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Lean has a bunch of advanced but good tools for material delivery, like Just in Time, Just in Sequence, and Ship to Line. Using them is much easier on short distances and with short delivery times. Yet, sometimes you just don’t have the option of short delivery times. This blog post deals with the issues related to long lead times and delivery times.
The lead time of a system is heavily influenced by both the utilization and the variation. There are approximations available to estimate this relation, and one of them is the Kingman formula. In this post I would like to introduce you to this equation and describe the fundamental understanding of it. Luckily, you don’t really need the formula for your daily dose of lean. The equation itself has little practical use. However, this relationship is important for understanding the behavior of your production system. While you won’t use the Kingman formula to evaluate your production system, understanding the equation will help you in tweaking your system in the right direction.
Ship to Line (STL) is yet another technique in lean to optimize your material flow. The idea’s gist is that instead of bringing material to the warehouse, you deliver it directly to the line or to the point of consumption. Like a freshly delivered pizza, you don’t put it on the shelf and eat it two days later. However, for Ship to Line to work, there are a few things to be aware of and to take care of. Let me explain:
Aaaand another year is over. AllAboutLean is now a whopping four years old. Since I started on September 1, 2013, I’ve managed to write 213 posts on lean manufacturing, and my glossary now contains 375 terms related to lean manufacturing. Time to celebrate and to look back.
This third and last post on Just in Sequence details all the things that can go wrong, and talks about how to fix them. The biggest problem is if the sequence of your Just in Sequence part does not match the main component that it should be sequenced to. This happens especially due to defects and rework. I also describe common options to deal with these problems – but be warned: all of them suck. As usual in lean, it is so much easier not to have problems in the first place than it is to deal with them afterward.
In this second post on Just in Sequence, I would like to talk about some details on the actual sequencing of parts: when to use Just in Sequence in the first place, which parts to sequence, and how to define the sequence. These are all organizational details to make Just in Sequence work. In my next and last post of this series, I will describe how to handle problems with parts being out of sequence.
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