Mar 19, 2014 | Posted by Ben Thompson
With Takt time calculated and in hand we have a glimpse at what rate our processes should operate at but we have no data on the current state of things on our shop floor. So, to gain insight on what is actually happening out there we have to scientifically measure the current state of our processes.
A few posts back I mentioned the Japanese term Genchi Genbutsu which translates to “Go and see for yourself”, and talked about the he standardized work chart as baseline for improvement that establishes a diagram of the workplace and the work movements that occur in it. The idea behind job analysis and data collection is to time processes to gather data on how long the work within a process takes. We first take ten full cycle observations, to gather data on the process as a whole. We highlight the lowest repeatable time that this process can be completed in, because if it is repeatable within ten trials it is very likely it can be repeated continuously. If we take this repeatable time and subtract it from the greatest time it took to complete the process we find the fluctuation in the time it takes to complete the process.
But we aren’t done yet. Now we take that breakdown of work within the process, those work movements that occur in it, we call these work elements. We time each of these work elements ten times and again highlight the lowest repeatable time and find the fluctuation for each of these elements. This assists us in pinpointing a more precise origin of the problems that are causing the process to suffer overall. Tune in next week to see how we organize the data to display visually how the cycle times of a process are not meeting the demand of the customer. Until then,
Keep
Calm,
and
Kaizen
On!
