Page 231 - How To Implement Lean Manufacturing

Cellular Manufacturing 209

Summary of Results
So, summarizing, just how did the conversion to cells improve our production?

• With minor losses, the 21-station flow line could only produce 163 units/hr.
• By using cellular design we reduced the waste of waiting, caused by the inter-
action of variation and dependent events and we should have been able to
produce about 214 units/hr.
• However, we produced 266 units/hr, and
this increase above the 214 units/hr was Point of Clarity Cells are
due to the reduction of the wastes of waiting a natural variation reduction
and transportation, which was also made device.
possible by the cellular design concept.

Make no mistake about it. Properly designed cells are
• a variation reduction device.
• a waste reduction device.
• a productivity improvement tool!

Chapter Summary
So what happened to Greg’s labor efficiency? Well, it skyrocketed and is now well over
100 percent, which of course cannot be. Needless to say, he was very very happy.
The Gamma Line is a story often repeated in manufacturing and differs from the
situation that Ohno and Toyota had to deal with in the automobile business. The Gamma
Line produced a household appliance where the life of any given product is seldom
three years. In addition, the monthly demand for household appliances has huge swings
due to the sales and promotions by their customers. In short, the concept of takt does
not really apply to these products, and overproduction is handled by running the line
in less time—seldom is the production line slowed down. Nonetheless, we were able to
apply the concepts of Lean and achieve huge process gains. To achieve these gains,
exactly which tools did we utilize?
First, we looked at the waste in the system; our focus was waste removal. Then,
utilizing cells, we were able to eliminate most of the waste. They already had a pull
production system in place, using one-piece flow, but we utilized line balancing and
conversion to cellular manufacturing. This allowed us to reduce the wastes of waiting
and transportation and more effectively utilize our manpower. Cycle-time reductions
were a large part of our gains, as was an understanding of how variation and depen-
dent events were affecting our production rate. Changing the design to cellular produc-
tion allowed longer cycle times so that small variations in techniques did not affect
production nearly as much as with the shorter cycle times. These were the Lean tech-
niques employed to achieve the 63 percent increase in the hourly production, as well as
achieve a more level hourly production.
However, these gains were not achieved in a vacuum. A number of Lean techniques
had already been implemented and were functioning. First, to achieve flow, the original