The Seven Types of Waste (Muda) – Now with 24 More Types of Waste Absolutely Free!

Seven Trash Cans Labeled

One popular and well-known concept of the Toyota Production System is the elimination of waste, in Japanese also called muda (無駄). It is one of the three evils of manufacturing systems, the others being unevenness (mura, 斑) and overburden (muri, 無理). In this post I would like to go through the details of waste with you. This includes the traditional seven types of waste – of which I am a big fan. For completeness sake I also included a lot more types of waste I have come across in industry. However, you have to decide yourself if these additional wastes are not themselves a waste.

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Bottleneck Management Part 3 – Bottleneck Decoupling and Capacity Improvement

Nine empty green wine bottlesBottleneck detection and management are important in managing or increasing your production capacity. In the first post of this series I talked about fundamentals and improving utilization. The second post looked at the impact of planning on the overall production capacity.  This final post in the series will look at the effect of decoupling and the actual process capacity improvement.

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Bottleneck Management Part 2 – Improve Bottleneck Planning

Eight empty green wine bottlesBottleneck detection and management are important when managing or increasing your production capacity. In the first post of this series, I talked about fundamentals and improving utilization. This second post looks at the impact of planning on the overall production capacity. A third post looks at Bottleneck Decoupling and Capacity Improvement.

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Bottleneck Management Part 1 – Introduction and Utilization

Seven empty green wine bottlesIn the past I’ve written a few posts with some nifty methods on how to find the bottleneck (The Bottleneck Walk – Practical Bottleneck and The Active Period Method), and some warnings of which methods don’t work. In this post I would like to go into more detail on what to do once you find the bottleneck! Due to the length of this topic, I have split it into multiple posts. This first post gives an introduction and goes into more detail about increasing utilization. The next post talks about planning. A third post looks at Bottleneck Decoupling and Capacity Improvement.

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Quick Changeover Basics – SMED

Formal Place Setting
Set up basics

One popular approach to battle waste is to streamline changeovers. Changing machines from one set-up to another is often a time-consuming exercise. Hence, in lean manufacturing, reducing changeover times is a well-known method for improving efficiency. In this post, we will go through the basic approach of improving changeover time, also known as quick changeover or single minute exchange of die (SMED).

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Top Three Methods on how to Fudge Your OEE

How to fudge your OEE!
How to fudge your OEE!

The Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) is by far and wide the most lied-about and fudged measurement on the shop floor, both intentionally or by accident. This post tells you the top three different ways how an OEE is fudged, so you know which OEE to trust and which one not.

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What is OEE? – Definition of OEE

What is an OEE?
What is an OEE?

OEE, the abbreviation for Overall Equipment Effectiveness (or sometimes Overall Equipment Efficiency), is a measure of the utilization of a machine. It is frequently used on the shop floor, often determines part of the performance-based compensation of the managers, and is by far and wide the most lied-about and fudged measurement on the shop floor.

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