Line balancing is one of the important methods for improving your production system. The idea is to give every process the same workload so all processes are busy all the time. However, there are cases where it may be better NOT to balance a line. This post will look into when and why you may choose not to balance your line.
Material Flow
Toyota’s Six Rules for Kanban
The kanban system is the most famous way to establish a pull system. As part of their guidelines for kanban, Toyota has established Six Rules for Kanban. They can be found, for example, in the 1973 Toyota Production System Handbook. This blog post describes these six rules, based on the Toyota handbook. While these rules are all true, they are in themselves not sufficient to establish a kanban pull production. Nevertheless, this post will show you these six rules.
How to Convert a Job Shop into a Flow Shop – Part 2
Turning job shops into flow shops is not easy. This is my second post explaining such transformations as I try to help you in improving your shop floor from an (always) messy job shop into a much more efficient flow shop.
How to Convert a Job Shop into a Flow Shop – Part 1
Job shops are always very difficult to manage. As I described in my previous posts, the irregular material flow causes fluctuations that are very hard to contain. In my view, the only true fix for a job shop is to convert it into a flow shop. In this post I will talk a little bit about how you approach the idea of converting a job shop into a flow shop … although this is not always possible. However, in many cases it is possible to increase flow-shop-like segments, even though the whole system is still a job shop.
Why Are Job Shops Always Such a Chaotic Mess? Part 2
Job shops are a mess. Period. The increased and uneven levels of inventory cause a host of other problems. In my last post I described how these inventory imbalances are caused by irregular material flow, how subsequent safety buffers increase inventory even more, and how this causes staff to change their workplace irregularly in a job shop. In this post I will continue the long list of ills in a job shop with staff changeover losses, extra searching and organizing, fluctuating lead times, and general un-plannability of job shops.
Why Are Job Shops Always Such a Chaotic Mess? Part 1
Job shops have a strong tendency toward chaos. Even well managed plants struggle to maintain order in a job shop. This is due to the inherent nature of a job shop, and there are no good solutions to manage job shops. The only good way to improve a job shop is to turn it into a flow shop. I will talk more about such changes later in this short series, but first let me explain why job shops are always a mess.