Business Management Life

In this article series, we uncover the real purpose behind 5S: to instill a waste eliminating thinking process in our people. 5S is NOT a housekeeping campaign! Since we are told that 5S is the cornerstone of any continuous improvement initiative, like Lean Manufacturing, than why is it the only thing we ask our people to do is clean?

In the past five articles we have followed this line of thinking, exploring the real thinking mechanism embedded within the 5S’. In this article we will consider the waste of conveyance through the 5S lens. When I say conveyance, I mean moving material that is in between stages between points A and B. So we can imagine that this could mean literally, conveying material on conveyors. Or it could mean shipping material from one state to another. We are not talking about human movement, but specifically machine and material movement in stages and batches.

When sorting the waste of conveyance we need to stratify conveyance into needed and unneeded conveyance. Accumulators that excessively protect upstream and downstream processes from variability are unnecessary. This waste of moving material only exacerbates the problem of excess inventory. In fact, because our local processes are efficient independently we typically justify the automation of accumulation. It looks good on the books.

When sorting transportation waste, do we agree that red priority shipments are unnecessary? Here is a good indicator of wasteful activities: tag a red overnight shipped priority items as they hit your dock. By doing so, we can measure the time between tagging and when they are actually used. It is not uncommon to find that the actual lead time between receipt-to-usage is longer than an otherwise normally accepted lead time at substantially less shipping expense. The same is often true of outgoing shipments. Work with your customers, distribution centers and sales groups to truly sort out what is really a shipping priority and what is not.

In order to set in order the conveyance problem we design the process to flow without accumulation, sometimes eliminating conveyors altogether. Often we can drastically shorten conveyors in order to maintain necessary automation of part orientation, for example. In some instances this will mean we need to improve TPM practices. In others, we will need to improve our standardized work practices. In any circumstance, we need to understand why the accumulators are present in the first place - and design them out with robust reliable processes. The reason we do this is to force the identification of waste in the process and force the leadership to encourage further improvements. The more fragile process demands this of us.

In order to achieve flow within our own four walls, we must work closely with our suppliers and customers. The reason is that flow will sensitize the process to variability due to lack of accumulation via conveyance. If we work hard at achieving the reliability required, we can reliably ship products on time, avoiding costly priority shipments.

Murphy’s law says that if we let it go, it won’t flow. So we need to follow-up and sanitize the process from any variability in conveyance standards. Are there ways that will allow accumulation to occur? Are we creating excess inventory and moving it unnecessarily into staging areas for later use? How is our priority shipping cost trending? When we make these spot inspections of the process, we need to understand why variability may exist. This is contamination of the standardized process and must be addressed.

We need to standardize the limits of inventory, the movements and pull schedules so that unnecessary movements are eliminated. This is often best achieved by robust pull and kanban systems. By controlling your process through kanban control, we establish the sort, set and sanitize standards required to achieve level 4S when it comes to elimination of conveyance and transportation waste.

By following up on these pull/kanban standards and training the supervisors in your process on the process inspection standards required, we can always improve the process. Transferring this knowledge to others is vital to continuously improve the process. Always go back to your standards and ask the simple questions of what, why, when, who, where and how? You will find unlimited opportunities to eliminate conveyance and transportation waste.

Want to learn more about changing your culture and developing your people? For more information on TWI and a look at the Original public domain manuals, go to http://www.trainingwithinindustry.net

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This entry was posted on Sunday, April 20th, 2008 at 8:36 am and is filed under Leadership, Management, Hiring, Ideas, Tips, Blog Carnival. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.