Just-In-Time (JIT), and measuring and prioritizing the improvements.
Module Two: Material Flow and Facilities Layout
Several productivity metrics, such as throughput and lead time, are directly affected by where and how the processing and storage resources are located in a factory. In this module, you will learn about the different types of industrial processes and plant layouts.
Plant layout (changes in resources or even factory location) is an activity that all companies are forced to deal with sooner or later. These situations occur because of technology innovations, increases in demand, and certain other productivity reasons. Therefore, it is important to be familiar with the methodologies used to carry out these studies.
Cellular layouts, where labor and machines are grouped in cells, will be presented in this module because they are becoming increasingly important and require specific methodologies. Cellular layouts will be explained in greater depth in Module Three.
In this module of lean manufacturing certification, you will learn about layout improvement and its theoretical basis, layout design methodology, and tools for layout study.
Module Three: Material Flow and the Design of Cellular Layouts
In Module Two of lean manufacturing certification, the concept of manufacturing cells was presented as a specific case of the product/process layout. The basic analysis necessary to transform a traditional factory into a cellular layout requires a unique development and implementation methodology. Because of this difference in layout analysis and philosophy, a separate module on cellular design and analysis is used for this important topic.
The use of cells creates a unique set of production modules. The plant’s division into cells exclusive to producing a product family transforms the factory into a group of self-managed sub factories or modules. This module presents some design and analysis tools focused on getting a company ready to progress to cellular manufacturing.
When a production line is being designed, it is important to distribute the needed manufacturing tasks within the workstations as best as possible. One always should avoid any unneeded workstations so that task distribution can be well defined and developed and lead time can be reduced, along with work-in-process and labor costs. In this module, line-balancing techniques will be explained and developed.
In this module, you will learn about the assembly line and its theoretical basis and cell design methodology.
Module Four: Equipment Efficiency: Quality and Poka-Yoke
Shigeo Shingo developed a system to improve inspection tasks to guarantee 100 percent quality for manufactured parts, leading toward a defects-free process. This module will explain inspection processes based on unnoticed mistake-proving devices (called poka-yoke). This type of inspection strategy complements statistical process control (SPC) and is used primarily for inspecting logical features.
Poka-yokes are visual and physical tools used in conjunction with source inspection (a concept also created by Shingo) for the two techniques to be effective. Source inspection also will be presented in this module.
In this module, you will learn about poka-yokes and their theoretical basis and poka-yoke design methodology.
Module Five: Equipment Efficiency: Performance and Motion Study
This module will examine the second equipment efficiency indicator based on two factors: equipment performance losses due to stoppages (usually not registered) and equipment performance reduction caused by equipment component deterioration or wear. In Module Seven, we will study equipment availability (setup reduction) and quality related to startup.
Small breakdowns or device (fixture and tooling) holdups are responsible for these machine stoppages. In other cases, an improper adjustment or interaction between the worker and the machine cycle also can create problems.
Time and motion study allows one to optimize the relationship between the worker and the machine and investigate whether the worker can tend to more than one machine in those cases where the machine cycle is significantly longer than the worker cycle.
The main tools presented in this module are worker-machine and machine-machine diagrams. These tools help us study the relationship between worker and machine cycles (or between machines), eliminating or reducing idle time and optimizing the working cycle.
In this module, you will learn about motion study and its theoretical basis and motion study tools.
Module Six: Equipment Efficiency: Availability, Performance, and Maintenance
The role of maintenance is to ensure the proper functioning of all company hardware. Most companies consider their maintenance departments a necessary evil or a money pit that represents an ongoing cost. Managing a maintenance department can be nearly impossible because the investments required to improve production processes usually take on a low priority or, even worse, may not even make it to the priority list for capital expenditures.
Maintenance evolution and maintenance techniques evolution have been developed in parallel for many companies: The maintenance department’s first obligation is to remediate hardware failures that have occurred already. The next obligation after fixing breakdowns is to prevent future problems with the equipment that eventually may lead to failure.
The most advanced maintenance management companies try to incorporate basic maintenance tasks into their daily production routine with direct labor personnel checking fluid levels and examining production equipment for potential failure mechanisms, also searching for ways to increase the ability to predict potential equipment breakdowns.
In this module, you will learn about equipment maintenance and its theoretical basis, maintenance program implementation, and maintenance tools.
Module Seven: Equipment Efficiency: Availability, Quality, and SMED
It has become increasingly important to manufacture products economically in smaller and smaller batches. New management philosophies demand product lead times (both development and then manufacturing times) be kept as small as possible. Product customization has increased, increasing the number of parts in a product family. As a result, batch sizes have been reduced and continue to shrink.
In this context, companies should be as agile and flexible as possible. Part of the required agility is to reduce machine setup times to minutes instead of hours. Unless setup time can be reduced significantly, it will be difficult to produce small batches and reduce lead time economically.
The single-minute exchange of dies (SMED) methodology, as it is called, is a clear, easy-to-apply methodology that has produced good results in many cases very quickly and amazing results in some other cases. Shigeo Shingo developed the SMED methodology in Japan from 1950 to the 1980s. With this methodology, it is possible to achieve good results without costly investments, which makes implementation in many factories an easy decision to make,
In this module, you will learn the setup process and its theoretical basis, SMED methodology, SMED tools, and SMED effects and benefits.
Module Eight: Environmental Improvements and the 5S Methodology
The third area analyzed in this course is the work environment and how it can be improved. The number of implementation projects based on a 5S methodology has increased significantly in the last decade. This methodology’s name corresponds to the initial letters of five Japanese words (also five English words) based on sort, organize, and clean.
However, the main objective of the 5S tool is to educate workers and encourage an attitude that supports worker habits. These habits will allow workers to maintain the work environment orderly (sorted, organized, and clean) with little effort. The ideas used in this methodology are simple, and most of them are based on common sense. However, in most companies, these procedures of organization and cleaning are not adhered to as well as they should be.
In this module of lean manufacturing certification, you will learn about clean and organized workspaces, 5S implementation methodology, implementation of the 5S in offices, 5S tools, and 5S benefits and effects.
Module Nine: Other Improvement Keys
In previous modules, different improvement tools that can be used to solve many production problems were discussed, illustrated, and analyzed. These tools are included in the course 20 Keys to Workplace Improvement, but not all 20 keys have been explained. The rest of the keys can be grouped into four categories:
- Human resources
- Efficient materials use
- Visual control
- Technology
In this module, you will learn about human resources-related keys, visual control-related keys, and technology-related keys.
