong, that evidence can be invisible to us. The classic example is the Swiss watch industry. It totally dominated the world watch market when a Swiss researcher invented the quartz watch. As it did not have hands, jewels, a mainspring, and so on, Swiss watch management literally did not recognize the invention as a watch and exhibited the invention publicly as a curiosity without patenting. As a result, within three years the industry had lost some 75 percent of its market and its employment. The industry was devastated by the power of its own paradigm about watches.
The same thing applies to our vision of what constitutes informed management of manufacturing processes. We all have succeeded by applying a certain set of rules. As we have achieved success, these rules have become indelibly written into our set of management paradigms. In the case of senior management, this imprinting process has gone on for more than 30 years. For them to change is to suggest that their 30- year investment has been wrong. (Note: It is not a matter of right or wrong. As long as everyone has the same set of paradigms, everyone is safe. As soon as one company adopts a new and better paradigm, the whole world changes.)
Throughout these discussions, our key words are going to include terms such as simple, visual, manual, shop floor, common sense, real-time, and employee driven. These concepts can be in stark contrast to MRP,2 SQC,3 SPC,4 QFD,5 TPM,6 MIS 7 or computer-driven anything, and centralized anything. A paradigm conflict results, and the security of people involved in any aspect of modern management is threatened. A major objective of this book is to show that a cycle time strategy is not in conflict with any aspect of modern management sciences.
As we discuss application of these concepts, the stepwise process that begins with senior management is intended to avoid the paradigm problem. Starting this process on the shop floor will not produce permanent sustainable change, because unaltered senior management paradigms will lead to management behavior that will effectively cancel changes as they happen. This in turn will cause the shop floor to revert to practices that are in harmony with management paradigms. See Section 2 for more information on senior management's role in a cycle time project.
Metrics and Behavior
Dealing with the metrics that we use to manage our processes is actually a specific part of the paradigm problem. We all grew up (as managers) with a traditional (BAU, or "Business As Usual") set of performance metrics. We have succeeded by applying those metrics; they are a powerful way to describe what constitutes good manufacturing performance. Some of them are shown in Box 1.1.
Please don't chuck this book immediately when I suggest to you that all those cherished metrics from your own past may very well be wrong in today's environment. That is one of the reasons why you don't see these concepts in application: You'll have to give up (or at least alter significantly) those old measures in order to adopt a cycle time approach.
As we work through the sections of this book, I'll suggest a new set of base measures. Among them are those shown in Box 1.2. (Through-out the book, quality will refer to product quality, and Quality will refer to quality in everything done for the customer [recognizing that every-one has a direct customer, in addition to the business's end paying customer].)
If you compare the following two lists of metrics, I think the contrast should be obvious. Many of the BAU metrics encourage production (whether you need it or not) and/or discourage idle time. More production means labor content per unit or fixed cost per unit will be lower, idle time is reduced only by making more, capacity impact of transitions can be reduced most easily simply by making longer runs (which acts to increase total amount made), big, wide, high-capacity production units (which are greatly desired by traditional managers) need to justify their high investment by pumping out the product . . . and so on.
Note what happens when metrics encourage overproduction. If I am a supplier to you, and if I produce faster than you consume, then material piles up between us. As material piles up, each unit of material waits longer (or moves slower). In that condition, assume that I make something that is bad. Several undesirable results occur:
It will be a long time before you find that bad unit.
When you find it, you won't care (because you have a large pile of available material to choose from).
When you find it, I don't care (because I made that last Tuesday and certainly am not doing that now).
The effect is that we are disconnected; cause-and-effect relationships between the two stations will be invisible. If, however, I make some-thing only as you need it, then if I make something that is bad, you will see it immediately; you will throw it back at me, and I have nothing to do except respond to the problem. We are connected; cause-and-effect relationships are obvious. My contention is that BAU metrics encourage disconnection.
However, under our Time strategy, the primary metric is Cycle Time-the time it takes material to enter, move through the operation, become a finished product, and ship to the customer (and perhaps also until the customer sends back payment). The classic formula is inventory in the system divided by the output demand for that material: Ct 5 Inventory/Demand. Note: As manager of an operation, you can't reduce your Ct by simply shoving material downstream; it has to be demanded by your downstream customer. Hence, inventory that you are responsible for is your work-in-process (WIP) plus all downstream inventory until that material is actually drawn into the downstream operation. My conventional symbology includes a circle to represent an operation, an arrow to represent a transport, and a triangle to represent a storage point (see Figure 1.1).
The basic premise of a cycle time strategy is that we WANT to minimize Cycle Time, to understand the reasons for buffer inventory, to minimize inventory (numerator in the Ct formula), to maximize out-put demand (denominator of the Ct formula), and to balance production between stations (to ensure that I supply to you at a rate equal to your consumption so that the pile between us doesn't get bigger). We'll go into great lengths as to how to do that, but part of it is resisting the traditional impulse of emphasizing production and avoiding idle time.
This section is titled "Metrics and Behavior." The connection between the two is that metrics determine behavior; people perform according to how they believe they are measured. Therefore, if you want to change behavior, you must start by changing metrics. Said another way, any spontaneous change in shop floor behavior will be canceled if it is in conflict with management metrics. Traditional BAU metrics are a powerful paradigm because they are the way we in senior management gained our success. According to the paradigm principle, any evidence that suggests that our paradigms are wrong will be invisible to us. Hence, adopting cycle time behavior requires first accepting cycle time metrics and that is very threatening to those of us who have a conflicting history. (See Section 2 for a complete discussion of metrics.)
Issues of Power and Control The dynamics of an organization are dominated by issues of power and control; to many of us, power and control are synonymous with success. Cycle time strategy threatens or redefines power and control in any number of ways. Two examples follow.
1. Continuous Improvement. An essential part of this approach is the concept of continuous incremental improvement. Traditional management approaches improvement from the top down; management identifies and drives improvement opportunities. This book presents a method that starts with capture of detractors on the shop floor and then funnels the major problems upward for resourcing by management. That approach is based on the fact that if you want to involve people, you have to empower them. If you want to empower people, you have to give them the tools/methods to determine or control their own destiny or future.
2. Scheduling. A fundamental of cycle time strategy is Pull Scheduling. A full section is devoted to that subject, but basically Pull is a technique for managing/scheduling the daily shop floor activity by the shop floor people. The prime objective is to link workstations so that each produces in rhythm with and in response to its downstream customer demand to avoid the pileup of material and disconnects. The concept is that it is impossible for a remote agency to respond/react to the minute-by-minute changes that occur, around the clock, on the shop floor. Pull is a mechanism that gives the floor the means for reacting instantly and almost automatically to any unexpected deviations. That is in stark contrast to the MRP approach of using centralized and powerful computer systems for scheduling. Most large organizations now include central MRP organizations charged with scheduling, inventory control, and customer distribution and service. Those organizations can be very threatened by any suggestion that scheduling is going to shift toward the shop floor people: It is a basic issue of power and control.
A later section shows that these Time concepts are not in conflict with MRP, that instituting Pull Scheduling on the shop floor frees MRP and empowers MRP to provide the long-term management perspective that is critical to long-range health and success. To implement cycle time concepts, issues of power and control must be addressed.
Summary: If This Is So Good, Why Don't I See More of It?
Power of the Paradigm. Cycle time strategy conflicts with the good management rules we have learned as we have succeeded.
Metrics. To change behavior, we must first change the things we value and measure; these new metrics are counter to our traditional metrics.
Power/Control. Before implementing cycle time concepts, we must resolve issues of power and control that threaten those very people who must drive the implementation.
Table of Contents
MAKING THE DECISION.An Overview.
The Foundation for Cycle Time.
A Process Overview.
How Will We Know When We're Done?
ORGANIZATION AND METRICS.
The Process Industry and the "We're Different" Syndrome.
Organizing For a Time Implementation.
Performance Metrics.
Other Organizational Tasks.
ASSESSING AND PLANNING.
Getting Started with the Core Team.
Cycle Time Mapping.
Simulation Modeling.
Assessing Opportunity.
Other Tools in the Toolbox.
The Business Plan.
PULL SCHEDULING.
The Pull Concept.
Pull Adaptations for the Process Environment.
Designing Pull Systems.
Additional Design and Management Considerations.
VISIBLE MANAGEMENT AND CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT.
Visible Management.
Linking Visible Management with Continuous Improvement.
Management Structure.
The Benchmarks.
Notes.
Bibliography.
Index.