Lean Terminology:
Muda – Waste, any activity which uses resources but creates no value. These are often defined as the 7 wastes:
- Overproduction – making more product than the customer requires (the customer can be internal – the next work center, or external)
- Waiting – This occurs when the activities are not balanced. Note: not all waiting is bad thing.
- Transportation – A result of poor layout and often occurs in batch & queue environments where large batch are moved from department to department.
- Processing Itself – Conducting more operations than a customer requires. Usually due to poor specifications or in reaction to quality issues.
- Inventory – This occurs when there are long lead times and batch & queue planning methods are used.
- Motion – Due to poor work center layout
- Making Bad Product – Rework or scrap is always a waste, not only of the material but of the processing time, particularly so if defective material is fed to the operations constraint.
Value Stream – All of the actions required to produce a product for a customer. These can be defined into 3 broad categories:
- Problem-solving task- Everything it takes to create a product for the marketplace from concept to product launch.
- Information management task- This the order taking to delivery.
- Physical transformation task- The actual production of the product.
Flow – The goal of Lean Manufacturing is to drive the waste (muda) out of the value-stream then make the remaining value added steps flow. Ideally, the process would be so lean, that one piece flow could be achieved, meaning that the value stream could produce a “batch of one” where changing between different products would so insignificant that a “batch of one” could be achieved allow and organization to produce exactly what is ordered.
Pull – Not producing a product until one is required. The customer sets the pace of production. Sell one; build one.
Kaizen – Incremental continuous improvement.
Kaikaku – This is extremely quick continuous improvement, usually requiring moving processing equipment into cells to create flow.
5 S’s – Applying the 5 S’s create a work environment appropriate for lean.
- Sort (Seiri) – Eliminate unneeded tools, parts and instruction from the work center
- Set In Order (Seiton) – Create effective storage for the items that remain. Often using shadow boards, outlines, etc… for easy identification.
- Shine (Seiso) – Clean the work center
- Standardize (Seiketsu) – Going back through the first 3 S’s for all workcenters at specific intervals to ensure they are all standardized
- Sustain (Shitsuke) – Repeating steps 1 through 4 until it habit
Heijunka – Leveling your scheduling process to better correspond to longer term demand.
SMED – Single Minute Exchange of Dies. Created by Shigeo Shingo to conduct changeovers (even on very large and complicated equipment) in less than ten minutes.
- One-Touch Setup refers specifically to setup taking less than a minute.
TPM – Total Productive Maintenance. Created by Nippondenso to ensure all equipment in a production process is always ready to perform so production is never interrupted.
Poka-yoke – Error proofing a process or procedure to stop the a part from moving on in the process if it is defective. Sometimes called baka-yoke.
Process Villages – Grouping equipment together by similar process. (i.e., welding department, drilling department, milling department, etc…)
QFD – Quality Functional Deployment. A tool utilizing the customer requirements to determine the specifications for a product. It utilizes perspectives from multiple areas of expertise (engineering, production, etc…)
Takt time – Sets the production rate equal to the rate at which the customer requires your product.
5 Why’s – Driving down to the root cause of a problem by asking, “Why?” five times.