Organize Your Production Sequence – 1: Project Shop

There are different ways to organize your shop floor. You surely know the flow shop and the job shop. There is also a project shop (with many variants of names). While the flow shop is in many cases the ultimate goal, each shop has advantages and disadvantages. Let’s look at them in more detail, starting with the project shop.

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Pay Attention to Details – Operator Training at Toyota and Scania

Watchmaker
It’s all in the details…

Often, implementing “lean” means management is picking the latest lean-related buzzword and telling their people to implement it. This is wrong on so many levels. For one, a lean project should always start with a problem, not a solution. On another level, good manufacturing is all about the nitty-gritty details. Both normal operations and improvement projects need a lot of attention to details. Unfortunately, this is frequently lacking in many companies. In this post I would like to show you the level of detail for operator training in some excellent companies.

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Corporate Culture on Quality Starts at the Top – A Small Anecdote on Organizational Blindness

Six Forks
Notice something?

Quality starts at the top with management. Top executives like to talk about quality, but employees below usually know very well if the manager only talks the talk or also walks the walk. Words are cheap. Quality (and pretty much everything else that is important) requires attention by management.

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Lean is Zero Defects? – I don’t think so!

Zero Defects?If you work in manufacturing, sooner or later you will find someone who claims that lean manufacturing is all about Zero Defects. Or Zero Inventory. Or Zero Lead Time. Or Zero Whatever. This is bollocks! Zero Defects was a management fad from the 1960s that pops up regularly every now and then again. In this post we will look at what Zeros there really are in lean manufacturing – if any.

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