Page 277 - How To Implement Lean Manufacturing

254 Cha pte r S i x tee n

Lessons Learned
So just what is the point of the Zeta line experience? It clearly points out that:

• You have to know the work.
• If you want to make materials flow in the basic work cell, you have to deal with
the work at the element level.
• “Inside out” is almost always the best way to begin eliminating non-value-added
work activities, something that can easily begin during the paper kaizen phase.
• There are huge early gains everywhere.

The Case of the QED Motors Company: Another Great Example of Huge
Early Gains on an Entire Value Stream

Background

The Prescription—Revisited
The Second Prescription—How to Implement Lean-The Prescription for the Lean Project—
is well detailed in Chap. 8. The story of QED Motors shows how all eight steps of the
prescription are applied. As is normally the case, the prescription can not always be
adhered to in a linear straight-line fashion, but if you follow it through, you will see that
all eight steps are well addressed by the team, which improved this process. As a
refresher, the Second Prescription is summarized here.
Steps 1–3: Systemwide evaluations
1. Assess the three fundamental issues to cultural change.
2. Complete a systemwide evaluation of the present manufacturing system
(outlined in Chap. 19).
3. Perform an educational evaluation of the workforce.
Steps 4–8: Specific value stream evaluations and action items
4. Document the current condition of the value stream.
5. Redesign to reduce waste. (Refer to Chap. 7.)
6. Evaluate and determine the goals for this line.
7. Implement the kaizen activities.
8. Following the changes, evaluate the new present state, stress the system, then
return to step 4.

Background Information
The QED Motors Company had been making motors for over 30 years. They had a
plant in California and had just constructed this new facility in Mexico to take advan-
tage of the low-cost Mexican labor. Their plan had been to run the two plants in parallel
for three to six months while the Mexican plant came up to speed, and then shut down
the California facility. It had now been over 15 months and the Mexican plant had just
that month achieved the design capacity of 3500 motors per month. However, to meet
this demand the plant was working seven days versus a business plan of five days, and
still had a number of production problems. The largest problems were: