Shojinka - line balancing
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When the lean production system is mentioned, productivity comes to mind for almost every engineer, every manager, and every employee. It is said that productivity will increase with the lean production system. Most of the time, more production is what is talked about. In many of our previous articles we explained that productivity is the ratio between inputs and outputs. One of these inputs is labor. Together with the lean production system, it is possible to affect labor efficiency directly. Indeed, as we can analyze with the Yamazumi application, one of the lean production techniques, and as we will see, a large part of labor goes to non-value-adding activities. These can most often be listed as searching, motion, transport, bending, reaching, and working while turning. All of these movements arise in work areas that have not been engineered, through arrangements the employee developed alone and defined as correctly as they were able. We have all come across it: employees prefer their own work area to be wide, spacious, and such that it increases movement; they want to bring and take materials in bulk, and to produce products on a batch basis. When we look at the general reason for this, causes are identified such as engineering not having been done, the employee working according to experience, and the absence of one-piece production. For labor efficiency to be fully achieved, a Yamazumi analysis must be carried out, the ratio of the time of value-adding activities to total activity time must be determined, and the necessary improvement Kaizens must be planned. In addition to all of this, if the factors that affect labor efficiency the most are to be listed;
- Application of one-piece flow,
- Balancing the production line, with each employee taking on work suited to Takt Time,
- A suitable plant layout,
- Production according to customer demand (Takt Time) instead of trying to produce quickly
It has been established through our experience that these affect labor efficiency to a large extent. In many companies the assumption prevails that producing quickly will also improve labor efficiency, whereas for production quantities to increase it is enough that inputs increase. Efficiency does not increase as inputs increase; most of the time it does not even stay constant; on the contrary it decreases, because measures that increase speed can cause inefficiency. The most important subject to focus on is producing the goods that are sold with fewer inputs. In this way efficiency will increase as well. Because it becomes possible to produce the same product with fewer inputs.
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You have surely come across this in your company. Lean production practices and competition ultimately come down to the employees. In that situation, employees whose trust you have not won, who have not identified themselves with the company values, who have no self-discipline, and who are not satisfied with the income they earn and therefore with their job, refuse to contribute to preventing waste, and the work either comes to a halt or moves forward very slowly.
Toyota has also shown a leading approach to teamwork. A principle of working in teams, in which individual development is encouraged for every employee, has been established. As is known, Toyota offers job security to employees from the start. In this way many problems are solved before they begin. In such an environment, employees can turn to new questions and problems and focus on the solution.
In this article we will explain what needs to be done to win employees' trust, to motivate them, and to ensure that they take part in the lean production system.
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One of the basic analyses applied on production lines is Yamazumi analysis. The greatest benefit of this analysis, used during workload balancing, is that it sets out value-adding and non-value-adding work clearly and explicitly. I believe this analysis must be done especially while one-piece flow is being set up. In this way the facts are brought into the open, and the points that need to be focused on are determined.
The word Yamazumi means "to stack" in Japanese. The work steps are shown stacked on top of one another for each station. Thus a way of using it emerges that is the same as the literal meaning of the word.
Toyota uses the Yamazumi chart to show workloads visually, to reveal non-value-adding work steps, and to achieve workload balance easily. Because the non-value-adding workload is laid out visually, all employees can focus on eliminating these workloads.
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As always, today too we will take up a practice-oriented topic. Someone has surely come to you wanting to set up an assembly line. What must be paid attention to in that situation is our topic today. Let us start by establishing the current state. Look over what you have done, and see whether you too are making the mistakes we list below.
The most common mistakes;
. Choosing a time that is too short or too long for workstations
. Giving the information flow little thought, or none at all
. Not taking the material flow into account
. Applying 5S, or the placement of materials and tools, incorrectly
. Using the concept of "comfortable working" incorrectly
. Distributing the workload incorrectly .Incorrect work sequence
Read more: What to Pay Attention to When Setting Up Assembly Lines
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The most important subject we have dwelt on in recent seminars has been ‘Standard Work’. Standard work is something that many company owners and managers have difficulty understanding, and whose benefit in the work they cannot see. In an environment where there is no standard work—and many companies attribute this situation to many causes and claim that, because of product variety, standard work cannot be applied in their own companies—it is clear that there will be no measurement and no evaluation. In that case it is also clear that improvement cannot be measured. How could you do it? It is not possible for you to see the waste (Muda, Mura, Muri) present in the work being done. If you cannot see the problem, how will you plan the improvement?
