In my last post I stated that I had prepared a brief
presentation of my own for when the corporate people arrived. Here's what happened next.
The very first slide
said it all. It was a plot of weekly
on-time delivery and I think it shocked them.
When I had arrived, the plant’s on-time delivery was just under sixty
percent while the efficiencies were around eighty-five percent, which was still
too low for our “corporate experts.”
When they saw it, they didn’t believe it because even though the
efficiency had dropped to around sixty-five percent, our on-time delivery now
stood at eighty-eight percent which was still not good enough for me. Actually, the most current week which had not
yet been plotted now stood at ninety four percent!!
I asked the “experts”
if they would like to see how it was possible to improve on-time delivery,
while at the same time reduce our process efficiencies. I went through my traditional drawings of the
piping system and simple four-step process and explained the concept of a
physical constraint. But for those of
you who haven’t read about the concept of a system constraint, here are the two
drawings I used.
In this first drawing
I asked the corporate “experts” the question in the box just beneath the
drawing of the simple piping system.
They answered the question correctly in that it would be necessary to
increase the diameter of Section C to increase the volume of water delivered. I also asked them if increasing the diameter
of any other section would increase the flow of water through this system and
again, they answered correctly by saying no, only Section C. This exercise was intended to implant the
concept of the system constraint firmly in their minds. I then inserted a second drawing of a simple
four-step process for manufacturing something.
I repeated the same
questions I had asked about the piping system and they answered each
one correctly. I then asked them to
tell me what would happen if we were to run every process step as fast as we
could in order to increase efficiency like they wanted? One of the "brighter" corporate
folks got a smile on his face and said that, if you did, you would end up with
two piles of inventory…..one in front of Step 2 and an even larger one in front
of Step 4. When I asked him to explain,
he said that because of the differences in capacities it would be a natural
effect. Since Step 1 could produce at
double the rate of Step 2 the WIP in front of Step 2 would build up at a rate
of one extra part per minute. The pile
of WIP in front of Step 4 would be even bigger.
I then asked this same
man to tell me the rate at which I should run the current process and he
correctly stated one part every 5 minutes to match the rate of the
constraint. Everyone had just
experienced that concept of slowing down, in order to speed up and that
attempting to drive efficiencies upward could have a negative impact on on-time
delivery. And with that, the team from
corporate packed up and went home.
TO BE CONTINUED
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