Kaizen Competition

Today I have attended the Kaizen competition. Actually this kaizen comes from employee suggestion especially shop floor suggestion. This is the fruit of what we spread out this couple of months in the shop floor. Every shop floor including production and maintenance look very excited and spirit of competition start to grow well here.

In the beginning, so many obstacle in the suggestion implementation. Many ideas in the shop floor can not be facilitated well and followed up until those ideas can be implemented. Moreover, many ideas from operators are rejected by managers because those manager don’t understand truly what operators mean by that suggestion. The impact is communication between management and operators are not linked well and growth gab between them. shop floor personnel do not want to give suggestion because they think if they give suggestion, management do not care their ideas and never follow-up it. And the worst part is the operator become not caring about their equipment. Just follow the instruction. If the problem happen just call maintenance, and maintenance will fix it without ever looked for root cause of the problems. And the end, blame each others!

After starting implementation TPM, we see that moral of employee need to raise up. And we start to advocate the ideas and create the system so that operators can easily give suggestion and guide them how to create suggestion. Motivating all shop floor to give suggestion create the spirit to create ideas that can be implemented and do kaizen for that ideas. Months by months the ideas become huge in number. To motivate them we do competition in division level that be attended by top management. We have to select which kaizen have to be presented by the suggester. The result is greater than what we expected. All people become very excited because they can show their ideas. We only allow the idea that already implemented and give good result can be counted in the competition.

Suggestion system is one of the way to generate idea from shop floor. I will talk more how operator can give more ideas and implemented it.

5S: how to make it become culture?

Some day, Ministry of manpower and transmigration come to visit one of factories. This is not the first time government officer or foreign officer come to visit this factory. As usual, everybody come to do preparation about the security, agenda as well as the cleaning of area that the minister will be passed through. And management instructed to all employee to start cleaning the machine since the minister will visit and pass through the machine area. And the managers ask the shop-floor to clean their area and machine.

And the big day came. The minister came and gave the speech and visited the factory area. The big ‘baligo’ was setup to welcome and many journalist follow the minister and the video was prepared so it could be shown on TV. Everybody was happy and what the purpose of this visit is achieved. They could achieve that success because they had experience and work hard to create the condition that suitable to show for outsider as an image of the company.

5S is not implemented well here. To solve the problem, just clean the specific area and claim that the implementation of 5S of their area is running good. They just requested shop-floor people to do extra job to clean the machine area where in the normal time they did not monitor about the cleanness of the area.

The lack of standard or even there was no standard make the situation become worse. The increasing the defect problems because of contaminating of the product with foreign material become dominant. They were still not aware about that condition and blame others for the quality problem. Unplanned breakdown become common because some components weren’t monitored well which were the key components.

They had an 5S audit, but the result of an audit was not clear. The quality of the auditor was questionable as well as the audit criteria. There was no specific goal for this audit.

The 5S need implementation need to reprogrammed again. And it should be soon. How is the condition after implement and refreshing 5S, see more in the next post.

14 management principles of Edwards Deming : Synergy between Management and Quality

Below is the Deming principles how management also responsible to the result of quality. Proper action in approaching quality systems is really important! not only slogan by provocative words, but the most important is how management take real actions about quality. In the next post I will write more about Edward Deming; his achievement, and method that we know today as PDCA in approaching quality improvement.

1. Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of a product and service with a plan to become competitive and stay in business. Decide to whom top management is responsible.(Creates a mission and vision for the organization-sets a direction)
2. Adopt the new philosophy. We are in a new economic age. We can no longer live with commonly accepted levels of delays, mistakes, defective materials, and defective workmanship.(All are prime examples of waste, creating extra burden on your company)
3. Cease dependence on mass inspection. Require, instead, statistical evidence that quality is built-in. (defect prevention rather than defect detection)
4. End of the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag. Instead, depend on meaningful measures of quality along with price. Eliminate suppliers that cannot qualify with statistical evidence of quality.(a supplier that offers inexpensive material may be selling you cheap material)
5. Find Problems. It is a management’s job to work continually on the system (design, incoming materials, composition of material, maintenance, improvement of machines, training, supervision, retraining)
6. Institute modern methods of training on the job.(there’s no substitute for well-trained workers!)
7. The responsibility of the foreman must be to change from sheer numbers to quality… [which] will automatically improve productivity. Management must prepare to take immediate action on reports from the foremen concerning barriers such as inherent defects, machines not maintained, poor tools, and fuzzy operational definitions.(organizations can’t make up for poor yields with additional volume)
8. Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.(create the culture where it’s expected for employees to ask questions and make suggestions)
9. Break down barriers between departments. People in research design, sales and production must work as a team to foresee problems of production that may be encountered with various materials and specifications.(no operational discipline operates in a vacuum, teamwork is necessary for true improvement)
10. Eliminate numerical goals, posters, slogans for the workforce, asking for new levels of productivity without providing methods. (You may get a slight, short-term boost in yield or productivity, but it won’t last without affecting the process or system in question)
11. Eliminate work standards that prescribe numerical quotas. (500 acceptable units per measure of time is much better than 500 units in that same measure of time)
12. Remove barriers that stand between the hourly worker and his right of pride of workmanship.
13. Institute a vigorous program of education and retraining.
14. Create a structure in top management that will push every day on the above 13pts.

Deming’s 14 principles for management is a time-tested and internationally agreed upon theory regarding the synergy between modern management and increases in overall quality.

Autonomous Maintenance : Increase Operator’s Ownership to their Machine

When preventive maintenance was developed at USA, Noppondenso was the first company introduce preventive maintenance in 1960. In implementation, operator produced goods using machines and maintenance group was dedicated to maintain the working of the machine. Because the machine more complex, the needs for more maintenance personnel was essential. So the management decided that routine maintenance would be carried out by operator. Maintenance groups only took the essential maintenance works. This was the first Autonomous Maintenance implemented the practice of maintenance.

As one of TPM pillar, autonomous maintenance promotes the development of production operators to be able to take care small maintenance tasks such as cleaning, inspecting and lubricating their equipment. Production operators are expected to involve in doing basic care and daily maintenance of their machine. Not only basic care and daily maintenance but also continuous improvement (Kaizen) become more essential in the Autonomous Maintenance implementation.

JIPM (Japan Institute of Plant Maintenance) have promote the Autonomous Maintenance in seven step. I think it is very common in the implementation of Autonomous Maintenance. These seven step can be followed as below :

All of these seven step can be divided into three big items which are :

Step 1 to 3 : Restoration and improve basic machine condition

1. Step 4 to 5 : Prevention of deterioration
2. Step 6 to 7 : Optimization of AM

The purpose of autonomous maintenance are to maintain basic equipment condition, to adhere the usage of equipment, by visually to inspect for external deterioration of equipment, to detect signs of abnormalities by five senses and by relatively easy machine diagnostic techniques and to enhance operating, setup, adjustment and inspection skill.

In the first step; initial cleaning, production personnel is expected to clean their machine at the same time should find abnormal in their machine. Abnormal means something is not proper that can impact the runnability, quality, performance, safety and condition of work-place.

By doing initial cleaning, production personnel will have a new experience about their machine and know more about their machine; the symptom before the equipment breakdown will be more easy to be detected and proper operation will be sustained. The production personnel will find the experience where they found the abnormal at their machine and they will start to think how to solve the abnormal and how to prevent in the future so the abnormal will not happen again and the end the machine condition will be tidy and clean. I believe no one want it dirty again. This condition will be as foundation of the relation between production personnel and machine. This relationship will be made stronger and deeper by implementing AM until the rest steps.

This relationship will bring production personnel will not let the machine down or create flaw on the final product. Slowly the operator will understand the machine language that will be sound if abnormal happen. Ownership of the production personnel about their equipment will be established. Imagine if we have a car, we will try to be more familiar about the language of the car, what will it sound if the gas is lack or what will sound if time to change the lubrication..etc. Maintenance specialist will verify the actual condition by implementing the predictive maintenance tools so it can be more clear in number.

Caring the machine is about ownership. How is your production personnel caring about their equipment? Did they find abnormal before it broke?