TOCICO

If a manufacturing company desires long-term growth and profits, and realizes change is a constant, sooner or later they will be faced with designing or redesigning their production system. Despite the prediction of profits and flow, most of these designs have neither, and the company struggles with the effects of low return on investment (ROI) and poor delivery performance. Often, this new elephant leads to the downfall of the company as a whole. During the early phase of the design process, management creates a list of all things this new system must have. Be profitable, have a high ROI, have 100% delivery performance, have minimal inventory, reduce headcount, have no variation, meets forecast, etc. In addition, key concepts are tossed in from what they understand from current continuous improvement (CI) processes. Use one-piece flow, U-shaped cells, single-minute changeovers, have no bottlenecks, use pull systems, use less workers to reduce costs, etc. The vast number of requirements, few of which have been achieved in the current production system, overwhelms designers. To ensure all these requirements are met, experts from each area and CI method are included, and charged with making sure their key must haves are firmly in place – no compromises allowed. It’s clear that a self-defense needs to be implemented to ensure the goal of this manufacturing system is being met. In this presentation, seven key points are reviewed as the building blocks to develop this method and to ensure the profitability of the future design. The vast majority of these design points are based upon the work of Eli Goldratt, but lean experts will recognize several key points as well. A key issue, the ability to design in the bottleneck, and design out management constraints, is addressed.