All postst related to the history of lean, management, manufacturing, and any other topic covered in this blog.
Commercial planes are one of the safest ways to get around. Accidents are rare, and your likelihood of dying in a plane is very small compared to all other modes of transportation. However, this was not always the case. Safety in modern aviation is the result of many improvement iterations. Let’s have a look at how aviation improved one of its aspects, namely the passengers’ knowledge of what to do in the case of an emergency.
In my last post I started to talk about the remarkable increase in the Chinese manufacturing industry over the last decades, and how China is nowadays the manufacturing workshop for the world. Yet, in addition to opportunities, there are also challenges ahead. In my last post I described that it gets harder to catch up on technology the closer you come to the front runner (example chip making), but that there are plenty of opportunities in new industries (electric cars, solar cells). I also mentioned that past quality flaws also still have an impact on Chinese reputation. In this post I will continue with more challenges and opportunities for Chinese manufacturing. This series of posts is a mixture of facts and a lot more opinions, so feel free to disagree.
A lot of the stuff you own comes from China, either as a completed product or with plenty of parts that were assembled elsewhere. “Made in China” is a label you see very often when looking for the source of your products, albeit not everybody is convinced of the quality. In this series of two blog posts I want to look at how China improved its technological know-how as well as its manufacturing proficiency, and what challenges it faces as well as in its opportunities to completely close the gap with the Western world. This series of posts is a mixture of facts and a lot more opinions, so feel free to disagree.
Assembly lines are THE way to do mass production. Yet, with constant regularity people try out to undo the assembly line, only to fail in their endeavor. In my previous post I looked at examples by Volkswagen in Salzgitter, Volvo in Kalmar, and Opel in Bochum, who all tried, just to switch back to an assembly line afterwards. This second post in this series has more historical examples of when people tried and failed to undo assembly lines in mass production.
Assembly lines are everywhere in mass production. From mobile phones to cars to airplanes, almost all items produced in large quantities come from an assembly line. Just look around you wherever you are and try to find a produced item that did NOT come from an assembly line. My general recommendation is that if you can make it on an assembly line, then you probably should make it on an assembly line.
However, assembly lines are not always loved by the workers. Every few years, another—usually European—car maker is in the news about undoing the assembly line in favor of group work, box assembly, assembly stations, and the like. So far, all of these initiatives have dwindled and died, simply because the assembly line is the best! Let’s have a look at the long list of car companies that tried and failed with undoing the assembly line. The assembly line is still king in manufacturing!
Training Within Industry and its modules Job Instructions, Job Relations, and Job Methods are well known. But (thanks to Mark Warren) I just recently learned about another module: Job Instructions for Second-Line Supervisors (nowadays called managers). This is a hierarchy level higher, and the goal is to support and guide the shop floor supervisors on how to use job instructions. Let me dig deeper:
The Toyota Production System (TPS) is the archetype of lean manufacturing. Lean is often used as a synonym for the Toyota Production System, and that is generally quite accurate. It is also sometimes referred to as the “Westernized” version of the Toyota Production System. However, there are some smaller differences in the underlying approach, as well as some larger and often unintentional differences in its application. Let’s have a look!
Fifty years ago, the FAMULUS industrial robot was introduced by the German machine tool maker KUKA. This articulate-arm kinematics industrial robot with six axes was the first of many modern industrial robots. This design is nowadays still the most common type of industrial robot.