Lean Manufacturing Green Environment
Ever since the beginnings of industrialization in the nineteenth century, mankind has been working to streamline processes, to eliminate waste in manufacturing, and to always work towards bringing that profit line up and that expense line down. The ideals of lean manufacturing focus on a number of things, the chief of these being the elimination of excess cost and, more recently, a focus on environmentally friendly ‘green’ standards of cleanliness and efficiency. I may have first written about lean manufacturing in my recent post entitled: The Toyota Way but the concept itself is at the core of what I consider sustainability.
The idea of lean manufacturing as a protocol in itself was originated by Toyota in the early twentieth century. Toyota’s process – the Toyota Production System, or TPS – involves two key points, the elimination of waste (in Japanese, muda) and the streamlining of processes (mura). Toyota and other companies who have partaken, knowingly or not, in similar systems are always looking for ways to advance along those tracks.
Lean manufacturing has an especially important focus on automation, and, more importantly, autonomation. With automation, one has machines which do the work of human laborers. Automatic spray painters, electric washing and drying machines, and even early devices like the loom or spinning wheel partake in the automation ideal. Autonomation is ‘smart automation’ – automation which can take place while needing an absolute minimum of human oversight. Toyota has proved to be exemplary in this area, and the Japanese economic culture as a whole leads the world in the areas of cybernetics, robotics, and other forms of autonomation.
The lean manufacturing ideal applies to more than just industrial processes. No matter how autonomous machines and production lines get, humans are still running it all, and a streamlining of the human process is a necessary one for any manager or CEO who wants a truly efficient company. Toyota and other proponents of the lean manufacturing system apply it as well to their company and inter-corporation education. Toyota implements a mentoring system, strongly supported in Japan, which is meant to help bring promising employees up through the system and make sure that the company is run by the most qualified individuals and that, when they get to a high level position, they have already been mentored and educated to be able to fulfill that task. In Japan, this is known as the Senpai and Kohai relationship and is key to making an efficient business structure. Toyota also advocates the use of lean Sensei, which is essentially the use of third party contractors and educators to bring new blood, so to speak, into a corporation’s ideas, to provide unbiased outside advice, to perform tasks which only temporarily exist and for which it would be inefficient or not cost worthy to train a full time employee, and any number of other functions contractors and independent workers seek to fulfill.
Lean manufacturing ideals can be traced back to even before the twentieth century. Benjamin Franklin, in fact, talks about some principles held today in his Poor Richard’s Almanac. We’ve all heard the phrase, “a penny saved is a penny earned,” or, as Franklin put it, “a penny saved is two pence clear.” A key ideal of lean manufacturing is that to improve profits it may be easier to eliminate costs than to simply raise prices. By streamlining processes, inventing new techniques, and eliminating every form of waste possible, both production and the product become cheaper, allowing more room for worker wages and lower prices for the consumer – everybody wins.
One of the greatest examples of this revolution was undertaken by Henry Ford at the turn of the last century. His ideas of mass manufacturing, interchangeable parts, and a quick production line technique made the building of his cars cheap and, in turn, allowed him to sell the new ‘automobile’ at prices most families could afford. Without Ford’s new techniques and standardized production processes, parts would have to be manufactured by hand in small private smithies, making things like cars luxuries only the very wealthy could even hope to afford.
This change in mindsets gave rise to a new type of job – the motion efficiency expert. One worker of this sort made famous by the book and movie Cheaper By The Dozen was Frank Gilbreth, an efficiency expert during the first few decades of the 1900s. He got started in the motion efficiency industry when he worked in his younger years as a bricklayer and noticed that other workers were lifting bricks all the way from the ground onto the wall. His simple solution was to build a waist high scaffolding to keep the bricks on, from which it then became simple to move bricks and build quickly without having to bend down. With this simple change – which eliminated no workers, didn’t effect the quality of the product, and didn’t cost any more – workers could now work up to three times faster. It is this sort of waste that lean manufacturing seeks to eliminate.
Methods like these and innovation on the part of individual workers is a major part of the lean manufacturing ideal. Gilbreth, for example, would tell his clients to find the “laziest person they had working for them” and then would watch that person work. His theory was that lazy people would do only the work absolutely necessary and would thereby be more likely to avoid the excess work more diligent and responsible laborers would do without question. Note that, in the original Toyota formulation of lean manufacturing, Gilbreth would fulfill the role of sensei, an independent outside teacher brought in to provide a new perspective and help things work better.
Nearly all lean manufacturing boils down to the elimination of waste. Toyota’s official formulation gives seven ‘deadly wastes’ of the modern workplace, and designs its business strategies to fight those wastes. These wastes are:
1. Overproduction
2. Transportation
3. Waiting
4. Inventory
5. Motion
6. Over processing and
7. Defects
By eliminating excess movement, product that can’t be used, ‘idle time’ where workers or machinery are not in use, or any of these other items, money can be saved and thereby made, without affecting the price the customer pays at the counter.
The official work that reviewed and first documented Toyota’s TPS or lean manufacturing system was The Machine That Changed The World: The Story of Lean Production, by Womack and Jones. The Story of Lean Production chronicles the ideals and the shaping forces behind Toyota’s methods, and boils the process down to six simple steps. First, the value must be specified in the eyes of the customer. If you don’t have people who are willing to pay for the goods or services you buy, then everything you will do is a waste. The most important part of any business venture is the existence of someone who would be willing to pay you for what you’re offering.
The second step is to identify the value stream and begin to eliminate waste. The ‘value stream’ is a term efficiency experts use to try to determine exactly which processes in a production line actually add value to the finished product. When evaluating a value stream, experts check each step in a process and, if that step doesn’t actually add any value to the final product, that step can be removed. In the Gilbreth bricklaying example, that step was picking the brick up from the ground, and it was eliminated by building a ‘lifting scaffold’ to eliminate that extra movement.
The third step is making value flow at the pull of the customer. A key thing to remember in manufacturing is that what you do and what you sell should be decided by what the customer wants. The more the customer wants what you have, the more he or she will be willing to pay for it. The end result – the delta, if you will – of the value stream is the desires and wishes of the customer.
The fourth step is to involve and empower employees. At the heart of every corporation is the people who work for it. Without dedicated employees, a corporation simply cannot succeed. Loyalty, dedication, and good work ethic can make a far bigger difference than any small mechanical change one can make. This step in the process points out that one can change the machines all one wants, but if one ignores the people working on them one will end up bankrupt and without a company.
The final step is to ‘rinse and repeat.’ No process is perfect, which means something quite simple: every process can be improved. This final step means that, when you get to the end of your value stream and you think everything is working great, don’t stop there. Go back and streamline, and streamline again, and again, and again. The cleaner a process is, the cheaper your product will be. The cheaper your product is, the more the customer will buy from you and not from your competitor. If you can decrease the production cost without decreasing or even while increasing the quality of your product, you’ll have the formula that made men like Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller, Henry Ford, and Bill Gates the wealthiest men on earth. Make that a cleaner more sustainable earth.
Friday, May 25, 2007
