Sunday, March 29, 2015

A really cool video.....

Here's a video that I found very interesting.  It's a 3-man process for making dinner roles which has good synchronization and flow, but it appears to me that WIP is growing.  So where is the constraint I this process?
Bob Sproull
https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=706011482806628

1 comment:

ERIK said...

Hello Bob, you are right the video is really awesome!
As you mentioned the pace they have is quite high ;-).

There are 3 men.
There are 5 steps (that we can see in your video).
Step 1
From the main bread dough, the man with the palette knife is cutting a a smaller amount of dough
Step 2
The "palette knife man" forms and rolls the cut dough like a sausage and cuts it into small pieces of dough (the size of the future bread rolls)
Step 3
the 2 other men roll the small pieces of dough (with their 2 hands simultaneously) into the nice and round bread and put them on a hot plate (the one that will go into the oven)
Step 4
When this hot plate is full of the rolled pieces of dough, then "man number 2" takes the hot plate to put it on a trolley just behind him. In the same action he also takes an empty tray (hot plate) and gets it back on the table where himself and "man number 3" will continue rolling the dough and will form it in future round bread.

When man number 1 has finished cutting the whole dough into smaller one, he finally helps man No 2 & 3 rolling the dough into formed bread.

Where we can see the WIP (work in process) accumulating a little is when No1 cuts the dough into smaller pieces as he is so quick that No2 & 3 have no time to roll the dough into small breads. Especially because when No2 stops rolling to move the tray and get a new one No3 goes a little slower as he cannot put the new formed bread on the tray. At this moment No1 is not slowing down, so it seems the accumulation of small cut dough is getting bigger.
So I would say the "forming and rolling the dough" step is the bottle neck; this is not only due to the forming and rolling activity but also to the fact that the No2 has to remove the full tray and get the new one: at that time he stops forming the future bread and dough accumulates before their working centre.

Hoping my description was clear enough, Thanks for your feedback to tell me what you think of my short analysis (I watched the video once only, so maybe I forgot some details).
ERIK