The Difference between Production Time and Time of Production

Production time covers the period from the moment of entry of the means of production into an enterprise up to the completion of the finished product (The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 1979). Time of Production covers only and exclusively the time raw materials and semi-finished products undergo value addition by being processed. The difference between the two times is considered to be a waste of time and can most likely be assigned to one of the 7 waste categories listed hereafter. You can easily remember those by using the TWO DIME - acronym. Note that you can save considerably more than just two dimes by eliminating these 7 wastes. T ransportation W aiting O verprocessing D efect I nventory M otion E xcess Production

All the time a product or component needs to be transported from A to B to be further processed, is a waste of time. During the transport from one department to another, one factorys facility to the next, the yet unfinished product does not get processed any further. It is only moved from one place to another without any value being added to it. Time of transportation and transportation itself is purely a cost and should be eliminated.

Every minute a product or component is waiting to be processed, is a waste of time. Im sure whenever you sit in your car lined up in front of a red traffic light, you feel like you are wasting your time. And when the light finally turns green, the convoy slowly starts moving again until its finally your turn to move on. Could it be that the products in your production line feel the same? Imagine you sit on one of your products across the entire production process. How many times would you sit and wait until its moving on again? All these invisible red lights in the production process should be eliminated as they disrupt the continuous flow and result in a loss of speed and wasted time. Over-processing occurs in at least four instances: 1) any time more work is done on a piece than what is required by the customer o Make sure customer requirements are clear and understood. If there is only one label needed on one side of the box, then dont apply one on both sides of the box just out of a habit because other customers used to require one on both sides. As trivial as this example sounds, it safes you 50% of labels and labeling-time. Train your staff to watch out for this kind of things. It might also be possible to talk to your customer and discuss with him whether certain things are really necessary or could be eliminated. 2) each time a piece needs to be reprocessed due to whatever reasons (usually quality issues) o If for whatever reason you have to re-process goods, then you basically do part of the job twice. Needless to elaborate further on this, it can be addressed by reducing defects and quality issues. 3) when your production process contains redundancies o When you try to draw a clearly understandable process flow including all steps and options of your production process and layout without ending up

with a wild labyrinth of overlapping lines you are likely to realize how complicated and rich in detail and options your manufacturing process is. It might also uncover process redundancies and inadequate process layouts. 4) Usually, using tools that are more precise, complex, or expensive than absolutely required belongs into this waste category. o While this can be true as it is likely a waste of money, I think we also need to include the opposite into this waste category and say that using inappropriate and/or outdated tools can result in a considerable waste of time. Buying a hammer to crack a nut will not result in a waste of time, but trying to hammer a nail into a plank with a nut-cracker is likely to take a while. You can buy your secretary an expensive scientific calculator for just doing standard operations. It wont be any faster to do the four basic calculations than it would with a simple calculator, it only cost you more money than would have been necessary. But saving money by not buying her any calculator will result in a waste of time whenever she has to do some calculation manually on a piece of paper. Defects are definitely the worst waste a company can have. All the cost of raw material and processing has already occurred and then the product cant be sold. Either the product needs to be reworked (over-processing) eating up the benefit margin in the best case, or it needs to be scrapped, making you literally losing money in a first step and causing additional cost when it starts to pile up as inventory. Its relatively easy to avoid defects when your suppliers provide you with only first quality parts and you just assemble those to a finished product. Its a bit different if you really produce the parts. Just ask some suppliers of the large car manufacturers whether they have defects in their production or not. Eliminating defects has a technical and a human aspect. Technically, the right tools in good condition

need to be used and taken care of properly. The human aspect and impact on quality or defects is often underestimated. (See my article The Challenge called Human Being). Inventory is either capital standing still in case of raw material that does not get processed (transformed into sellable product), or an already occurred cost costing further more in case of defective product piling up. Note that raw material can become unusable (defective) over time and tacitly move to the second category. Unless youre doing business in the wine or liquor industry, get rid of inventory. Neither raw materials nor finished products and for sure not defective products will gain in value over time. The earlier you dispose of them the better. Inventory is like a cancer growing slowly and finally getting out of control if not taken care of seriously. If you already have a lot of inventory, the first thing to do is to eliminate it and the second is to not let it grow again. Design and designate a clear zone/warehouse of a very specific size according to what you think is reasonable for your business for inventory and then strictly stick to this. If the space is full, there must be some old or obsolete materials or products pushed out before new materials/product can be taken in. This sounds simple, but it might be very challenging because business owners often see the money they spent to buy the raw material or the value of the finished product that they are now asked to dispose of. But if you let the inventory-cancer grow, it will suffocate your operation process, it simply stands in the way of efficient operation, and finally of your business. Motion refers to human movement, means any movement done by humans to get their job done. Bending, stretching, reaching out for things and walking. Simple example: in order to be able to control how much paper his staff prints, a department manager places the printer in his own office even though he himself doesnt use it much. The people who actually print are sitting 20 or more meters away in other rooms. Each time his staff hit print, they walk to and back from the Department Managers office. This is a waste of time.

Work p places shoul ld be set-up p in a way that employ yees and workers w need d the least physical p effort a and motion to do their jobs. If you u can get 500 5 employees to reduc uce their wa aste time through h avoidable motion by y only 1 min nute each per p day, you save 8.3 workman hours h or more th han one full time positio on. Excess Pro oduction is that percen ntage of pro oduction you u add as saf fety buffer to make up for defects. Th his is a do ouble-edged d sword. Not N only do o you plan n for defe ects that eventua ally really will w occur and a result in n re-work or o scrap, yo ou also may y end up with w first quality finished go oods you ca ant sell in case the pl lanned defe ects did not occur. Asi ide from e can see th hat some of the 7 waste es are interl linked. For r example, w we can see a chainthat, we effect in n the case of Excess Production. P . If to guara antee delive ery of a 10 00% of first t quality product t you need to produce 105% of p product, the en you also need to bu uy raw material for 105% o of product. Assuming A that t your pu urchasing de epartment adds a some r raw materia al buffer, you ma ay end up buying b raw material fo for 110% of f product to o make sur re you can produce 105%. If for any case, c neithe er raw mate erial consum mption nor production n itself enco ountered any irre egularities, you y will hav ve raw mate erial and fin nished produ uct left over r in stock.

The4wa astesDefects,ExcessProduction,Invento oryandOverprocessingareinterlinked

If you have identified, addressed and eliminated the 7 wastes from your business processes, and that is not limited to just the production line itself, then you have made a big step towards Lean Manufacturing and towards improving the competitiveness of your business.

Written by: Niklaus Stucki Bangkok, 24th January 2012 Published: The Nation, 30th April 2012