Book Report

Book Title: The Synchronized Production System, Takeda

Book Overview: SPS covers manufacturing, transport, managing + reducing operating

time, few personnel, little machines. This conjunct is called SPS.

For this it is necessary to offer high quality at a low cost and to be able to react to
increasing diversification. Waste is eliminated and the entire chain of processes from
order intake to production to delivery is synchronized.

Several topics known already are explained on this book such as 5S or 6S (habit) I had
supposed that Discipline and Habit could be the same but after read it I understood that
Discipline means that work is carried out in the correct manner and Habit means
constant and practical repetition.

Also One Piece Flow, Flow Production, Takt Time, Standard Work. Quantity
Management, Quality Management, Maintenance and Kanban, some examples.

My main learning points:

Were the last topics who caught my attention, of course the other ones are very
important but as I said we have reviewed in detail during our Lean Journey.
 Quantity Management: the tool is a depiction of the results, cost and benefits
are compared and how those affect manufacturing cost. Also helps to show
disturbances and stablish production lines without fluctuation. The demands
made on the team leader are also considered; as a leader, he or she must
possess clear the objective to a greater degree than other workers.
Five requirements for team leadership capabilities:
1. They must have a clear conception of the future and be in a position to
clearly portray their ideal requirements
2. They must be able to express the ideal form for the production line
concretely and quantitatively to their superiors, colleagues and
subordinates
3. They must develop their own initiative on the basis of mutual trust
4. They must have the capacity for self-management and self-instruction.
5. They must work permanently on their self-realization
 There are 3 important task for Quantity Management; first: team leaders and
workers can discuss issues arising on the basis of the actual facts with the help of
a graphs. Second: QM helps keep delivery dates. Third: manufacturing cost are
shown by QM graph.
 QM on an hourly basis means for me LPMS, it is also a graph to monitoring
hourly the state of the production, registering constantly changing situations, and
finding solutions for problems or critical situations.

 Quality: to create Quality all procedures and processes must be visualized in

such a way that they can be understood at a glance, which means each defective
part becomes visible immediately.
The product represents the condition of the company. Quality is the result of
mechanical processing and assembly, so Product Quality is the end result.
 The quality of the employees, machinery, methods and information can be
inferred through to careful observation of the actual situation (genjitsu), at the
actual work site (genchi) and actual products (genbutsu).

 Maintenance: each person interprets the “term” Maintenance according to their

own ideas, Maintenance means keeping the machinery in a perfect, disturbance
free state, etc. Regular cleaning, testing and lubrication is necessary for this.
Machinery is a most important part of a company´s capital.
 Testing: they are 2 types of defects: those that suddenly come up, and those that
appear as a gradual decrease in function.
 Oiling can be broken down in 3 elements: refilling reservoirs (management of
amounts), oil change (quality management) and oiling intervals (timing)
 Degree of demand describes the relationship between supply and demand, that
is, the relationship between performance capacity and the demands of the
customer at a certain point in time.
 Service quality describes the proportion of time which a line or machine is
operational at exactly the “appropriate time” in the framework of SPS.
 Actual degree of capacity is the proportion of value-creating work in the actual
work time.

 Kanban: in principle a Kanban is only a small rectangular piece of paper which

states that should be pulled in what quantity and how it should be manufactured.
The downstream process always pull only the necessary parts in the necessary
 quantity at the appropriate time, and the upstream process only produce what the
downstream process demands.
 Kanban that contains that information for pulling and transporting are called
pulling Kanbans. By contrast, those Kanbans that give production orders are
called production Kanbans. These two types of functional Kanbans are linked to
one another, and circulate within and between factories.
 The supermarket is therefore faced with the task of supplying the goods
demanded. The supermarket must meet demands with a minimum of stock in the
buffer and the stockroom, since customers demand good quality at the lowest
possible prices.

What will I apply to my business?:

Through this book I could see the actual situation of my site compared to SPS. There is
a lot of work to do trying to apply all these concepts but first of all trying to convince,
change the mind set of my colleagues.
Quantity Management is a concept that we are currently doing, as I understand LPMS is
the same as QM, we have our LPMS boards, our morning meetings everyday attempting
find solutions to our lines, improve productivity, etc, but in this chapter I could see
another factor that maybe we are passing by and those are the Team Leaders, perhaps
we are not thinking on them as a part of the solution, just they are like a “messenger
person”: “I need this”, “give me one production report”, “advice to maintenance there is a
problem”, etc, but we are not considering that they are with the operating people all the
time; same as operator people know their machine and operations, Team Leader should
know about micro managing, because that is part of their activities, lead with the people.
So we have to think on them more than as normal operators helping others, but as a
people who can find solutions to critical situations. The first step for me would be train to
our Team Leaders about their own importance and how they can solve issues, explain
them LPMS is not just a board where they just write down red or green numbers, it´s
also a tool to track the performance and they are transcendent part of it.

As the author said, Maintenance has several interpretations, I can say easily for my site
Maintenance means corrective actions. I´m not speaking ill about our department; they
are very good guys and their strive to fix and keep machinery and operations running
well is admirable. But honestly all of us have the same thought, even the managers think
“just fix it”. This chapter about Maintenance taught me that we can use the same
concepts: quality, demands, capacity related to the machinery, just we have to
understand it first. Just with 5S is possible prevent many defects or functional
decreasing of machinery. I think all this is about culture, 5S culture until achieve the 6S,
the habit, not just doing it in a correct manner but also thinking why we have to do it on
that way.