Lean - History and Definition
To begin, Lean is the disciplined approach to reducing waste within a system until the system is considered perfect. Here is how our current understanding of lean came into being.
Ford Assembly Line
In 1913, Henry Ford installs the first moving assembly line for the mass production of an entire automobile. His innovation reduced the time it took to build a car from more than 12 hours to two hours and 30 minutes.
Gilbreth Inc. was established by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth
In the early 1900s, they collaborated on the development of motion study as an engineering and management techniques. From Frank Gilbreth start in the building industry, he observed that workers developed their own peculiar ways of working and that no two used the same method. In studying bricklayers, he noted that individuals did not always use the same motions in the course of their work. These observations led him to seek one best way to perform tasks. He increased the output of bricks from 1000 per to 2700 per day.
Lillian Gilbreth, was one of the first women to hold a PHD. She and Frank had 12 children and the book Cheaper by the Dozen is the story of their family life with their twelve children, and describe how they applied their interest in time and motion study to the organization and daily activities of such a large family.
Toyota Production System
Kiichiro Toyoda, Taiichi Ohno, and others at Toyota looked at the need to provide choices and flexibility that Ford didn’t offer in the 1930s, and more so just after World War II, it occurred to them that a series of simple innovations might make it more possible to provide both continuities in process flow and a wide variety in product offerings. They, therefore, revisited Ford’s original thinking and invented the Toyota Production System. This system, in essence, shifted the focus of the manufacturing engineer from individual machines and their utilization, to the flow of the product through the total process. Toyota concluded that by right-sizing machines for the actual volume needed, introducing self-monitoring machines to ensure quality, lining the machines up in process sequence, pioneering quick setups so each machine could make small volumes of many part numbers, and having each process step notify the previous step of its current needs for materials, it would be possible to obtain low cost, high variety, high quality, and very rapid throughput to respond to changing customer desires.
Just In Time is an evolution of the start of the Toyota Production System
It is aimed primarily at reducing flow times within production as well as response times from suppliers and to customers. Originated in Japan, largely in the 1960s and 1970s and particularly at Toyota, JIT migrated to the Western industry in the 1980s, where its features were put into effect in many manufacturing companies. Some benefits are Reduced Set-Up Times, Improved warehouse flow of materials, Scheduling and work hours are consistent with demand, Increase emphasis on supplier relationship,
Lean Manufacturing
The term “lean” was coined to describe Toyota’s business during the late 1980s by a research team headed by Jim Womack, Ph.D., at MIT. The core idea is to maximize customer value while minimizing waste. Simply, lean means creating more value for customers with fewer resources. A popular misconception is that lean is suited only for manufacturing. Not true. Lean applies in every business and every process. It is not a tactic or a cost reduction program, but a way of thinking and acting for an entire organization. Businesses in all industries and services, including healthcare and governments, are using lean principles and 5S.
Six Sigma - History and Definition
Guinness Brewery
The original statistical test was developed by William Sealy Gosset, a biochemist who worked for Guinness in the early 20th century. At this time, the Guinness brewery was taking the progressive step of hiring statisticians, chemists and other scientists to improve the quality and consistency of their ingredients and their beer. Gosset could only test small samples out of the entire quantity of beer brewed by Guinness while he worked there. He came up with a statistical formula that would let him prove whether or not the very small samples reflected a much larger population (in this case, the ‘population’ would be all of the beer or barley used in Guinness’ operations).
Shewhart Introduces SPC
Walter Shewhart successfully brought together the disciplines of statistics, engineering, and economics and became known as the father of modern quality control. He was as an engineer at Western Electric and Bell Telephone. Industrial quality was limited to inspecting finished products and removing defective items. Shewhart’s work pointed out the importance of reducing variation in a manufacturing process and the understanding that continual process-adjustment in reaction to non-conformance actually increased variation and degraded quality. Introduced the control chart as a tool for distinguishing between the chance variation and assignable-cause variable.
Deming is best known for his work in Japan after WWII
He is particularly known for his work with the leaders of Japanese industry. That work began in August 1950 in Tokyo. Many in Japan credit Deming as the inspiration for what has become known as the Japanese post-war economic miracle of 1950 to 1960, when Japan rose from the ashes of war to become the second most powerful economy in the world in less than a decade founded on the ideas Deming taught:
1. Better design of products to improve service.
2. Higher level of uniform product quality.
3. Improvement of product testing in the workplace and in research centres.
4. Greater sales through side [global] markets.
Deming offered fourteen key principles to managers for transforming business effectiveness and Seven Deadly Diseases of Management describe the most serious barriers that management faces to improving effectiveness and continual improvement.
SPC (Statistical Process Control) and TQM (Total Quality Management)
By the 1970s some American industries had come to be regarded as inferior to their Asian and European competitors. As a result of increasing economic globalization during the 1980s, made possible in part by advanced information technologies, the U.S. manufacturing sector fell prey to more competitive producers, particularly in Japan. U.S. producers scrambled to adopt quality and productivity techniques that might restore their competitiveness. Deming’s philosophies and systems were finally recognized in the United States and by the early 1990s, the U.S. manufacturing sector had achieved marked gains in quality and productivity. And by the late 1990s, several American industries had surpassed their Japanese rivals in these areas
Motorola Develops a New Standard
In the early and mid-1980s with Chairman Bob Galvin at the helm, Motorola engineers decided that the traditional quality levels — measuring defects in thousands of opportunities – didn’t provide enough granularity. Instead, they wanted to measure the defects per million opportunities. Motorola developed this new standard and created the methodology and needed cultural change associated with it. Six Sigma helped Motorola realize powerful bottom-line results in their organization – in fact, they documented more than $16 Billion in savings as a result of our Six Sigma efforts.
Credit for the term “Six Sigma” goes to Motorola Engineer Bill Smith. In 1987, Motorola developed six sigma as a key business initiative.
2000s-2010s
During the 2000s Lean Six Sigma forked from Six Sigma and became its own unique process. While Lean Six Sigma developed as a specific process of Lean Six Sigma, it also incorporates ideas from lean manufacturing, which was developed as a part of the Toyota Production System in the 1950s.
The first concept of Lean Six Sigma was created in 2001 by a book titled Leaning into Six Sigma: The Path to Integration of Lean Enterprise and Six Sigma by Barbara Wheat, Chuck Mills, Mike Carnell. The book was developed as a guide for managers of manufacturing plants on how to combine lean manufacturing and Six Sigma in order to dramatically improve quality and cycle time in the plant. Wheat, Mills, and Carnell narrate the story of a company who was sceptical about implementing Lean Six Sigma, but as a result of doing so was able to successfully improve the quality and efficiency in all aspects of the business.
In the early 2000s Six Sigma principles expanded into other sectors of the economy, such as Healthcare, Finance, Supply Chain, etc. While different sectors of the economy sell different "products" and have different "customers", Lean Six Sigma principles can still be applied with slight alterations in wording and processes.
Source: Forge Progress
Course Overview
Our Lean Six Sigma courses provide in-depth training on FTY calculations and its importance in production processes, measuring the quality and efficiency of a process by evaluating the proportion of defect-free units produced. Our Lean Six Sigma courses equip professionals with the knowledge and tools needed to master FTY and drive continuous improvement in their organisations. Join us to learn from industry experts and take your career to the next level.
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