Lean & Agile Manufacturing

Lean Manufacturing

Definition

Lean manufacturing or lean production, often simply, "Lean," is a team based continuous improvement process designed for long term maximization of company resources. Lean is an approach to achieving manufacturing excellence based upon the continued elimination of waste. Waste is defined as activities that do not add value to the product.

Working from the perspective of the customer who consumes a product or service, "value" is defined as any action or process that a customer would be willing to pay for. Basically, lean is centered on preserving value with less work. Lean manufacturing is a management philosophy derived mostly from the Toyota Production System (TPS) and identified as "Lean" only in the 1990s. It is renowned for its focus on reduction of the original Toyota seven wastes to improve overall customer value, but there are varying perspectives on how this is best achieved. The steady growth of Toyota, from a small company to the world's largest automaker has focused attention on how it has achieved this.

Types of Waste

While the elimination of waste may seem like a simple and clear subject it is noticeable that waste is often very conservatively identified. This then hugely reduces the potential of such an aim. The elimination of waste is the goal of Lean, and Toyota defined three broad types of waste which are muda, muri and mura.

Muri is all the unreasonable work that management imposes on workers and machines because of poor organization, such as carrying heavy weights, moving things around, dangerous tasks, even working significantly faster than usual. It is pushing a person or a machine beyond its natural limits. This may simply be asking a greater level of performance from a process than it can handle without taking shortcuts and informally modifying decision criteria. Unreasonable work is almost always a cause of multiple variations.

To link these three concepts is simple in TPS and thus Lean. Firstly, muri focuses on the preparation and planning of the process, or what work can be avoided proactively by design. Next, mura then focuses on how the work design is implemented and the elimination of fluctuation at the scheduling or operations level, such as quality and volume. Muda is then discovered after the process is in place and is dealt with reactively. It is seen through variation in output. It is the role of management to examine the muda, in the processes and eliminate the deeper causes by considering the connections to the muri and mura of the system. The muda and mura inconsistencies must be fed back to the muri, or planning, stage for the next project.

A typical example of the interplay of these wastes is the corporate behaviour of "making the numbers" as the end of a reporting period approaches. Demand is raised to 'make plan,' increasing (mura), when the "numbers" are low, which causes production to try to squeeze extra capacity from the process, which causes routines and standards to be modified or stretched. This stretch and improvisation leads to muri-style waste, which leads to downtime, mistakes and back flows, and waiting, thus the muda of waiting, correction and movement.

The original seven muda (waste) are:

1.      Transport (moving products that is not actually required to perform the processing)

2.      Inventory (all components, work in process and finished product not being processed)

3.      Motion (people or equipment moving or walking more than is required to perform the processing)

4.      Waiting (waiting for the next production step)

5.      Overproduction (production ahead of demand)

6.      Over Processing (resulting from poor tool or product design creating activity)

7.      Defects (the effort involved in inspecting for and fixing defects)

Lean Goals and Strategy

1.      Improve quality: To stay competitive in today’s marketplace, a company must understand its customers' wants and needs and design processes to meet their expectations and requirements.

2.      Eliminate waste: Waste is any activity that consumes time, resources, or space but does not add any value to the product or service.

3.      Reduce time: Reducing the time it takes to finish an activity from start to finish is one of the most effective ways to eliminate waste and lower costs.

4.      Reduce total costs: To minimize cost, a company must produce only to customer demand. Overproduction increases a company’s inventory costs because of storage needs.

Steps to Achieve Lean Systems

The following steps should be implemented to create the ideal lean manufacturing system:

1.      Design a simple manufacturing system

A fundamental principle of lean manufacturing is demand-based flow manufacturing. In this type of production setting, inventory is only pulled through each production center when it is needed to meet a customer’s order. The benefits of this goal include:

·         decreased cycle time

·         less inventory

·         increased productivity

·         increased capital equipment utilization

2.      There is always room for improvement

The core of lean is founded on the concept of continuous product and process improvement and the elimination of non-value added activities. The Value adding activities are simply only those things the customer is willing to pay for, everything else is waste, and should be eliminated, simplified, reduced, or integrated. Improving the flow of material through new ideal system layouts at the customer's required rate would reduce waste in material movement and inventory.

3.      Continuously improvement of lean manufacturing system design

A continuous improvement mindset is essential to reach a company's goals. The term "continuous improvement" means incremental improvement of products, processes, or services over time, with the goal of reducing waste to improve workplace functionality, customer service, or product performance.

AGILE MANUFACTURING

Agile manufacturing is an approach to manufacturing which is focused on meeting the needs of customers while maintaining high standards of quality and controlling the overall costs involved in the production of a particular product. This approach is geared towards companies working in a highly competitive environment, where small variations in performance and product delivery can make a huge difference in the long term to a company's survival and reputation among consumers.

 This concept is closely related to lean manufacturing, in which the goal is to reduce waste as much as possible. Agile manufacturing is seen as the next step after Lean in the evolution of production methodology. In lean manufacturing, the company aims to cut all costs which are not directly related to the production of a product for the consumer. Agile manufacturing can include this concept, but it also adds an additional dimension, the idea that customer demands need to be met rapidly and effectively. In situations where companies integrate both approaches, they are sometimes said to be using “lean and agile manufacturing”. According to Martin Christopher, when companies have to decide what to be, they have to look at the Customer Order Cycle (the time the customers are willing to wait) and the lead-time for getting supplies. If the supplier has a short lead time, lean production is possible. If the COC is short, agile production is beneficial.

Figure: Structure of Agile Manufacturing

Lean and agile principles complement each other, however, the scale at which they are applied are different. Lean principles are best applied at the factory or floor level where efficiency takes precedence of all except safety. On the other hand, agile principles are most suitable at the enterprise level where ability to adjust to changing internal and external factors is off utmost importance. The emphasis in lean is more on the technical and operational issues, while agile addresses the people and organizational issues.

However, where there is a significant difference is how change management is performed under each system. Lean tries to minimize change, whether internal or external in order to minimize waste and increase efficiency. On the other hand, agile embraces change. The idea is to thrive at the ever changing environment and business landscape. In fact, agile manufacturing should be seen as the natural extension and evolution of the lean principles.

Four Principles of Lean Production and Agile Manufacturing

Lean Production	Agile Production
·           Minimize Change	·           Enrich the Customer
·           Perfect first-time quality	·           Cooperate to enhance competitiveness
·           Flexible production lines	·           Organize to master change
·           Continuous improvement	·           Leverage the impact of people & information

(Adapted from Mikell P. Groover’s Automation, Production Systems, and Computer Integrated Manufacturing, 2nd Edition)

Comparison of Lean Production and Agile Manufacturing Attributes

Lean Production	Agile Production
·         Enhancement of Mass Production	·         Break with mass production; emphasis on mass customization.
·         Flexible production for product variety	·         Greater flexibility for customized products
·         Focus on factory operations	·         Scope is enterprise wide
·         Emphasis on supplier management	·         Formation Virtual enterprises
·         Emphasis on efficient use of resources	·         Emphasis on thriving in environment marked by continuous unpredictable change
·         Relies on smooth production schedule	·         Acknowledgement and attempts to be responsive to change.

(Adapted from Mikell P. Groover’s Automation, Production Systems, and Computer Integrated Manufacturing, 2nd Edition)

Companies which utilize an agile manufacturing approach tend to have very strong networks with suppliers and related companies, along with numerous cooperative teams which work within the company to deliver products effectively. They can retool facilities quickly, negotiate new agreements with suppliers and other partners in response to changing market forces, and take other steps to meet customer demands. This means that the company can increase production on products with a high consumer demand, as well as redesign products to respond to issues which have emerged on the open market.

 

Figure 2: Lean Vs Agile Manufacturing

Markets can change very quickly, especially in the global economy. A company which cannot adapt quickly to change may find itself left behind, and once a company starts to lose market share, it can fall rapidly. The goal of agile manufacturing is to keep a company ahead of the competition so that consumers think of that company first, which allows it to continue innovating and introducing new products, because it is financially stable and it has a strong customer support base. Using this method Agile offers several significant advantages not only to the team but also to their sponsors:

• Business leaders can see results quickly and exert more control over development costs. Failing projects can be cancelled early, lowering risk and potential waste.
• Changes in priority can be addressed immediately with minimal waste. Change is welcome, not eschewed.
• Collaboration between business leaders and development teams lessens misunderstandings on both sides and builds stronger relationships and overall team spirit.
• Solutions get to market faster and development cycle times are reduced.

References

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_manufacturing

Expert Opinion by Andy Brown

L. Goldman, R.L. Nagel and K Preiss, Agile Competitors and Virtual Organizations - Strategies for Enriching the Customer, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1995.

http://customcable.ca/lean-versus-agile-production/

Type of Process

Project

A project in business and science is a collaborative enterprise, frequently involving research or design, that is carefully planned to achieve a particular aim. In term of Engineering projects are, in which requires that such projects should be carried out by registered engineers and/or registered engineering companies. That is, companies with license to carry out such works as design and construction of buildings, power plants, industrial facilities, installation and erection of electrical gri networks, transportation infrastructure and the like. Initially, the project scope is defined and the appropriate methods for completing the project are determined. Following this step, the durations for the various tasks necessary to complete the work are listed and grouped into a work breakdown structure. The logical dependencies between tasks are defined using an activity network diagram that enables identification of the critical path. Float or slack time in the schedule can be calculated using project management software. Then the necessary resources can be estimated and costs for each activity can be allocated to each resource, giving the total project cost. At this stage, the project plan may be optimized to achieve the appropriate balance between resource usage and project duration to comply with the project objectives. Once established and agreed, the plan becomes what is known as the baseline. Progress will be measured against the baseline throughout the life of the project. Analyzing progress compared to the baseline is known as earned value management.

The scope of the project is specified in a contract between the owner and the engineering and construction parties. As a rule, an engineering project is broken down into design and construction phases. The outputs of the design process are drawings, calculations, and all other design documentation necessary to carry out the next phase.

Flow Line Production

Manufacturing systems can be individual work cells, consisting of a single production machine and an operator. In other cases they are linked as groups of machines and workers, for example, a production line. The manufacturing systems come in direct physical contact with the parts and/or assemblies being made so they "touch" the product. 

Flow line production involves multiple workstations arranged in sequence, and the parts or assemblies are physically moved through the sequence to complete the product. Flow production involves a continuous movement of items through the production process. This means that when one task is finished the next task must start immediately. Therefore, the time taken on each task must be the same. The workstations consist of production machines and/or workers equipped with specialized tools. The layout is called a product layout, and the workstations are arranged into one long line. 

Flow line production is suitable for mass production which is the high quantity range (10,000 to millions of units per year). Flow production (often known as mass production) involves the use of production lines such as in a car manufacturer where doors, engines, bonnets and wheels are added to a chassis as it moves along the assembly line. It is appropriate when firms are looking to produce a high volume of similar items. Two categories of mass production can be distinguished: 

(1) Quantity production and

(2) Flow line production.

Quantity production involves the mass production of single parts on single pieces of equipment. Although flow line production can produce million products per year, but the product variety is low. This is due to the high production cost if we produce high variety product for a flow line production. The setup for the equipment and machinery will be very costly. So, product variety is inversely proportional to the production quantity. When the product variety is high, production quantity is low and vice versa. 

The advantage of flow line production is capital intensive. This means it uses a high proportion of machinery in relation to workers, as is the case on an assembly line. The advantage of this is that a high number of products can roll off assembly lines at very low cost. This is because production can continue at night and over weekends and also firms can benefit from economies of scale, which should lower the cost per unit of production. 

In contrast, the disadvantage of flow line production is that with so much machinery it is very difficult to alter the production process. This makes production inflexible and means that all products have to be very similar or standardized and cannot be modified to individual tastes. However some “variety” can be achieved by applying different finishes, decorations at the end of the production line.

Cellular Manufacturing

The cellular manufacturing system, often called lean manufacturing, is a fairly recent development in global manufacturing processes. One of the first, and today, the most common cellular, or lean manufacturing systems is the Kaizen system. Originally conceived by the Toyota Corporation in Japan, Kaizen utilizes technology and cellular manufacturing to reduce the waste of time, effort, money, and resources in the production process.

The main objective of lean manufacturing is the minimization of waste, called muda, to achieve maximum efficiency of resources. It means that having the flexibility to produce a high variety of low demand products, while maintaining the high productivity of large scale production. Cellular manufacturing, sometimes called cellular or cell production, arranges factory floor labor into semi-autonomous and multi-skilled teams, or work cells, who manufacture complete products or complex components.

In order to set up a single process flow (or single product flow) line, it is necessary to locate all the different equipment needed to manufacture the product together in the same production area.  This is in contrast with the traditional 'batch and queue' set-up wherein only similar equipment are put in the same area.  Under a 'batch and queue' set-up, products that need to undergo processing under certain equipment need to be transported to the area where the equipment is located.

The single process flow set-up described above is an example of a 'work cell'.  A work cell is defined as a collection of equipment and workstations arranged in a single area that allows a product or group of similar products to be processed completely from start to finish.  It is, in essence, a self-contained mini-production line that caters to a group of products that undergo the same production process. Cellular manufacturing involves the use of work 'cells', which is how it got its name.

   

Because of the free flow of materials in cellular manufacturing, it has the ability to produce products just in time. This means that every unit processed at one station will get processed in the next station. As such, no inventories that have already undergone processing at one station will be left unprocessed in another station.  This prevents the build-up of non-moving inventories, which are products that have already incurred some production costs but can’t generate revenues because they are stuck somewhere along the process.

   

FIGURE: Cellular Manufacturing Systems, Machine Guarding

Technology and cellular manufacturing have combined to streamline the production processes of numerous established and start-up manufacturing facilities worldwide. Lean systems, such as Kaizen, and Six Sigma, to name just two, though very often high in startup cost, provide both a short- and long-term benefit in reducing the waste common to the traditional production line. The bottom line in any manufacturing enterprise is profit. Cellular manufacturing has been proven to dramatically increase profits.

 Function Process

A function process or functional model in systems engineering and software engineering is a structured representation of the functions (activities, actions, processes, operations) within the modeled system or subject area.

Example of a function model of the process of "Maintain Reparable Spares" in IDEF0 notation.

A function model, also called an activity model or process model is a graphical representation of an enterprise's function within a defined scope. The purposes of the function model are to describe the functions and processes, assist with discovery of information needs, help identify opportunities, and establish a basis for determining product and service costs.

Job  Processing

Introduction                      

 Job production, sometimes called jobbing, involves producing a one-off product for a specific customer. Job production is most often associated with small firms (making railings for a specific house, building/repairing a computer for a specific customer, making flower arrangements for a specific wedding etc.) but large firms use job production too. Examples include:

• Designing and implementing an advertising campaign
• Auditing the accounts of a large public  limited company
• Building a new factory
• Installing machinery in a factory
• Machining a batch of parts per a CAD drawing supplied by a customer

Fabrication shops and machine shops whose work is primarily of the job production type are often called job shops. The associated people or corporations are sometimes called jobbers

Benefits and disadvantages

Key benefits of job production include:

• work is generally of a high quality
• a high level of customization is possible to meet the customer's exact requirements
• significant flexibility is possible, especially when compared to mass production
• workers can be easily motivated due to the skilled nature of the work they are performing

Disadvantages include:

• higher cost of production
• requires the use of specialist labour (compare with the repetitive, low-skilled jobs in mass production)
• slow compared to other methods (batch production and mass production)

Concurrent Engineering

Several definitions of concurrent engineering are in use.

The first one is used by the Concurrent Design Facility (ESA):

Concurrent Engineering (CE) is a systematic approach to integrated product development that emphasizes the response to customer expectations. It embodies team values of co-operation, trust and sharing in such a manner that decision making is by consensus, involving all perspectives in parallel, from the beginning of the product life cycle.

The second one is by Pennell and Winner, 1989:

Concurrent Engineering is a systematic approach to the integrated, concurrent design of products and their related processes, including, manufacturing and support. This approach is intended to cause the developers from the very outset to consider all elements of the product life cycle, from conception to disposal, including cost, schedule, quality and user requirements.

Definition

Concurrent engineering, also known as simultaneous engineering, is a non-linear product or project design approach during which all phases of manufacturing operate at the same time - simultaneously. Both product and process design run in parallel and occur in the same time frame. Product and process are closely coordinated to achieve optimal matching of requirements for effective cost, quality, and delivery. Decision making involves full team participation and involvement. The team often consists of product design engineers, manufacturing engineers, marketing personnel, purchasing, finance, and suppliers.

Concurrent engineering techniques can be used to compress time in the product development cycle, and business cycles in general. Every business has basic cycles that govern the way that paper is processed, parts are manufactured, and decisions are made. They may be documented in the form of procedures or routings. Examples of business cycles are customer order, product development, production, and procurement.

The concurrent engineering method is still a relatively new design management system, but has had the opportunity to mature in recent years to become a well-defined systems approach towards optimizing engineering design cycles. Because of this, concurrent engineering has gathered much attention from industry and has been implemented in a multitude of companies, organizations and universities, most notably in the aerospace industry.

Concurrent engineering is an excellent tool to use in improving productivity and inducing velocity within an operation. It can reduce the time-to-market, engineering times in general, overall throughput time, and costs. It can be applied to a variety of circumstances where operations are performed in sequence and contribute to excessive lead times.

The basic premise for concurrent engineering revolves around two concepts. The first is the idea that all elements of a product’s life-cycle, from functionality, producibility, assembly, testability, maintenance issues, environmental impact and finally disposal and recycling, should be taken into careful consideration in the early design phases.

The second concept is that the preceding design activities should all be occurring at the same time, or concurrently. The overall goal being that the concurrent nature of these processes significantly increases productivity and product quality, aspects that are obviously important in today's fast-paced market. This philosophy is key to the success of concurrent engineering because it allows for errors and redesigns to be discovered early in the design process when the project is still in a more abstract and possibly digital realm. By locating and fixing these issues early, the design team can avoid what often become costly errors as the project moves to more complicated computational models and eventually into the physical realm.

One of the most important reasons for the huge success of concurrent engineering is that by definition it redefines the basic design process structure that was common place for decades. This was a structure based on a sequential design flow, sometimes called the ‘Waterfall Model’.Concurrent engineering significantly modifies this outdated method and instead opts to use what has been termed an iterative or integrated development method. The difference between these two methods is that the ‘Waterfall’ method moves in a completely linear fashion by starting with user requirements and sequentially moving forward to design, implementation and additional steps until you have a finished product. The problem here is that the design system does not look backwards or forwards from the step it is on to fix possible problems. In the case that something does go wrong, the design usually must be scrapped or heavily altered. On the other hand, the iterative design process is more cyclic in that, as mentioned before, all aspects of the life cycle of the product are taken into account, allowing for a more evolutionary approach to design.

A significant part of this new method is that the individual engineer is given much more say in the overall design process due to the collaborative nature of concurrent engineering. Giving the designer ownership plays a large role in the productivity of the employee and quality of the product that is being produced. This stems from the fact that people given a sense of gratification and ownership over their work tend to work harder and design a more robust product, as opposed to an employee that is assigned a task with little say in the general process.

Batch

Batch-The quantity of material required for or produced by one operation. An amount of material subjected to some unit chemical process or physical mixing process to make the final product substantially uniform.

Batch production is the manufacturing technique of creating a group of components at a workstation before moving the group to the next step in production. Batch production is common in bakeries and in the manufacture of sports shoes, pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), inks, paints and adhesives. In the manufacture of inks and paints, a technique called a colour-run is used. A colour-run is where one manufactures the lightest colour first, such as light yellow followed by the next increasingly darker colour such as orange, then red and so on until reaching black and then starts over again. This minimizes the cleanup and reconfiguring of the machinery between each batch. White (by which is meant opaque paint, not transparent ink) is the only colour that cannot be used in a colour-run because a small amount of white pigment can adversely affect the medium colours. The chemical, tire, and process industry (CPT) segment uses a combination of batch and process manufacturing depending the product and plant.