Value Stream Mapping Cuts Through The Fat
Value Stream Mapping is used to draw out the entire process, identifying the flow and showing the time it takes to move through the system.
Article courtesy of Ottawa Business Journal
By Scott Foster,
Ottawa Business Journal Staff
It would have been impossible for Taichii Ohno and Shigeo Shingo to predict, but their post-war manufacturing techniques were destined to be the subject of an Ottawa conference 50 years in the future.
In post-war Japan, the two Toyota Motor Company executives picked apart the Ford Motor Company's production system, honing in on Ford's shortcomings and making adjustments.
One of their improvements was to design an assembly line that could accommodate new products, something they believed Henry Ford had overlooked.
Accordingly, Toyota incorporated equipment changeovers into its process and got timing down to a fine science, reducing setup times from hours to minutes and seconds. This allowed for the production of smaller batches and eliminated excess inventories.
The buzz phrases just-in-time and lean manufacturing were born.
Today, those buzz phrases are frequently uttered by Craig Cunningham, director of operations at Arnprior-based Zomax Canada Co. and the chairman of this year's Lean Canada Conference.
The conference will take place at the Ottawa Congress Centre next month.
"In the automotive industry, it used to take eight hours to changeover a dye from stamping a car-door part to making a hood," said Mr. Cunningham from Zomax's CD and DVD plant. "So, by really analysing where all the waste of time was, they got it down to 10 minutes."
For Mr. Cunningham, Lean Manufacturing is all about identifying the fat within a process and cutting it out. That fat, or waste, is defined as "anything that doesn't add value as perceived by your customer", he explained. For example, there may be a three-hour changeover required when manufacturing different types of consumer electronics, he said. "Customers won't pay you for the three hours you're down. That's your problem if you're going from product A to product B. They want to pay you to put stuff on a board, not change your machines over."
Mr. Cunningham tells the tale of a local company that addressed this dilemma head-on by reducing lengthy changeover times to less than 18 minutes. The company continues to peck away at other inefficiencies to reduce production times further. One of the ways of doing this is Value Stream Mapping, a method of drawing out the entire manufacturing process, identifying the flow of a product and showing the time required for it to move through each facet of the system, he said. "It's just a simple paper-and-pen technique, but it clearly shows you what's value-add, what's not and how much time it takes."
It's an important exercise, since the biggest source of waste within a manufacturing company usually involves the inventory it produces, said Mr. Cunningham. If companies run in large batch sizes, they are creating waste as excessive inventory mounts up. "So, if they go to a reduced batch size, inventories drop and the product goes through more quickly," he said.
"But it does require quicker changeovers more frequently", which can be solved by technology and more efficient use of existing resources, he added. "The idea is to get stuff more frequently, as you want it. So what happens is I'm not building an inventory of 50 sofas and shipping them en masse. Rather, I would ship them the way your customers want them in the true demand they want."
As a result, a company moves from "pushing" inventory on to the next department, where it stacks up all the way through the process, he said. Instead, the firm concentrates on "pulling" inventory, so it's only making something if the downstream process wants it. "You do all this and products move incredibly fast. You'll see people go from 2-3 weeks, to 2 days," said Mr. Cunningham.
Larry Coté, president of Ottawa-based Lean Advisors Inc., works on achieving such results with companies from a wide array of sectors, including defence, health and engineering. According to Mr. Coté, a company can save 30% or more in production costs if it successfully adopts lean techniques. His company recently worked with a large defence engineering contractor that went from 90 days to four within the first year of applying lean concepts to its production process.
"The major change was the way they viewed their business. They had to look at it from ... the customer perspective. They were able to recognize that there was a ton of waste that either needed to be removed or changed." Mr. Cunningham said the lean approach can also be applied to areas that support manufacturing, such as design.
Rorry Harding, director of engineering at MDS Nordion in Ottawa, has applied the concept in this way, enabling design changes on the company's medical devices to be tracked, approved, processed faster and more efficiently. Using Value Stream Mapping, he determined how many people handled the hard-copy design drawings, the length of time they were handled, and how many people it took to track all the changes. "Now, we meet everybody on a weekly basis and review and improve what has to be done in 1 step, as opposed to (the drawings) sitting on people's desks or being circulated around the company from desk to desk and sometimes between buildings."
Average turnaround times for design changes went from 28 days to 10 days. MDS' engineering group can spend less time on technical support related to manufacturing and more time on product development. It has also reduced the time management spends reviewing, approving, monitoring and tracking the drawings, he added.
The Lean Canada Conference takes place at the Ottawa Congress Centre. It is co-hosted by the Ottawa Manufacturers Network and Materials and Manufacturing Ontario. Companies and organizations on the speakers list include MDS Nordion, Mayo Clinic, Solectron, Industry Canada, Inco and General Electric Corp.