The early 90s was the beginning of my work experience
with Foreign-Domestic automakers such as Mazda and Toyota. It didn’t take long for me to realize that
they had a different philosophy to doing business. Quality, delivery, communication, and improvements were all a very important aspect to their approach. It was such a pleasure for our team to work
with them.
My perception was that they always wanted us to get
better and were not afraid to share their knowledge in order for us to do
so. Their production planning was so
precise that it made it so easy for us to schedule daily production
accordingly.
This is the era when I was first introduced to the new buzzword
“Kanban”, otherwise known as “Just in Time”. It was also the first project we worked on with Toyota. Just in Time was a simple well-known phrase,
however, it was a challenge to get this process implemented since this was new to
us and completely opposite to the way we were
used to doing business in “Mass Production” mode. We had the mentality of thinking changeover
and start-ups were far too time consuming and costly.
I remember when Toyota sent a team to work with us for
several months in order to educate us on how to implement the full Just-In-Time
system. I must admit that I was
pessimistic at the beginning, but was quickly convinced this was the right way
of moving forward.
This project included personnel within the front and
back door of our plants. Personnel such as machine operators, set-up
technicians, tool and die makers, maintenance technicians, shipping & receiving,
production supervisors & managers, purchasing, finance and the entire
executive team.
We started by putting our two teams together in a room. With
two white boards in front of us, we used one to outline all the activities
involved in making the parts, right from the receiving of raw materials to the
shipping of finished goods. The other white board was used for tracing out each action performed in different colour. We tracked the number of steps and distance the material and people traveled in order to make
a part. (Keep in mind that everything
was still done on paper. Computers and
cell phones were still foreign to us).
Once
all activities were visual on Board 1, we quickly realized that over ¾ of the
activities performed were Non-Value-Added. As for Board 2, we basically ran out of colour and realized we were
wearing out the soles of our safety shoes due to all the walking around from station to station.
Although
these process steps were clearly visible on each board, the main obstacles we
needed to overcome were equipment reliability and changeover of raw material and
tooling. After all, we were molding all
TPO (Thermal Plastic Olefin) interior parts in 9 different colours.
In
order to improve the tooling changeover, we decided to video record the changeover process from start to finish and have the entire team watch this video together. This was very educational. We learned that an average changeover was taking
us over 120 minutes. We were able to
list all steps, only to realize how unprepared we were - Process sequence was
wrong. - The technician was not well
prepared. He didn't have the correct screws, bolts or tooling at hand. – Over 90% of the activities performed added no value.
As we
improved procedures, we’d once again watch these steps on video and make
improvements accordingly, We continued
to record/watch/improve until we reached and exceeded our objectives of less than 10 minutes
for tooling changeover.
As other team members worked on different aspects of
this project, we were in full Kanban Pull System mode within 6 months.
Foreign Domestic believed that we could only be
successful once our end customer was fully happy.
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