Grand Designs

Heijunka box: A Toyota-inspired innovation that will help you pour cold water on production line fire fighting. The Heijunka Box helps smooth production flow by spreading the type and volume of product being built across different shifts. The box works by listing product build types on the vertical axis. The horizontal columns correspond to time slots of production (30 minutes in our example). Shifts are then issued a colour-coded Kanban card (another Japanism that is essentially a visual signal to trigger the flow of manufacturing materials). Here, the Kanban card indicates which products red and blue shift are tasked with building at a given time. In our example, red shift must build one product A and one lot of product C between 7.00am and 7.30am. Blue shift, by contrast, must build one product B – a more complex unit – in the same period. Think of the Heijunka as the manufacturing world's revision planner. Adopting one will grant you the breathing space to plan your time and resources to meet work demands. There will always be those who swear by a more seat-of-your-pants approach: The types who claim to thrive on the buzz of an 11th hour production run. But you don't have to be Eiji Toyoda to work out the consequences of last minute cramming on product quality, stress levels and efficiency. AGV: The younger, more sophisticated, sibling of the HGV, the automated guided vehicle (AGV) glides around the factory floor where the forklift beeps and brakes. The AGV can use laser guidance to deliver stock surreptitiously to the shopfloor and is a precision stocking tool. The AGV is free from the wasteful detours that can hamper even the most lean-minded forklift truck driver. However, the technology is not cheap. Entry level models guided by magnetic tape start from £20,000. Laser-based systems can be £200,000 or more. 5S: Sort, set in order, systemic cleaning, shine, standardise and sustain are treated as celestial beings by lean manufacturing converts. The system is a fulcrum of lineside efficiency, allowing all items to be stored at the optimum point to aid manufacturing flow. In a 5S world, operators pluck M3 button screws from colour-coded storage trays within a hand's reach rather than digging beneath old copies of the Angling Times in their top draw for spares. Supermarkets: While Asda and Tesco trade blows over who's got the best prices, lineside supermarkets swap bargain beans for key components and sub assemblies. Bringing parts from distant stores to the line helps eliminate productivity-draining journeys every time a manufacturing cell runs low on a key component. Waste walks: Turn your shopfloor into an episode of Superstars with the aid of a pedometer and stopwatch. The aim of the game here is to measure how far operators are travelling in the production process and seeking savings. You can also tally the number of loads being delivered or transported from the line as well as their contents. Turn the process into a competition by dividing the factory into teams and offering a prize for the biggest savings. You might want to disqualify anyone found doing star jumps by your new lineside rack though. The engaged employee: Even the glitziest line is only as good as the employee who works on it. "You can design the most effective, efficient line with all the added extras," says Ross Townshend, lean solutions manager at Bosch Rexroth, which specialises in line ergonomics. "But the people have to buy in to the changes or it will fail badly." Line equipment suppliers like the Lean Factory Group (www.leanfactorygroup.com) – which comprises Bosch Rexroth and six other manufacturing equipment suppliers – offer training events to rally shopfloor support. Getting feedback from operators is also the surest way to spot unseen flaws or improvements from the people who will be using the kit day to day, adds Townshend. Muda: Say it in your best Taggart-inspired Glaswegian accent and it sounds like murder... which is what muda will do to your production targets if left unchecked. For muda is the Japanese word for waste. Taiichi Ohno, Toyota's chief engineer, identified seven types of muda: Overproduction, waiting, transporting, inappropriate processing, unnecessary inventory, unnecessary motion and defects. All can be heightened by poor line ergonomics. Flexibility: Look for adjustable racking and shelving. Your lean journey will be anything but predictable, meaning the lineside is likely to go through a number of iterations before you get the perfect fit. Waterspiders: 'Right, hands up if you want to be a waterspider?' Kick off the day with this request and your shopfloor may think you've confused them with your six-year-old niece. This poetic term refers to the employee who must transport stock from the supermarket to the manufacturing cell to maintain smooth production flow. Waterspiders must look out for Kanban cards indicating when a workstation requires replenishing. An intimate knowledge of the build process is also preferred so waterspiders can anticipate future demand patterns. The phrase is derived from a Japanese insect that helps clean the water in which it lives. Visual management board: The nerve centre of the lean factory floor. A board should be a reference point for KPIs and link the activity of each operator back to your overall business strategy. The board should be the muster point for daily team briefings, assessing recent line performance and prioritising tasks for the day ahead. Here's how your lineside management can work on a practical level: Take two cardboard tubes, add a little bit of sticky back plastic and, ta-da, there you have your all-singing-all-dancing lean line. What sounds like an exercise straight out of Blue Peter really can deliver major improvements in your shopfloor performance, says Jason Speedy, head of manufacturing at Siemens Congleton. "Teams are tasked with mapping the seven lean wastes in their work areas, mapping the travel of operators and then coming up with a design that improves efficiency," he says of the Congleton site's experiment in shopfloor-led ergonomics entitled 'Lean Cell Design' or LCD. "The teams have to present the benefits of their design to management and then it's mocked up in cardboard." Prototypes must then prove their worth in cutting work in progress, reducing floor space and eliminating muda. Those that prove themselves are made permanent with Creform – a modular plastic tubing – replacing cardboard. LCD has fuelled a property boom at Siemens' Congleton site with 350 employees taking part in redesigns. "The buy-in is huge," says Speedy. "They've designed it and want it to work. We've had some really clever stuff – bench tops that can rotate on their axes to provide the right set up for batch builds. Management could never come up with some of these ideas." LCD has helped Siemens save 50% in work space and reduce work in progress by 40%. You'd be amazed how quickly the savings will crop up if you can engage your operators in the line design process, agrees Ross Townshend of the Lean Factory Group. He says: "A lot of manufacturers will look at the process of changing their lines as an expensive one. But just look at the number of improvements identified by delegates at the WM Manufacturing Conference when we got them to run a line for 50 minutes [the suggestions came thick and fast]. Imagine what you could do during a full trial on-site." You should allow four to six weeks to get your new-look line up and running. Suppliers will produce computer-animated drafts of your concept shopfloor through modelling programmes. Racking and storage can be tailored to your line requirements. Tube and Bracket, which, as nominative determinism would have it, supplies plastic tubes and brackets that can be built into racking, will deliver customised units fully built or as components for self-assembly. A typical single rack costs around £400-£500. Tube & Bracket reports a 33% saving in floor space by swapping plastic for fabricated benches on two boiler assembly lines at Baxi Heating. Plastic tubing has some major advantages over fabricated steel in the ever-fluid lean manufacturing journey, says Dina Beeney of the firm. "The kit is very flexible, if there's a change in your process then the tubes can be reassembled to fit. We can colour code specific areas and help enforce your 5S process." If the thought of shopfloor DIY brings you out in a cold sweat don't despair. Logistics firms are raring to go all Lawrence Llewelyn Bowen to boost your lineside ergonomics. Unipart Logistics will lend out engineering experts to help eliminate the seven lean wastes, reduce batch sizes and multi-skill your workforce. Challenge to work most efficiently DHL is another logistics specialist turning its hand to lineside redesign. The firm offers sub-assembly and kitting, sequencing, line-side feeding and many others. Martin Dougherty, development director for inbound to manufacturing at DHL says. "The skills shortage in engineering in the UK presents a challenge of how do you ensure your engineers work most efficiently? One of the ways around that is to make sure workstations are highly efficient and time is not wasted walking to and from stores." Outsourcing doesn't mean ceding control over your line setup, assures Dougherty. "We don't go in and say: 'This line solution is what you need'. The process would start by taking customers to see existing manufacturers using some of our solutions... It's sharing best practice and using our expertise to identify improvements." And you don't have to possess sites from Mumbai to Montreal to entertain the idea of outsourcing, concludes Dougherty. "Because of the scale of DHL we can create shared user facilities where customers can gain access to some of our services on a pay to play basis." Whether you call in a third party or go it alone in your Grand Designs factory floor makeover, take note of a final pearl of wisdom from the experts. "Involve your employees," says Beeney. "It will give them a sense of pride in their work area. The employees appreciate somebody asking them their opinion. It pays to make them a very important part of the redesign process."