Takt Time, Waste Elimination, and Lean Manufacturing Principles
Takt-Time and Elimination of Wastes
Takt-Time represents the “good rhythm” that a process should have for a continuous and synchronized flow. The tempo should be quick enough to produce a lot, but also slow enough not to overburden workers and machines. If the Takt-time is inconsistent with workers’ and machines’ rhythm (and vice versa), we have a lot of wastes.
Workers become less focused when the Takt-time increases, which generates the following wastes.
Jidoka: Automation with a Human Touch
Jidoka means to improve the relationship among the individual, the workforce, and the technology to improve decision-making. (Automation with a human touch) Examples of Jidoka are: Andon Board, Poka-Yoke, and Genchi Gentbutsu
Kaizen: The Foundation of Continuous Improvement
Kaizen suggests preserving the core assumptions and emphasizes the importance of continuous improvement to gradually remove waste in place of radical improvements. In contrast, BPR tends to challenge the core assumptions of the process and tries to redesign it radically.
We should focus on small changes to focus on elements of a process. Processes should be improved constantly, ideally on a daily basis. Process owners should empower individual members to identify areas for improvement and suggest practical solutions.
The Working Space: Lean Principles
Lean proponents have promoted the importance of total engagement. Lean works in two key directions: On one hand, Lean simplifies and standardizes tasks, e.g., limiting the chances of mistakes (e.g., with poka-yoke), removing the need for improvisation (e.g., kanban), providing workers with intelligent machines (jidoka), and enacting real-time control (e.g., andon). On the other hand, Lean tries to obtain workers’ creativity and proactivity. In this regard, Liker argued that Lean implementations can create thinking people systems if they:
- Grow leaders who thoroughly understand the work, live the philosophy, and teach it to others
- Develop exceptional people and teams who follow your own company’s philosophy
- Respect your extended network of partners and suppliers by challenging them and helping them improve
- Make decisions slowly by consensus
- Become a learning organization through relentless reflection (hansei) and continuous improvement (kaizen)
Critics of Standardization and Control
Standardization and control demand compliance with the tasks, while creativity and improvisation are treated as a potential source of waste. The pressure to eliminate waste might prevent managers and workers from any attempt to take a risk with creative solutions as well as from more profound revisions of the status quo.
Critics have argued that Lean can become a form of Neo-Taylorism: was crucial for industrial progress. However, it didn’t enable workers’ improvisation and creativity, so subsequent theories and practices have criticized this model arguing that workers should be given more autonomy and more participation to innovation and strategy. Lean has sometimes been regarded as a return to the past, much closer to Taylorism than socio-technical views of the workforce. More specifically: does the implementation of Lean remove important spaces of autonomy and flexible decision-making to expert workers? There is no definitive answer to this question.
Benchmarking Types
Maylor identifies four types: functional (“projects conducted within the same organization”), internal (“projects conducted by the same organization”), generic (“process-related studies comparing projects with similar processes”), and competitor (“comparison with competitors”).
Benefits and Issues of Benchmarking
Benefits: Hill and Hill identify two main benefits of using benchmarking: It enables you to start an improvement process by showing people that there are other ways of working AND to maintain these improvements – by sharing best practice between and within organizations.
Issues: Maylor: The functional benchmarking is “clearly limited to the level of improvement, but it provides a good starting point and is likely to be highly cost-effective.” The internal benchmarking “develops benchmarking experience among staff and can be considered to be ‘safe’ as the information is developed and kept in-house.” The generic benchmarking states that comparisons are likely to be very difficult, but benefits can often be gained. The competitive benchmarking is “possibly the most difficult to execute effectively, due to the defensive attitudes of organizations towards their performance” (e.g., retaining confidentiality of data). The issues given above often prevent companies from fully benefiting from the process. Therefore, companies should consider:
- the context in which the best practice has thrived before considering if and how that best practice should be adopted;
- the resources (e.g., money) required to import and implement the external best practice.