Seeing the Waste: Henry Ford's Lean Success Secret
William A. Levinson, P.E., FASQ, CFPIM is the principal of Levinson Productivity Systems, P.C. He is an ASQ Certified Quality Engineer, Quality Auditor, Quality Manager, Reliability Engineer, and Six Sigma Black Belt, and the author of several books on quality, productivity, and management.
Enormous waste (muda) can hide in plain sight for years or even longer because everybody in the workplace takes it for granted, and is used to living with it or working around it. This waste can however consist of up to 95 percent of the labor, and a large portion of materials and energy as well. Henry Ford, whose success speaks for itself, identified three key performance indicators (KPIs) for waste that encompass the Toyota Production System's Seven Wastes and even more. These are waste of time, waste of material, and waste of energy. These are easily learned by the workforce, which can then use them to identify and remove the wastes in question.
Learning Objectives
- Know that most waste hides in plain view, as pointed out by Henry Ford, Taiichi Ohno, Shigeo Shingo, and others. Wastes other than poor quality are asymptomatic as they do nothing to announce their presence.
- Ford wrote that it is possible to waste only three things; time, material, and energy.
- Waste motion wastes the time of people.
- Wasted cycle time constitutes a waste of the time of things, and inventory is proportional to cycle time. Work in a process that is not having something done to it (transformation) represents wasted cycle time.
- Wasted materials are wasted money regardless of whether they are environmental aspects. Pay attention to everything that is thrown away as well as to the product itself.
- Wasted energy also is wasted money. Identify the gap between the amount of energy that is actually required for the job and the amount that is actually used. - Treat the waste as a problem subject to corrective and preventive action (CAPA) to remove it, and deploy the lessons learned to related operations.
Who Should Attend
Manufacturing and quality professionals and practitioners; people with responsibility for continual improvement and lean manufacturing.
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$200.00
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