Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Lean emphasizes the prevention and elimination of waste which are the products
and services that doesnt add value to an organization. The idea is to review all
areas in an organization in order to determine where the non-value added work
is. Its ultimate goal is to provide value with zero waste. They are willing to pay
for their needs. End products will be expensive if they add in unnecessary specs,
such as using much more expensive raw materials. I think that what a customer
wants is always value. They only are willing to pay for what they need. For
example, the products that Fidel Engineering offers to their customers must be
worth what their customers are paying for because when people pays something
for a product or service offered, there are expecting for their money to be well
spent, in other word it is the customers satisfaction. When customers see that
there are minimal or no value offered by an organization, likelihood they will not
engage them in future business and will go elsewhere. Therefore, it is important
to safeguard their interest. There are 2 types of values that I will be talking
about; Value add Vs Non-value add process. Both require resources such as
manpower, time and money. The results of value add is bringing in profit to a
business whereas a waste for non-value adds. What organizations should aim for
is improve Value added process while reducing Non-Value added as much as they
can. Waste costs you and your customers money.
Lets look into more detail about non-value add which is simply waste. Waste
comes in into 3 forms. They are Mura - waste due to variation (unevenness),
Muri -activity asking unreasonable stress or effort from personnel, material or
equipment (overburden or strain). The last one is Muda - 7 types of Waste. The 8
types of waste can be easily remembered by using the acronym Tim woods.
They are Transportation, Inventory, motion, waiting, over-production, overprocessing, defects and skills. By reducing these wastes, quality is improved;
production time and costs are reduced. Next, I will discuss more on each waste
and will try to relate them to Fidel Engineering by identifying the wastes that can
be found during my internship there. In addition, I will be suggestions solutions
that can be implemented to reduce these non-value add processes. In Toyota
production system to eliminate waste, the order of steps is Mura>Muri>Muda.
This is because these wastes (Muri,Mura) are often the underlying causes of
Muda observe in processes.
beyond its capacity. When overloading is ignored, this will result in defects,
downtime, delays and even disasters. It also host of other failures in our system
such as lack of training, unclear or no defined ways of working, the wrong tools,
and ill thought out measures of performance. Overburdening of people on other
hand increase the risk of accidents and hence safety is at risk.
Process
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Process
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Process
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Product
The small steps that Kaizen promotes can bring change that is both lasting and
powerful. Ive read various sources which stated that Kaizen, a Japanese word
which means good change. Business may be sceptical towards small steps that
Kaizen adapts in providing goodwill to them. They seldom realise that these
small improvements can produce immediate gains in productivity and quality.
There are 2 strategies for change, innovation and kaizen. Innovation may or may
not work when solving for solutions. Innovation is a dramatic, sweeping change
where is usually executed within a short amount of time. They can arise when a
problem is too big to ignore and the management starts to do something about it
in a radical way. It usually involves radical risks such as huge investment of
money, time, people or goodwill. There is always a probability of the innovation
to bring down an organization or part of it, such as the affected departments. I
will take this insight that Ive gained and share with my group so that we will be
able to drive the way of attending to change, whenever needed in Fidel
Engineering. I would want to promote Kaizen as an ideal strategy for responding
to a change as compared to innovation. Looking psychologically, radical change
sets off our brains fear response and shuts down our ability to think clearly and
creatively. In addition, people are already isolated from their day-to-day
responsibilities. The small steps approach in Kaizen allows our intellectual
process to flow without any obstructions.
Some of the benefits of Kaizen are:
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My Proposal
During the first visit to the new location of Fidel Engineering, the company have
just shifted there for one week and only the fabrication area has not yet shifted
into the new premise. Before the visit, I realised that the reason why lean
process cannot be implemented into the new layout for Fidels new location is
due to the arrangement of the machines on the site where all CNC machines are
placed, and some other machines such as the wirecut. I understand that the final
arrangement of the machines is due to limited of space. This imposes us a
challenge to design a lean flow for workers to follow as during observation,
there is no flow that can be created in that particular section of the factory. The
CNC machines are scattered and work areas for workers to do machining are
quite small. Looking at the current situation of Fidel Engineering, there are few
ideas currently that I can think of to help improving the process flow of their
work. The team will need to get feedback from Mr Poon How wan on this matter.
Implement 5s tool for shop floor 5s is the post popular lean tool that most
companies adopting to lean uses. It is the first step towards being a lean
Safety implementation During the walk to the factory, I noticed that some of
the workers do not conform to safety standards / PPE when operating the
machines and other ad-hoc works. I also did observe this particular problem
during my internship at Fidel Engineering. This increase the risk of workers
getting injured at work. How this affects lean is the flow of work will get
interrupted if workers have to attend to emergency needs. When safety and 5s
combine together, it is called lean 6S. Thats the direction that I think the team
should focus on at the start of the project.