Quick Introduction to Production Leveling (Heijunka)

Heijunka is the Japanese name for production leveling, a scheduling technique for repetitive multi product production. Instead of trying to stick to varying demand or run long production series, leveling seeks periodic demand patterns for scheduling repetitive small production runs. Heijunka or leveling enables taming the variations in demand and keeping schedules consistent, using a …

TPM should be built upon 8 pillars, barely got more than 2

At the moment of publishing this post, in 2021, Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) turns 50 after official launch in 1971. In the Western world, TPM was hype in the late 1970s until mid-1980s when its shine faded before Lean Manufacturing.2021, Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) turns 50 after official launch in 1971. In the Western world, …

1971-2021 What is left of TPM (Total Productive Maintenance)?

Total Productive Maintenance was officially born in 1971 and since then promoted by the Japan Institute of Plant Maintenance (JIPM). It’s 50 years by the moment I write this post. I myself was introduced to TPM by the Japan Management Association Consulting (JMAC) team training us, Frenchmen, when we started YAMAHA’s Hi-Fi factory in my …

Will the fight against COVID-19 bring back 5S?

In April 2019 I posted an article titled Will 5S resist 4.0 tech? sincerely thinking 5S were doomed as 4.0 tech spread. Roughly one year later, May 2020, most countries of the northern hemisphere try to get back to a new normal after being locked down in order to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. Lisez-moi en …

Holidays, flow and common sense

This article is an afterthought of what I have seen the previous week during a nice holiday abroad, an so many times before. It is a rather common experience. We booked a one week vacation in a nice sunny place, with palm trees and a hotel that seems to match our requirements. We choose half …

4 reasons to consider SMED

SMED is a structured approach to reducing changeover durations. Here are 4 good reasons to consider deploying SMED. >Lisez-moi en français 1. More production capacity is required A critical resource of the production process is not able to deliver the expected quantity, due to lack of capacity. Such a resource is usually called a bottleneck, …

Management attention as a constraint – Part 2/2

In part 1 of this series, I introduced management attention as a constraint. This second post goes on with more reasons why management fail to pay the necessary attention to the factor limiting the whole system’s performance. Unaware or wrong about the constraint Management attention might be on the wrong things because manager are unaware …

What is autonomous maintenance (TPM)?

Autonomous maintenance is one of the 8 Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) pillars, it aims to give both competence and responsibility for routine maintenance, such as cleaning, lubricating, and inspection to operators. The aims and targeted benefits of autonomous maintenance The ultimate goal of Total Productive Maintenance is to enhance machines’ effectiveness. TPM is a participative …

The fallacy of maturity assessments

Maturity assessments are a kind of qualitative audit during which the current “maturity” of an organization is compared to a maturity reference model and ranked accordingly to its score. As explained in the wikipedia article about maturity model (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maturity_model), the implementation is either top-down or bottom-up, but from my experience it is mostly top-down. The …

A video introduction to DDMRP

The buzz around Demand-Driven Material Requirements Planning is getting louder. If you don't know what it is all about, here is a video primer. An Introduction to DDMRP (HD) from Demand Driven Institute LLC on Vimeo.