In this podcast we discuss concepts from Lean Manufacturing, the Toyota Production System, and general business management to improve our businesses. Thanks for listening! Please drop us a note with any and all feedback!

If you have parts you need machined, reach out to [email protected] and follow on Instagram www.instagram.com/lichen_mfg

If you need CNCed Buckles, check out www.austeremfg.com and follow at on Instagram www.instagram.com/austere_manufacturing

This week Devin and Uriel discuss some improvements from around the shop with some discussion of what issues came up that led to the improvements as well as some of the thinking behind the improvements implemented.   

Please follow us on Instagram and share your improvements and tag us.www.instagram.com/incrementalci   

In this podcast we discuss concepts from Lean Manufacturing, the Toyota Production System, and general business management to improve our businesses.  

Thanks for listening! Please drop us a note with any and all feedback!  

If you have parts you need machined, reach out to [email protected] and follow on Instagram www.instagram.com/lichen_mfg   

If you need CNCed Buckles, check out www.austeremfg.com and follow at on Instagram www.instagram.com/austere_manufacturing

Please follow us on Instagram and share your improvements and tag us. www.instagram.com/incrementalci 

This week Devin and Uriel have a wide ranging discussion about a range of topics that relate to lean manufacturing and the Toyota Production System, and continuous improvement. Some of the topics include: 

- Balancing equipment utilization vs operator utilization vs overall shop throughput. 

- Profit sharing and exploring other ways of putting money where your mouth is to share success with employees. 

- How to think about revenue goals. Is it based on equipment, or is it better to think about employees as a profit center that gets multiplied based on the equipment or process they're utilizing. 

- Information flow in a company as it relates to production leveling and scheduling. 

- Safety stock and how to evaluate if it's needed. Fixing problems / making improvements vs actually getting work done. How do we keep work moving while still capturing issues to be resolved later. 

- Part orientation as they move through production. We spend a lot of time orienting parts. 

- Prototyping aimed at learning. 

Thanks for listening! Please drop us a note with any and all feedback! 

If you have parts you need machined, reach out to [email protected] and follow on Instagram www.instagram.com/ lichen_mfg 

If you need CNC'ed Buckles, check out www.austeremfg.com and follow at on Instagram www.instagram.com/austere_manufacturing]

This week we talk about:  

- Listener question - we discuss how we've been improving the podcast process inline with Lean concepts 

- Single loop vs Double loop learning and building a learning organization 

- How to think through standardizing setups and workholding to account for a wide variety of work scenarios. 

- An update on approaching an assembly station redesign and shifting the focus from designing the station to designing experiments for quick and cheap learning. 

- Devin and Uriel then go over some of their improvements from the past week.

This week Devin and Uriel talk through some listener questions, talk production leveling, how to prioritize tasks, and what happens when linked processes fail.

Standardized tooling and redundant tooling can be an essential part of gaining efficiency. It is interesting to think about what can be standardized but also how to standardize deviation from standard... Is that possible? Kanban can be a very useful tool for making sure that tools stay in stock. As buffers get reduced, downtime becomes more immediately problematic so it needs to be addressed.  

What's the best way to get started in lean and what are some favorite cheap and quick improvements.  

Developing in house vs buying off the shelf or hiring out custom machines. Toyota talks about building in house costing 1/3-1/5 the cost of buying. What are they talking about?  

Figuring out what to do next minute by minute in the shop is very tricky. It is hard to build systems that surface what should be done in what order but if we just write out a schedule ahead of time, than it will be rigid and will not respond to fluctuations in the market.  

What happens when things fail in a system of linked processes with minimal buffers, it becomes immediately apparent that there was a problem. Adding inventory buffers between processes can alleviates this issue, but bakes in a lot of waste.   

Devin and Uriel discuss some improvements that they made during the week with some interesting conversations around what issues were noticed that led to the improvements.

We have an Instagram! Go give us a follow @incrementalci and see all types of improvements from across the web!

On this episode Devin Bodony and Uriel Eisen talk about Production Leveling and the three M's of the Toyota Production System.  Muda, Mura, and Muri. There are many examples where increasing inventory can help level production which can be hugely valuable. Uneven production leads to huge waste so it is critical to figure out how to level production.  While Toyota uses temp workers to deal with peaks in demand, that is not necessarily a tool that is available to small business. Devin and Uriel discuss many ways that a business can achieve flex to deal with peaks and valleys in demand but the root of the issues is an uneven load on the shop. This uneven load necessitates optimizing systems for peak demand which is wasteful. There is a lot of efficiency to be gained by keeping a leaner system continuously busy. They discuss staggered work schedules, working overtime, using pricing adjustments to deal with fluctuations.  

Some discussion of improvements, keeping things simple and production rationalizations. It points to the need for good SOPs and developing a culture that works from SOPs rather that everyone doing things differently. Checklist Manifesto is a great book that is very relavant here and worth a read.  Devin talks through the strugles of information handoff from CAM to the CNC operator. What is the process and tools for making sure that information is handed off well and absent rework.  A discussion of checklists vs detailed instructions. Toyota uses a combination of these things and it is interesting to see where they use which one.  

Uriel discusses kanban signals and how many kanban to have in a given item's stock. It is clear that efficiency would be increased paradoxically by reducing the efficiency of the paint department.  

TPS has a simultaneous focus on the global view and on the minute. The very big and the very small.  How do we maintain focus on those two opposites as people that run the business as well as work in the business.  

Is counting down less mentally taxing than counting to a target that you need to hold in mind? That said, counting in general is all waste. We should all move away from needing to count.

This week we cover: Rationalizing production, TPS Engineering, Cognitive load research, Single piece flow. Our weekly improvements,  and a discussion of developing software vs buying off the shelf.  

Continuous improvement is not unique to lean. It is something we all do, but lean and TPS do bring a systemized and scientific approach to improvements that is very helpful. TPS is not about reducing waste. It is about solving your problems in a rational and scientific manner. So what is meant by rationalizing your production? Don't seek local optimum but instead rationalize your entire process to and make sure your decisions are inline with your goals.  Ask why 5 times to get to the root cause and solve the problem at the source. 

Toyota seems to focus on the human element.  

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." - Aristotle  

"Practice does not make perfect, practice makes permanent. Perfect practice makes perfect."  

TPS Engineering achieves better results with half the engineering hours in half the time. Their teams, unlike most companies, are large at first then get smaller over time. The savings they seem to be leveraging is reducing rework. 90% planning, and 10% execution. This is hard because it shows slow progress at the beginning but has very little rework. Devin relates this to his process of designing fixtures. How do we think about this approach when compared with the concept of "fail-fast, fail cheap"?  Do we fail fast and cheap on a whole project or can we break things down to de-risk a crux of a process, it can avoid a lot of rework.  

Mental work load is something that is barely talked about in an explicit way in a lot of writing on TPS. There is some very interesting research on this topic. Uriel spoke with Kenneth Kotovski who spoke about some of his research on the impact of "problem isomorphs". They saw a 15x increase in time of solving a structurally identical problem. There are many examples of difficult mental tasks that could be eliminated or greatly simplified. There are so many examples of us overusing our brains which pulls them off of much more useful tasks.  

Single piece flow. What is it? Devin and Uriel give an overview of single piece flow. The idea is that a single piece of the thing you're producing moves from one process to the next with no waiting between and not in batches. It's very hard to achieve. Eliyahu Goldratt mentioned that Ford used a spatial constraint, Toyota uses inventory constraint, to achieve flow. He then proposed using the release of stock to limit overproduction.  How do dishwashers impact the kitchen. This is a good example how batches have far reaching effects. More storage space for more dishes means traveling further to move around the kitchen because you need so many dishes because of the batch size of a dishwasher.  Single piece flow as a north star to move toward. It has far reaching impacts from quality, space, and highlighting new issues to solve.  Devin and Uriel go over some of their small improvements.  Devin shares some of the challenges he's having with quoting new jobs and the software available. There are some very expensive solutions that MAY do what he needs, but there are also some cheaper options including just building tools in house. The question is which direction to go.