Heijunka (Level Scheduling)

Heijunka (pronounced hi-JUNE-kuh) is a Japanese word that means “levelling.”

When implemented correctly, heijunka elegantly – and without haste – helps
organizations meet demand while reducing wastes in production and
interpersonal processes.

According to many Lean experts, heijunka is better achieved as a later-stage

implementation in a Lean organization, long after value streams have been
identified and solidified and refined, when Lean philosophy and legacy are
already deeply embedded into process and materials cycles.

What Is  Heijunka?

“Levelling the type and quantity of production over a fixed period of time. This
enables production to efficiently meet customer demands while avoiding
batching and results in minimum inventories, capital costs, manpower, and
production lead time through the whole value stream.”

Batching is what mass producers do. For example, Ford Motor Company when
it first started was a mass producer. Company founder Henry Ford was fond of
saying that customers could have any color Model A they wanted, as long as it
was black.

Daniel T. Jones, founder and chairman of the Lean Enterprise Academy, writes:
“Years ago, Toyota reached the counter-intuitive conclusion that this
[batching] is a bad idea. Its reasoning was that no production system can be
continuously responsive to gyrating orders without suffering from mura
(unevenness in productivity and quality), and muri (overburden of machines,
managers, and production associates). And mura and muri together create
muda (waste).”

EdifyMinds
Figure 1: Relationship Among Predictability, Flexibility and Stability Is Heijunka
– When implemented correctly, heijunka provides predictability by levelling
demand, flexibility by decreasing changeover time and stability by averaging
production volume and type over the long term.

Core Concepts to Guide Heijunka Implementation

Keeping in mind the core concepts about heijunka will help keep a company
heading in the right direction.

Takt time: The time it takes to finish a product in order to meet customer
demand; can be thought of as the customer buying rate. It is the guidance for
the entire heijunka implementation.

Volume levelling: Manufacture at levels of long-term average demand and

keep a buffer inventory proportional to variability in demand, stability of
production process and shipping speed.

Type levelling: Essentially, make every product every day and reserve capacity
for changeover flexibility; use a heijunka box to visualize the production flow
and schedule.

Heijunka box: A working diagram of type levelling and production schedule.

Work slowly and consistently: Taiichi Ohno, founder of the Toyota Production
System, says it best: “The slower but consistent tortoise causes less waste and
is much more desirable than the speedy hare that races ahead and then stops
occasionally to doze. The Toyota Production System can be realized only when
all the workers become tortoises.”

Changeover time: Efficiency of changeover is the fulcrum of heijunka;

narrowing changeover times helps tighten the value stream between supply
and demand.

Buffer inventory: Having some product ready to ship at the beginning of each
production cycle is essential to smoothing production and levelling demand at
consistent rates and quality so that resource waste is minimized on the line.

Type standardization: By manufacturing one of each product or service a day,

knowledge can be more readily shared across types to benefit every process.

EdifyMinds
The use of production levelling as well as broader lean production techniques
helped Toyota massively reduce vehicle production times as well as inventory
levels during the 1980s.

In next letter we will discuss about Hoshin Kanri (Policy Deployment)

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

EdifyMinds