In this series on how to understand a shop floor, I talked a lot about the physical shop floor—which in my view is the more important part. However, as mentioned in my last post, looking at already collected data also gives a lot of insight into the shop floor. Depending on the aspect you are interested in, data may be the only way to grasp the situation. Hence, this post will look deeper into how to work with data to understand the shop floor.
Christoph Roser
Different Aspects of Seeing a Shop Floor—Gemba vs. Data
In my last three posts I showed you how I look at shop floors, starting with some general guidance (FOCUS!) and going into detail through the different aspects of what I try to observe on the shop floor (5S, visual management, waste, unevenness, overburden, and safety). This usually gives me a reasonable overview of what is going on on the shop floor. However, this is not all I do. For projects, I may have project specific observations (e.g., when I do a SMED project, I observe in detail the actual changeover). But beyond that, there is another source: the available data! Hence, this post will compare information you observed yourself on the shop floor (the gemba) vs. data obtained by others or by computers.
Different Aspects of Seeing a Shop Floor—Unevenness, Overburden, and Safety
This post continues my series on how I try to understand an unfamiliar shop floor. In the last post I talked about how to see visual management, 5S, and waste. These are usually easy to see. This post continues with unevenness, overburden, and safety, which are usually harder to observe.
Different Aspects of Seeing a Shop Floor—Visual Management, 5S, and Waste
In my last post I looked at some general tips on how to see the shop floor. Most of them involve focusing on the right areas of the shop floor, and avoiding interesting but not relevant technical details. This post will discuss different aspects that can be observed. Here, too, try not to see everything at the same time. This will make you like a young tiger hunting ducks; if he tries to catch them all, he will catch none.
Different Aspects of Seeing a Shop Floor—Introduction
I am in the lucky position of seeing a lot of different shop floors through my work. This requires me to quickly understand what is going on on the shop floor and to estimate how well the shop floor is managed. What my hosts tell me and what I see unfortunately does not always match. In this series of posts I would like to go through my steps for understanding the shop floor to form my own opinion on the production system.
Luxury Car Assembly at Audi and Daimler
Recently I had the chance to visit the high-end luxury car assembly lines of two German car makers, Audi and Mercedes, making the Audi A8 and the Maybach respectively. The feel of these plants is more about craftsmanship than mass production, quite different from “normal” cars.
How to Pace Your Assembly Line
An assembly line is a manufacturing process in which a product is built in a step-by-step sequence. One of many decisions when installing an assembly line has to do with its pacing. When should you use a pulsed line? When a continuously moving line? And when is an unstructured timing best? This post will look at the pros and cons of these options.
Keep Calm and Stop the Line—Part 2
In manufacturing, a common sentiment is that the line (or generally the process) must run. There is some truth to that, but—counterintuitively—for a system to run well you need to know when to stop it too. This is my second post in a series giving you an overview on when it may be better to stop the line rather than keeping it running (and making everything worse). Keep on reading!