The most fundamental of all the Lean tools is 5S Workplace Organization and Standardization. The concept of 5S Workplace Organization and Standardization was presented in the book entitled Five Pillars of the Visual Workplace, by Hiroyuki Hirano.* Workplace Organization and Standardization is a fundamental building block of any LSS organization. As described in the Lean concepts section, the Holy Grail in any process is continuous flow. If a process is poorly organized or not standardized, it is very difficult to establish continuous flow. This is one reason most organizations begin an implementation of Lean with the fundamental introduction to 5S Workplace Organization and Standardization. There are many case studies in the literature that cite the importance of 5S to their Lean initiatives. Moreover, an effective 5S program is a prerequisite to applying Lean tools, and achieving sustainable meaningful results.

The purpose of 5S is to arrive at a safe, neat, orderly workplace where everything required to perform for your customer is readily accessible by your employees. Implementing 5S Workplace Organization and Standardization results in a commonsense work area with an organized sequence of activities required in your value-added processes.

5S Workplace Organization and Standardization programs are comprised of five phases of activities. Each of these five phases is required if your organization is to successfully implement a 5S program.

• Sort: The first S is sort. Sort means just that; you select a target area and sort through everything that is in that area. The objective is to eliminate anything that is not needed. That means you are trying to leave only the bare essentials that are required for the VA steps in that area.

  At first glance this may seem like a very easy thing to do. However, once you begin this process of sorting, you will quickly find that there are a large number of things in any given area that are wanted but probably not needed. Because this is common in most organizations, a procedure has been established to help with the sorting process. This procedure is referred to as red tagging.

  Note: It is very important that the red tag is used to indicate that the item is “wanted but not needed” and is readily differentiated (size, shape, and shade of red) from the red tag used on rejected parts.

  Red tagging is a concept whereby employees sort through everything that is located in the target area. When conducting red tagging, a few simple questions are used to decide whether or not what you’ve identified is needed or not. Is this item needed? If so, where should it be located? Also, what quantity of this item is needed? During this process you will run across a large number of items that you’re not sure what to do with. These items should be “red tagged.” A red tag is nothing more than a tag that identifies critical information about the item, such as what the item is, where it was found, what date you found it, reason it was tagged, and possible disposition for the item. Once red tagged, the item is moved to the red tag area, where it is reviewed by a supervisor or manager for proper disposition.

• Set-in-order: Once the sorting is completed, you are ready for set-in-order. The process of setting items in order of use is very simple in concept; however, it requires discipline on the part of the user to identify exactly where all VA materials should be stored and how they should be prepared for use in everyday activities. The act of setting items in order by its very nature requires that the Lean practitioner standardize the work area. Care should be taken during this process to consider all employee interactions. For example, one should consider the workforce, such as: Are the employees right-handed or left-handed? Are there possible disabled or handicapped employees, and how do we set-in-order for the employee that may be color blind? These are critical factors for set-in-order.

  Once completed, it should be visibly obvious to all where every tool, material, fixture, or other items used in the VA process are to be stored. This process of standardizing the workplace makes it easier for multiple employees to use the same work area and complete VA activities in a standardized fashion.

• Shine: With sort and set-in-order completed, the next objective is to make sure that the entire area is completely clean. Shine is another simple activity; it just requires that you clean an area and make it ready for use. Typically, there are two valuable components of the shine activity. First, make sure that the entire area is clean and swept; this includes floors, aisles, and any areas in or around where VA activities need to be conducted. Second, owner’s shine has to do with the removal of dust or dirt or grime from any of the floors, workbenches, tables, computer areas, and office equipment that are in use on a daily basis. Adding the discipline of shine to your 5S program requires that you really take a close look at everything that is used in the VA process. The result of this is that once completed, everything in or around the work area is in a state of readiness for use whenever it’s needed.

  The importance of shine cannot be overstated. Organizations that fail to do a thorough shine process inevitably regress to a less organized, less productive work space. The planning process should become a fundamental component of our everyday activities. In order to make the shine activity a standard part of your operational procedures, one may choose to look at it similarly to that of personal hygiene. Few, if any of us, would consider leaving for work in the morning without performing any one of a number of various activities required to make ourselves personally ready for our day, i.e., taking a shower, brushing our teeth, and fixing our hair. This kind of philosophy needs to be adopted during the shine campaign in your organization. It must be daily. It must be routine. It must be a part of who the organization is.

  Another reason that the shine campaign is so important is that defects are often hidden in a clumsy, dirty, dusty, dark, or otherwise unclean environment. Many of the defects that we produce are often tied to an unclean work area. The cleaning process also affords the employee time to take a closer look at all of those items—materials, tools, computers etc.—that we use during the VA process. This type of inspection allows us to identify potential problems before they become too serious and result in poor-quality products or services for our customers.

• Standardize: The concept of standardize is a little different from the concepts of sort, set-in-order, and shine. Standardize requires a different thought process and is a technique that is used to define the consistent application of sort, set-in-order, and shine activities. Standardize is the difference between a sporadic, once-in-a-while approach to workplace organization and a systematic, continuous, and routine approach to maintaining your work space. Organizations that do not put the fourth S—standardize—in place and do not make standardize a daily habit revert back to old habits, and as a consequence, the workplace is never maintained in a state of readiness.

  Standardize is the phase where companies begin to falter. The reason for this is that we have many activities that happen on a daily basis that we would consider not standard in our workplace. That means there are many things that happened only once in a while or only today or only this week. The result is that materials that are often used or excess supplies required for a one-time event begin to creep into our work spaces. When we apply standardize on a daily basis, it forces us to take action on these one-time events, that is, to change the uncontrolled “happen” event into the controlled or standardized “occur” event. How often have you heard yourself say: “I’ll just put this here” or “This is just for today” or “We never really do this, but I have to do it this way this afternoon.” Each of these thought processes results in the breakdown of standardize and the circumvention of sort, set-in-order, and shine philosophies.

  Ultimately, the essence of standardize is to prevent any work area from returning to its original disorganized state. This is typically accomplished by using standardized tools, such as checklists or check sheets, cleaning schedules, and a visual map of what the area should look like. These tools typically identify all the activities required to effectively complete sort, set-in-order, shine, and standardize on a daily basis.

• Sustain: The fifth S is sustain. If your organization is to be successful at maintaining an effective 5S program, you must develop the discipline to keep sustain alive in your organization on a daily basis. This means allowing the time, energy, effort, and resources required to maintain your 5S program. Sustain is nothing more than making a habit of sort, set-in-order, shine, and standardize activities. It is basically demonstrating that your organization is committed to a company culture that accepts nothing less than a daily active 5S Workplace Organization and Standardization program. Many organizations make it through the first four S’s, yet lack the commitment to make it a part of their core daily activities. As soon as the sustain efforts dwindle or falter, your organization will revert back to its previous disorganized environment.

The 5S Workplace Organization and Standardization tool is for everyone everywhere in the organization all the time. It is both a concept and a tool encompassing an everyday way of life in your organization. The strength of the tool is that it can be started small; by that we mean that it can be used to improve small areas of your organization independently. Ultimately, the entire organization should be implementing 5S to the point where it is part of the organizational DNA. Unfortunately, efforts commonly falter at the standardize and sustain phases. In many organizations a casual walk-through exposes the remnants of past failed attempts to embrace and adopt this, the simplest of Lean tools. A list of 10 common omissions from 5S programs is listed below. These are implementation aspects to keep in mind when adopting a 5S Workplace Organization and Standardization program.

1. Not including the entire facility, inside and out. This includes every space—office, parking lot, hall, work space, closet, storage area, warehouse, break room, bathroom, copy center, call center, distribution facility, company vehicles, etc.
2. Not including the entire staff. If anywhere in your organization the mind set of “5S is for someone else” is present, your 5S program will not be successful.
3. Abandoning the 5S effort before all required 5S activities are in your organizational DNA and are a visible, daily, and cyclic set of commonly re-occurring activities.
4. Not allowing employee time for complete 5S understanding and implementation.
5. Not allowing employee time for regularly scheduled 5S activities to be conducted at certain points in the day or night, daily, weekly, and/or monthly.
6. Not investing in required housekeeping and standardization tools—cleaning materials, visual control indicators, or standard location markers.
7. Not documenting 5S activities. Many companies go through an initial 5S program, and because the concepts and activities are simple in nature, they do not document and standardize the processes. Checklists, cleaning schedules, visual maps, before and after photos, and visual controls are all essential components of 5S documentation.
8. Not having 5S standard work for all associates, managers, and executives. That’s right—managers and executives. It is commonly recognized that today manager standard work is essential for 5S success.
9. Not setting up a 5S visual workplace display that shows the entire company’s participation in the 5S program and is a living evolving display of ongoing 5S activities company-wide.
10. Not encouraging, supporting, acknowledging, and rewarding employee participation for ongoing creative 5S activities.

Overall equipment effectiveness is a tool that was developed predominantly for the manufacturing sector. It was created to measure equipment effectiveness in companies that use equipment to add value or create products for customers. This tool is perfectly suited for this outcome. However, the strength of this tool conceptually reaches far beyond equipment and can be applied in many nonmanufacturing environments. In addition to its application in a manufacturing environment, we will also show how to modify the OEE calculation to be used in nonmanufacturing environments.

The primary purpose of OEE is to measure how effective your VA equipment usage is. In a manufacturing environment OEE is also a secondary measure of productivity. OEE is often used as a foundation for evaluating the Total Productive Maintenance programs and deciding where to apply your maintenance dollars to receive the greatest improvement impact on equipment reliability. A well-run OEE measurement system can also be used as a foundation for assessing new capital equipment acquisitions.

Although OEE is an effective tool, as with all measures, there is one caveat here. The concept of optimizing equipment utilization at the expense of other key process inputs, such as materials or manpower, was a common mistake when OEE was first introduced, and is still present today. In an environment where salaries were low and equipment costs were high, it was easy to fall into the trap of requiring employees to be chained to equipment to achieve high productivity levels. An LSS environment mandates that we balance the proper amounts of materials (to reduce inventory), equipment (to meet customer demand), and utilization of the human factor (to be flexible to changing customer requirements). This synergy of process inputs demonstrates effective use of Lean concepts and tools and reinforces that we maintain a true process focus. It also provides a foundation that steers us away from the common misuses of LSS tools.

The use of OEE relies on three direct measurements of your equipment and the products produced by your equipment. These are equipment availability, equipment performance, and product quality. In essence, the objective of OEE is to identify and quantify equipment-related losses that decrease productivity. Once identified, these loss areas are targets for Kaizen.

• Equipment availability: Equipment availability is a measure of equipment readiness when your organization needs equipment to add value. This is basically composed of scheduled operating time minus any downtime losses that occur during that scheduled operating time. The result of the equipment availability analysis is the actual time that your equipment was running. This is often referred to as runtime or uptime.

  Availability = Uptime/Scheduled operating time

• Equipment performance: Once the runtime has been established, we can look at equipment performance. Equipment performance is defined as your target output for equipment running at maximum speed minus any speed losses that occur during operation. The result of equipment performance analysis is your actual output.

  Performance = Actual output/Target output

• Product quality: Product quality is a measure of your good product divided by actual (total) output. The result is your good product output.

  Quality = Good products/Actual output

  OEE (%) = Availability × Performance × Quality

The concept of overall equipment effectiveness can also be used in nonmanufacturing environments. To use the OEE calculation in nonmanufacturing environments all one needs to do is replace the middle term equipment with the term value-added. This gives us overall value-added effectiveness (OVAE). We can now define OEE in terms of OVAE.

• Value-adding availability: Every organization today conducts some form of VA activities for their customers. In order to complete the OVAE, your organization must define an element that adds value for your customers. This could be in the form of the number of process inputs that add value. For example, this could be the number of employees available in a service industry environment. In the health care industry this could be the number of nursing staff available in a specific wing of the hospital. In a call center this could be the number of call center representatives available to take incoming calls. The VA availability component of OVAE is therefore:

  VA availability = Working time/Scheduled time

• Value-adding performance: Value-adding performance can be defined as your actual service delivery output divided by your target service delivery output. Similarly to in an equipment environment, VA employees run into a number of speed-related delivery losses during their daily activities. The VA performance component of OVAE is therefore:

  VA performance = Actual service delivery output/Target service delivery output

• Product or service quality: Whether you are delivering a product or a service to your customer, the quality of that product or service can be measured. Service delivery defects can be described as actual service output divided by good service output. The service quality component of OVAE is therefore:

Service quality = Good service output/Actual service output

OVAE (%) = VA availability × VA performance × Service quality

Mistake proofing* is a tool that is used to minimize or eliminate errors and their subsequent defects in any process. No matter how hard we try, whenever we put together materials, machinery, manpower, and methods, we are bound to make some errors. These errors produce unwanted defects for our customers. The art of mistake proofing endeavors to eliminate mistakes where they occur by redefining activities and developing techniques to mitigate the defect before it happens.

So what is the purpose of conducting mistake proofing in our organization? Why would you want to eliminate mistakes from occurring in our organization? First, eliminating mistakes basically means that we are improving performance for customers, helping to generate customer satisfaction, and ultimately customer loyalty to purchase our product or service in the future. One way to look at mistake proofing is as a program to guarantee future income for your organization.

Another critical reason to conduct mistake proofing is that mistakes introduce additional cost to your product or service. Every time a mistake occurs, additional actions need to be taken before you can deliver your product or service to your customer, all of which add cost and no value from the customer standpoint. Many of these mistakes detract from company profitability but are not accounted for in everyday productivity monitoring systems.

Another factor is that every time a mistake occurs, resources are used. That means that lowering the number of mistakes in your organization will inherently be lowering how many resources are required by your organization at any point in time. This further decreases the overall cost of your product or service.

Mistake proofing is typically applied using some variation of the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle. It is primarily a tool to help your organization achieve the Lean concept of quality at the source. In its most basic form your objective is to isolate any process step or task during the Do-Check portion of the PDCA cycle. Achieving an effective check at the point of execution is critical to assuring that no error, mistake, or defect is produced at any individual process step and passed along to the next VA step.

One way to achieve this is by applying the concept of “negative analysis.”* This technique is used to identify and define what can go wrong in a process, and subsequently designing a process that will not allow a mistake to occur. The analysis includes observations and investigations of the interactions between materials, manpower, and equipment during the process. Creative, “no-mistake” solutions are developed as a result of the negative analysis.

Mistake proofing can be used wherever there is an interaction between two entities during a process step. Some examples include interaction between two employees, an employee-customer or employee-supplier interaction, an employee and a piece of equipment, an employee-material activity, an employee-method step, or during any measurement activity. For example, an office environment example of mistake proofing may be something as simple as setting the fields of an order entry form so that an inaccurate piece of data could not be entered.

With the ever-increasing accuracy and speed of digital photography, even high-speed manufacturing processes (e.g., stamping) are able to inspect and record, via digital photograph, products that are produced at thousands of pieces per minute. As soon as a manufactured piece is out of a predefined visual specification range, the machine is stopped. Prior to this type of technology, thousands of pieces would’ve been stamped, creating a tremendous number of defects at a substantial cost to the manufacturer. This type of mistake proofing technology virtually eliminates the need in many instances for tedious and expensive quality control checks.

Cellular manufacturing is best described as a Lean tool that is used to make the best use of resources during your VA activities. These resources typically include raw materials, manpower, equipment, and facilities. Manufacturing cells are most effective when there is a known steady demand for your product or service and products can be grouped by common VA steps. With customer demand known, you are able to sequence the flow of materials in your facility and apply the necessary manpower and equipment to best deliver your product. Creating a cell typically requires that we tie together all manual and semiautomatic (equipment) VA steps with the ultimate goal of making all of the VA steps and consequently your product flow at the demand of the customer.

As with all manufacturing process improvement tools, the primary purpose of cellular manufacturing is to enhance customer satisfaction and improve organizational profitability. A well-designed manufacturing cell can provide several positive outputs for both company and customer:

• Decrease lead time to your customer
• Improve product quality
• Decrease total inventory required and inventory carrying costs
• Minimize labor content as a percent of product cost

Since the inception of cellular manufacturing and one-piece flow concepts, it has been generally accepted that manufacturing cells produce the highest-quality products, allow for the highest productivity, and ultimately produce the highest profitability when compared with traditional in-line manufacturing processes.

The application of manufacturing cells draws together the use of several Lean concepts previously discussed. These include point of use storage (POUS), quality at the source, just-in-time (JIT), Kanban, and facility layout (i.e., process flow layout, not a function department layout), to name a few. The objective in cell design is to identify and eliminate as much NVA time and activities as possible from the current process by organizing all VA activities in the best sequence.

There are five key steps to the successful design and implementation of a cell.

Step 1: Group products. The first step in cell design is to understand your product groupings. To do this, you must first construct a list of products and then identify all the process steps required by each product. It’s usually easiest if you just make a matrix with product types on one axis and process steps on the other. After checking off which process steps are required by each product, it is easy to identify and group products by their respective process steps. After your products have been grouped, you can undergo the task of creating specific cells to manufacture or assemble all the products in each group.

Step 2: Measure demand (calculate Takt time). Once the products have been grouped, we must now calculate or measure the demand rate of each product. The demand rate is just the rate at which your customer requires that you produce your product or provide your service. The demand rate is the amount of working time available divided by the number of units sold and is typically reported as units per hour or activities per day. Understanding the demand rate of your customer is a critical prerequisite to designing a cell. Cells typically work best when the demand rate is somewhat constant. If your demand rate is erratic or unpredictable, you will need to consider adding a visual control supermarket along with your cell design.

Step 3: Chart current work sequence. For each product you must next chart your current work sequence. This is typically accomplished using a time observation chart to document each element of the work sequence and record the time to complete each work sequence element. This time observation process is an essential complement of deconstructing work activities and then re-assembling them back into a new and balanced continuous flow work sequence.

Step 4: Combine work and balance process. Once you have accurately recorded times for each element in the work sequence, you are now in a position to combine some work elements and balance the process to achieve the correct demand rate or output for the customer. This is accomplished by grouping elements to achieve the time that is less than or equal to the demand rate. For example, if the calculated demand rate is 10 minutes per unit for a specific product, then each individual element in the work sequence must be 10 minutes or less to complete. The closer you get each individual element to 10 minutes, the more continuous and smooth your work product flow will be. Work sequence balancing is not an exact science, but with some analysis of your time observation chart you will clearly be able to recognize significant disruptions in work flow associated with unbalanced work element times.

Step 5: Create new cell work sequence. After completion of steps 1 to 4, you are now in a position to create a completely new work cell sequence. During this step you complete a work flow layout that includes all materials and equipment manpower required to complete the work sequence. The primary objectives are to (1) simplify material flow by integrating process elements, (2) minimize material handling, and (3) make use of people for 100% of the demand rate time. In essence, your goal is to tie together and establish continuous flow of each work element. How you sequence these is dependent upon the actual work elements; however, it is best achieved by using one of the known successful cell configurations. The most common include the U-cell and S-cell configurations.

Kanban* is the Japanese word for “card” or “sign,” whose function is to relay information along with materials that tell employees exactly what to produce at any given point in your process. Most VA processes have a significant number of process steps. The beauty of Kanban is that it connects a series of process steps in a fashion that allows continuous flow. As we discussed earlier in this chapter, continuous flow is the Holy Grail of any process. Kanban is a critical tool to establishing flow in a process.

The purpose of using Kanban in a process is to regulate the flow of information and materials between employees by connecting sequential VA process steps. Kanban systems allow you to define the exact quantities of products that are required to meet your customer demand. The benefit of this system is that you produce only what the customer requested, therefore eliminating any tendency for overproduction, one of the nine wastes.

Kanban is used as an information-inventory control system by two sequential steps in the process. It can be used by steps that are directly adjacent to each other, those that are separated by great distances, or between different types of equipment at varying stages of your VA process. The Kanban signal system answers the question of “what to do next” that is required by employees to achieve high levels of productivity. One caveat is that Kanban typically only works well within stable demand environments. With the relatively stable demand, order points and order quantities within successive steps of the process can be defined. These are the foundation of a Kanban system.

Typically, a Kanban card identifying product name, photo, requesting department, and quantity desired is shuttled between the consumer of the product and the producer of the product.

Kanban is also a very powerful supply chain tool. It can and is being effectively used to make the supplier-customer materials management process more effective up and down the supply chain. Kanban containers are common tools between world-class organizations managing materials to meet customer demand.

Another method of Kanban signals is with vendor-managed inventory scheduling. This typically has a supplier being granted secured access to the customers’ information management system to monitor the real-time direct consumption of products. At prespecified points of consumption the supplier is signaled to prepare and ship product. This practice is becoming more common as companies strive to decrease lead times and inventories by taking advantage of global information sharing technologies. World-class companies are partnering through technology to create value for each other in ways not possible just 10 years ago.

Value stream mapping (VSM) is a technique that’s used to develop a visual representation of all the activities required for you to add value for your customer. It’s typically conducted in a two-step process. The first step is to construct a current state map. In the current state you review every single activity that’s currently being conducted in order to provide your product or service for your customers. The current state map is used to give a fairly accurate definition and description of what your organization currently does for your customer. This is critical for your organization to begin to understand the weaknesses of your current process and to identify what needs to be improved to improve performance for your customer. During the creation of the current state map, identify on the map as many of the nine wastes as possible, indicating where these wastes are present. Once a current state process map has been completed and significant waste throughout the process is identified, the second step of the VSM program can be completed, which is preparing a future state map.

The future state map defines and outlines a visual representation of how you want your organization to perform at some point in the future. It typically endeavors to describe an ideal state, that is, a state in which you identified and eliminated a significant amount of waste that existed in your current state map.

There are many software packages available today for VSM. Some are simple icon-based systems to help with preparation of current state and future state visual maps. Others are more complex and allow for the inclusion of many process variables, such as materials, employees, and cycle times and/or lead times. The most complex allow for computer process model development and sophisticated simulations of “what if” process change scenarios of selected process variables. Regardless of the complexity of your selected VSM solution, all options can allow you to significantly improve your processes using the VSM techniques.

Using VSMs to manage improvement activities is an effective way to organize, prioritize, deploy, and manage improvement activities. Using a technique called managing with maps is an effective approach to tie process performance acceleration and align organizational objectives from strategic plans to tactical improvement plans. In The Organizational Alignment Handbook, we describe the seven phases of the organizational alignment cycle.* The managing with maps technique would be developed and deployed in phases I, II, and VI. A brief overview of using managing with maps to align and manage organizational objectives is given below. Each view would require the preparation of current state and future state views at each level in the organization. These maps are used as the primary improvement management tools.

• Strategic view: The strategic view VSM shows a complete view of the value stream from customer contact to customer receipt of product or service. It identifies high-level process steps and includes key departments, high-level performance measures that all lower-level measures will roll up to. This map should allow all employees to see how their participation supports the organization’s strategic objectives. It also identifies high-level improvement initiatives targeted for the map time period.
• Department view: The department view VSM shows a complete view of the value stream within a department. It identifies department-level process steps and assigns key department measures. These maps encompass resources coming into or being used within the department and all the VA products or services exiting the department. It identifies Kaizen activities or continuous improvement team activities.
• Process view: The process view VSM shows a complete view of each process within a department. It identifies detailed views of each process and assigns key department measures to each process. These maps encompass resources coming into or being used within each process and all the VA products or services exiting the process. It identifies Kaizen activities or continuous improvement team activities, current state performance, and future state targets for improvement.
• Measure view: The measure view VSM shows a complete view of all measures within a process. It identifies specific measures of various process steps and allows for monitoring and aligning multiple measures of a process. Using this technique allows for measurement management and eliminates conflicting measures within a process. This is particularly important in complex systems or regulated environments such as health care or medical products manufacturing.

Using the management with maps approach allows complete organizational alignment. It provides a mechanism for measurement roll-up from the most specific process step measurement to department objectives, and ultimately to strategic initiatives. These VSMs are a powerful visual management and communication tool.

Visual controls are simple signals that show at a glance what needs to be done. They are simplifications of systems that, when implemented effectively, require no communication between employees in order to signal what action should be taken. Think about that for a second—no communication! No e-mail, no information management system interaction, no phone interaction, no reading standard operating procedures or good manufacturing practices. These are all no-value-adding, time-robbing activities that the customer is unwilling to pay for.

Some visual control examples that describe necessary actions are where a material should be moved, what raw material or sub-assembly should be replenished, which orders need to be entered, which patients should be waited on first, etc.

Visual controls are becoming more and more prevalent in many organizations. In multilingual environments visual controls can eliminate the need for translations. In organizations where employees may have handicaps, such as color blindness, for example, visual controls using geometric shapes can be incorporated into work instructions.

The visual control example in Table 4.3 will assist you in developing visual controls in virtually any environment. The table puts together control type, purpose, and several examples of common controls. This is a powerful tool for process improvement. Now that you have been introduced to them, look for aspects of your processes that would benefit from visual controls.

• Kaizen teams were used as the primary change management tool for cell design and implementation.
• The Kaizen and you method was used by individual employees for bench improvements along with 5S Workplace Organization and Standardization.
• During each cell design, the teams utilized continuous flow, pull systems, visual controls and instructions, standardized work, POUS, quality at the source, Kanban, mistake proofing, and facility layout.
• During cell “try-storms” workbench layouts were designated, and POUS and materials flows were established with replenishment occurring as materials were consumed using visual controls and Kanban cards and containers quantities.
• Quality @ the source and mistake proofing were incorporated into employee sub-assemblies activities. Two space visual controls located on the sub-assembly work center regulated materials flow within the cells. As the hydraulics assembly consumes each series of sub-assemblies, workers at each sub-assembly bench were signaled to replenish these parts.
• Well-defined Takt time assured continuous flow throughout each cell.
• Final assembly and testing proceeded without errors and sub-assembly rework that had previously hindered productivity.

Figure 4.1 shows details of the final composite U-cell layout, which includes raw materials’ storage on the exterior of the cells, sub-assembly workstations, employee deployment, final assembly cart progression, and in-process and final test stations.

FIGURE 4.1

Composite U-cell layout. Economic impacts: Over a 60-day period the continuous improvement teams designed and implemented the integrated U-cells. The results were that the initial production rate of 45 units/week was successfully increased to 60 units/week with greatly improved product quality. This represents a 33% increase in productivity using the same floor space, number of employees, and existing test equipment.