Recently on a trip to Spain I was reminded how easy it is to be misled into thinking that a company using high tech equipment understands lean manufacturing methods. The fact is the two are not related. Sometimes it is actually easier to see if a company understands lean manufacturing when the equipment is low tech because you can easily identify the proper understanding of Kanbans (properly proportioned part queues), poke yokes (error proofing), good work instructions and communications. The understanding of these principals can be obscured in companies that use high tech manufacturing.
The facility I recently visited had a very nice assembly line that manufactured circuit boards. The first step was to screen print the solder on the board and send it to a very advanced high speed robotics station which handled the assembly of surface mounted components onto the PCB (printed circuit board). After the components were assembled, the PCB was fed into a computer controlled oven that completed the soldering process. The whole assembly process was almost entirely hands off at this point, with the operator only needing to replace the components that the robot placed on the PCB. They even had a very nice high speed vision inspection system that checked every component on every PCB to insure it was correct. Yet this company would thoroughly demonstrate in the next process step that they really didn’t understand what lean meant.
The final process step was to solder a wire to the PCB. For this, there wasn’t any automation or high tech equipment, but rather a simple clamp fixture to hold the wire, a soldering iron, soldering wire and an operator. With these things in place, it would still be possible to show lean manufacturing implementation, and have good results from the process. In this instance there were a few simple things missing. First the operator work instructions didn’t reflect the process that the operator I observed was actually using. When I asked the operator why she was using a different procedure, she said that she found that she could stabilize the PCB better during the soldering process using her procedure, which was actually more precise than the published procedure.
In a truly lean manufacturing environment, that operator would have felt empowered and responsible to inform not only her co-workers performing the same operation, but also the management team that she was using an improved process so it could be documented to insure everyone used the better process (frequently called best practices). Furthermore, if she was really empowered to talk with the management team, she would have felt free to tell them that the process didn’t produce consistent results in the quality of soldering. This would have started a proactive process of trying to improve the fixture that held the wire AND the PCB board, thus insuring that the wires were consistently soldered onto the PCB board. So in the end, the operator lacking this empowerment resulted in a poor fixture, which provided inconsistent soldering, which resulted in a high failure rate at the launch of the product, which created an extended delay in selling the product until improvements were put in place.