A valuable lean manufacturing advice - Something wrong - Stop immediately and fixIf you have heard one basic technique used in lean manufacturing to improve quality is stopping the whole production when a problem is detected. A traditional manufacturer might wonder why this should happen. Obviously stopping a production line is a loss to the organization. But if you take the leader in lean manufacturing Toyota, one of the main advices they give their new employees when they join is to stop the manufacturing if you find a problem. There is an alarm to indicate that something has gone wrong. When the alarm is activated it will take one minute to stop the line. Within this one minute leader of the line will try to solve the problem without actually stopping the line. Most of the times manufacturing will not be stopped. This is because problems are solved within that one minute. But if they can not fix the problem within that minute, yes the lines will be stopped. But why Toyota and all the other lean manufacturers have given this much of importance to a stopping a line, where in a conventional organization might be treated as a very bad activity. Actually the aim is not to stop the line. The aim is to stop the movement of the poor quality parts forward in the manufacturing facility. So why we should stop the movement of poor quality parts immediately when detected. The reason is simple. We shall understand this with an example. Let’s say to manufacturer a product it should go through eight workstations. Let’s say you have detected a problem in the second workstation. If you have not stopped the line, the defective part will go all the way to the eighth workstation. Then obviously the final product will be a defective one. Then you have to make a decision. Either you have to discard that product or you have to rework the product. If you throw it away you are throwing the effort of extra six people who worked after the second workstation. The time, money and effort are wasted. If you decide to rework the product, you will have to undo all the work done up to the last workstation form the second. Then fix the problem and redo all the work from second workstation to the eighth. So you are manufacturing the wrong product, then you undo the problems and again you manufacture the product. This is three or more times of effort and time and resources to create a single product. If you have stopped the line immediately when you detect the problem, either you might be able to discard the product or you will be able to fix the problem and proceed. It costs only a fraction to stop the line rather than continue to make a poor quality product. |
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5 why concept of lean problem solving | PDCA cycle in problem solving |
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