From the Blog

Designing Value Streams for High Product Mix

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Value Streams, Shared Resources and Uncertain Demand Almost every operation has applied lean principles to enhance efficiencies, reduce quantity or improve quality. This process often involves management setting a goal in one area, making changes to achieve it, then setting another goal. But the result of this approach is a never-ending journey of continuous improvement. Instead, companies can jump their performance, in months, by setting a destination of Operational Excellence and designing their operations to achieve it. Operational Excellence is “when each and every employee can see the flow of value to the customer, and fix that flow before it breaks down.” And it’s not just flow, but autonomous flow. To achieve it, companies follow eight principles:
  • Design lean value streams.
  • Make lean value streams flow.
  • Make flow visual.
  • Create standard work for flow.
  • Make abnormal flow visual.
  • Create standard work for abnormal flow.
  • Have employees in the flow improve the flow.
  • Perform offense activities.
What about in complex operations with many custom product variations, shared resources and uncertain demand from day to day? In these situations, operations need to design mixed model value streams to produce a mix of products or product variations through the same value stream at the pull of the customer. The process starts with establishing product families (groups of products that have similar process flow and work content), then mapping the current state and, finally, designing a future state map. To guide this process, operations follow ten guidelines for mixed model production. These guidelines, from my book, Creating Mix Model Value Stream: Practical Lean Techniques for Building to Demand are:
  1. Do you have the right product families?
  2. What is the takt time at the pacemaker?
  3. Can the equipment support takt time?
  4. What is the interval?
  5. What are the balance charts for the products?
  6. How will we balance flow for the mix?
  7. How will we create standard work for the mix?
  8. How will we create pitch at the pacemaker?
  9. How will we schedule the mix at the pacemaker?
  10. How do we deal with changes in customer demand?
The end result is a process meets an organization’s business objectives, such as reduced inventory, increased on-time delivery, reduced lead times, and increased market share – all of which yield a competitive advantage.
Hear more from Kevin during FABTECH session F32: Lean Tools: Flow and Pull on Wednesday, Nov. 16 from 1:30 – 3:30 PM. Get session details. [x_author title=”About the Author”]

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