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Lessons learnt and helpful lean, improvement, kaizen etc discussions.   

 

Lean Manufacturing Article

Posted on 26 September 2010
Lean Manufacturing Article

From a staff perspective employees need to accept they are most employable and most valuable to an organisation when they contribute pro-actively to the ongoing competitiveness and improvement of a business.

Read the entire article  Australia's Best Manufacturing Magazine

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Lean Construction and Lean Project Management

Posted on 13 September 2010
Lean Construction and Lean Project Management

Lean Project Management in the Building and Construction Industry

What is Lean Project Management.


Imagine what your business would be like if everyone did what they said they were going to do. Variation in delivery, quality, cost and safety would be virtually eliminated. Your ability to plan and maintain control would be vastly improved and your customers would want to deal only with you. This is the kind of transformation that Lean has delivered in manufacturing businesses, why not construction businesses.


When boiled right down, a project is promise, delivered by people working in a network of commitments. The act of design creates the conditions of satisfaction that mark the delivery on that promise. During construction, the physical work, movement, and shaping and installation of materials delivers on promises made in planning as people organize to do their work. When people make reliable promises and do what they say, others in the network of commitments are free to make their promises resulting in predictable workflow downstream. When downstream planners can count on work being ready, crews can work closer together without sacrificing productivity. Project duration is reduced, productivity goes up across the board, and the site is safer.

A lean approach is achieved by involving project performers, people responsible for delivering on their promises, in planning the work that they will perform. It occurs through successive levels of planning starting from the overall promises to the client to weekly and daily planning where the details of what will be done by whom on a specific date is promised. The lean approach exploits what people learn as they perform. Planning continues throughout the project for refining, learning, innovating, and adjusting to the future that unfolds.

Lean Construction sees projects as temporary production systems and defines production as designing and making things. In other types of production systems, designing and making tend to get separated. The most extreme instance of this is repetitive manufacturing, the challenges of which have been the basis for production management theory and practice. We argue that the project is the fundamental form of production because even the products of repetitive manufacturing are designed and made the first time in a project, and because the result of separating designing and making is a decrease in value delivered to customers and an increase in waste during delivery. That separation of designing and making has unfortunately happened even in construction projects, partly as a result of increasing specialization. Simply put, Lean Construction is a way of delivering projects that integrates designing and making with the objective of generating value for customers and eliminating waste in the delivery of that value.

Construction as a manufacturing process:

The big lean ideal is to deliver projects while maximizing value and minimizing waste. An instrumental means is to simplify site installation to final assembly and commissioning. Projects as a whole are unique, but the components they assemble and the processes they use are very much the same. Consequently, shifting craft work into or towards manufacturing is a genuine opportunity to better achieve the lean ideal.


The Last Planner System

Last Planner is a management system developed by the Lean Construction Institute. It is defined by rules and consists of components, each with specific jobs to do. Its objective is production control; i.e., the reliable flow of work from one specialist to another, throughout project delivery. The primary measure of that reliability is Percent Plan Complete (PPC), the percentage of planned tasks actually completed in a production period.
PPC improves when commitments are made that have certain characteristics: definition, soundness, sequence and size. Since it is unlikely that we will ever be perfect planners, it is also necessary to track the reasons why commitments were not kept, so that root causes can be eliminated. In addition to making commitments and acting on reasons (learning), other components of the Last Planner system are lookahead planning and phase scheduling.
Phase schedules are produced by the team of people who will do the work in that phase of a project. Phases are typically defined in terms of the physical systems of facilities; e.g., substructure, superstructure, cladding, mechanical rough-in, and so on. Lookahead schedules are dropdowns of the phase schedule, looking ahead usually 3 to 6 weeks. Scheduled assignments are analysed for constraints that must be removed in order for that work to be committed when scheduled. The addition of these ‘make ready’ tasks increases the level of detail in the lookahead schedule as compared to the phase schedule. During the lookahead period, installation operations are designed with the trades workers who will do that work. These operations designs are then tested for capability to meet safety, quality, time and cost standards, using some combination of digital prototyping, physical mockups, and first run studies. Making work ready and defining how it will be done insures both that the work available for commitment in daily and weekly work plans is the right work in the right quantity, and also that the work will be done to requirements.


A general rule of lean implementation is to first stabilize a production system before trying to optimize it. In project production systems, stability is achieved through planning and control. The role of the Last Planner system is to provide production control within the Lean Project Delivery System. Hence, working at the level of projects, Last Planner is generally the place to start. It holds hands with work structuring, which-in various ways-specifies how work is broken apart and put back together again. Project schedules are the final output of work structuring, but it starts at forming the team and structuring supply systems.


So - Why do a project on a lean basis?


Underneath the simple answer, “It will cost less, get done earlier with far fewer injuries, and better quality,” there are better and more powerful answers. These include less suffering (there is that word again) for the customer and project team, greater accountability, forward-looking control – steering really – increased ability to cope with uncertainty and complexity, and the ability to identify and deliver more value to more people as the project unfolds. Such answers sound too good to be true, and they are too good to be true for those stuck in current practice.

Project Control


Control is redefined when the work in projects is understood as making and keeping commitments. By control, we mean the ability to make things happen as intended. Projects that look good on the cost and schedule report are not necessarily under control by this definition. Too often people choose and do work to make their accounts look good rather than keep their promise to deliver what is needed downstream. This sort of thing can be traced to a lack of accountability. Be clear about this: Accountability arises when a person makes a promise and accountability vanishes when they don’t have the freedom to say, “No.” Telling people to get their numbers up destroys accountability to others in the line of work.

New possibilities, beyond what we can explore in this short paper, open as the flow of work becomes more predictable. Perhaps the most important benefit predictable flow brings is close coordination in the midst of greater complexity. Nature knows this rule: predictability at the cellular level must increase as complexity increases or the organism cannot maintain its integrity.

The Future Is Uncertain


The primary reason to do projects on a lean basis is for the ability to adjust as the always uncertain and unknowable future unfolds. The usual approach, to do the majority of the planning and scheduling before the project begins, puts a straitjacket on the project team.

Things still go wrong on lean projects, but the ability of the team to work in trust together allows them to make the best of each circumstance. They can bring their collective creativity and talent to bear in ways unforeseeable in the initial program or master schedule.

Value is what the client says it is. Their understanding will change as the world changes and as new possibilities are brought forward. On lean projects, value is created and delivered when promising connects the work of specialists to the value delivered to the customer and coordinates their action. Greater value is delivered and customer satisfaction increased when the team adjusts to the changing situation and customer aims and interests.

Does Lean Construction work?

Lean Construction is being adopted widely in North and South America and northern Europe. Some of the more spectacular examples of its success are listed here.

• BMW Constructors, an U.S. industrial piping contractor, achieved a 31% increase in productivity on a refinery expansion project that the ‘experts’ said could not be delivered within the budget..

• Graña y Montero, a large Peruvian construction company, reports a 40% increase in project profitability after implementing Lean Construction.

• An architectural/engineering firm in Santiago, Chile reports a 31% increase in productivity.

• MTH, the largest Danish construction company, reports a 75% reduction in accidents on their Lean vs non-Lean projects.

How will it change the industry in the future?

There are trends in the Lean direction that are already well understood. Relationship contracting, increased use of BIM systems and reliance on suppliers and contractors to supply just in time with perfect fit-up are a few.

• There will be more involvement of downstream players in upstream processes, and vice-versa.
• There will various forms of alliances develop so bigger parts of the total project can be optimized; e.g., specialists will band together so that money can move across the boundaries of their organizations, thus removing an obstacle to innovation.
• Work will shift from on site to off site.
• More time and money will be spent on planning of all kinds.
• The general contractor role as financial go-between will be very much reduced.
• Builders will acquire design capability and designers will acquire building capability.
• Repeat customers will demand lean project delivery.
• The primary focus in lean itself will shift from waste elimination to value generation.

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Recommended Lean Books

Posted on 25 February 2010

Recommended LEAN Reading

Conduct your own book search -- Click here

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Lean Health book "Advanced Lean Thinking"

Designed to assist you to dramatically improve Health Care with the application of advanced and proven LEAN Techniques

Click here for more information

Health care is increasingly under pressure to improve processes and capacity --- Here is a book full of tools and techniques to Increase Quality and Patient Safety by Reducing Waste. Offering an effective alternative to traditional health care performance improvement.

A follow-up to the best-selling Doing More with Less: Lean Thinking and Patient Safety in Health Care, this book focuses on five specific tools and principles that can eliminate waste, save critical time, and improve the delivery and safety of patient care. Chapter by chapter, it unpacks a 'lean toolbox' providing step-by-step explanations of how to use the tools, and example applications for value stream mapping, kaizen events, 5S events, error proofing, Six Sigma, taking readers through real-life applications of key concepts and tools. The case studies of successful lean projects in all types of health care settings provide real examples and illustrate the collaborative nature and power of lean tools and help to identify opportunities for the future. They explore lean thinking in such areas as patient and nurse flow, appointment scheduling, lab turnaround, and more. Finally the book focusses on the readers application to successfully advance lean thinking in their own health care organizations and achieve rapid results.

_________________________________________

Strategic Lean Transformation

To ensure you have a more holistic view of what it takes to strategically create a lean enterprise.

Click here for more information about this book

To achieve sustainable competitive advantage is not simply the deployment of techniques of lean manufacturing, but the creation of distinctive competencies within business resources. Distinctive competencies built upon performance results based in knowledge, expectations, behaviors, and standards of performance hence the culture of operations excellence.

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The Lean Toolbox for Service Systems

This is the first book that attempts to assemble a comprehensive set of tools for lean service and administration.

Click here for more information about this book

All the material in this book has been 'field tested' by exposure to service professionals and executive programmes. A feature of the book is that it integrates several approaches rather than advocating a particular approach.

Attention is given to general Lean service concepts and frameworks, to mapping and understanding different types of service system, and to a range of tools that have been found to be useful in a variety of service environments.

To search for your own book titles -- Click here

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Information Automation

Posted on 24 August 2009

Information Automation (MES)

The goal of Information Automation in a manufacturing environment is improved control over information management processes. This is often manifested as a paperless factory or supply chain and is referred to as a Manufacturing Execution System or MES.

Information management is a key activity in any operational environment.

Enterprises are full of information management processes (often invisible). For example:

  • Raw material receival, specifications, inspections, quarantine
  • Process definition, variable set points, adjustments, setup information
  • Component part specifications, drawings, test specs, inspection procedures, SPC regimes
  • Assembly specifications, BILLs of Materials, routings, assembly instructions, packaging instructions
  • Productions schedules, inventory levels,
  • Works order issue and execution
  • Delivery schedules, transport requirements, logistics contractor equipments
  • Record keeping, used by, validation and verification

In each process there are information interfaces as information is passed from one place, department, individual, machine, computer or time to another. At each interface there is cost, risk of variation and loss of integrity. Information automation reduces process variation and cost by collecting data automatically where possible and removing or simplifying interfaces.

Information Automation implementation steps:

  1. Eliminate or combine as many information management processes as possible (after referring to the high level Value Stream Map)
  2. Eliminate or combine as many information interfaces with each remaining process as possible
  3. Simplify the process using Visual Factory techniques to the point that paper or computers are not required (KANBAN for example is a visual scheduling process)
  4. Automate the remaining process and interfaces
  5.  Automatic data collection,
  • direct from the process controller (PLC, SCADA, HMI)
  • using auto ID, either Barcodes or RFID tags (Radio Frequency Identification)
  • Validate manual collected data as it is entered into computer terminals (handheld or otherwise)
  • Use computerised manufacturing execution systems for data management

The benefits include:

  • Reduced direct and indirect information processing costs
  • Operators are relieved from filling out paperwork and have real time accurate information at their disposal
  • Increased customer value through greatly increased ability to change the production schedule, packing and delivery requirements etc at the last minute.
  • Less paper chasing, expediting and aggravation in the office
  • Real time data available for decision making across the organisation.
  • Poor performance data is available real time and in the public domain (inside the organisation), empowering employees to react to a negative situation before they need to be instructed to do so by a supervisor
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Using DMAIC for change

Posted on 23 August 2009

The Basic Change Process

It is recommended to split a change process into several steps. The number of steps is dependent on the complexity and size of the change project being undertaken.

Using DMAIC:

  • Define – The change program and objectives (intent) approved.
  • Measure – The “Current State” Take before pictures and establish before change performance.
  • Analyse – The current state opportunities, priorities, likely “Future State” measures and outcomes, create the detailed change plan, activities, resources and critical path items and expected resistance and issues.
  • Implement – Program launch, communicate progress, risk analysis, refine approach as necessary, complete each step on time and to budget costs and improvement outcome goals.
  • Control – The project progress, the future state process stages and report improvement success, standardise the new process to make it the new current state. Take the after pictures and establish after performance.
  • Establish the approximate timings for each of the DMAIC phases from the onset, giving regard to the organisational issues, such as suppliers, customers, regulatory, expected resistance, need for change, level of technology, level of complexity and level of resource support.

Analyse the “Current State”
This phase is a combined analysis as it is not just to find out what is to be improved and where we are now, but to also jointly work with the people who currently own or work in the key processes to be changed. They are required to share operational reality and are included in the understanding of why things need to be changed at all.
We want to:
• Indentify where improvements / changes can be made
• Check whether the change is appropriate given the direction of the organisation’s strategy and vision.
• Help people begin to build a shared view of what can be changed and the “Future State”.
• Begin un-freezing the organisation to the need for change.
• Identify priority components of the change.

Do you use a systematic approach to your continuous improvement change management? Share your ideas and experience with us all.

Want to know more contact us

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