Working with M achines

The Nuts and Bolts of

Lean Operations with Jidoka

by Michel Baudin

Boca Raton London New York

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A PRODUCTIVITY PRESS BOOK
First published 2007 by Productivity Press

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Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Baudin, Michel.
Working with machines : the nuts and bolts of lean operations
with jidoka / by Michel Baudin.
p.cm.
ISBN-13: 978-1-56327-329-2 (alk. paper)
I . Manufacturing processes. 2. Production planning.
3. Machinery in the workplace. I. Title.
TS183 .B4325 2007
658.5--dc22
2007006607

ii Working with Machines

Acknowledgements
This book is the distillation of many projects, and I would like to acknowl­
edge the contributions...

Kei Abe, Kevin Hop

Jim Ayers, Crispin Vincenti-Brown

Dale Bayley, Tom Berghan

Hormoz Moghare

Pierre Choussat

Christian Thomas

Bob Shroer

Charles Parks

Hormoz Mogharei

Shahrukh Irani

Shunji Yagyu

Jose Ignacio Erausquin

Asaf Degani

Working with Machines iii

C ontents

Introduction.........................................................................................................1
Jidoka = Working with Machines............................................... 1
Working with machines and competitiveness...................................................3
Inside the book................................................................................................5

P A R T I H um an—M achine interfaces.............................................9

CHAPTER 1 Using machine controls...........................................................11
Performing steps on machines....................................................................... 12
Unloading and loading................................................................................... 12
Pressing the right button................................................................................14
Monitoring and exception handling............................................................... 17
Usability engineering principles......................................................................21

CHAPTER 2 Performing operations on machines....................................... 35

Performing operations................................................................................... 36
Sequencing constraints.................................................................................. 37
Natural mappings.......................................................................................... 38
From process-centered to result-centered interfaces...................................... 40

Working with Machines v

CHAPTER 3 Understanding the process..................................................... 51
Machines used at work versus everyday life...................................................52
Categories of machine processes................................................................... 53
How much do the operators need to know?................................................. 54
The example of sputtering............................................................................. 56
How operators learn......................................................................................59

CHAPTER 4 Programming machines..........................................................63

Impact of machine programmability.............................................................. 64
Common features of programmable controllers............................................64
Impact of programmability on shop floor.................................................... 71
Characteristics of machine programs............................................................. 76
Who should program machines?............................................ 79
Process programs as tangible assets............................................................... 81

P A R T I I M achine cells......................................................................... 85

CHAPTER 5 Cellular manufacturing with machines.....................................87

Lean manufacturing cells with machines........................................................ 88
Examples of machine cells............................................................................ 88
Defining a lean manufacturing cell.................................................................95
Issues with machine cells............................................................................... 96
Alternative meanings of the word “cell” ...................................................... 103
The value of cells.........................................................................................104

CHAPTER 6 Design and implementation of a machine cell.......................107

About cell design and implementation......................................................... 108
Project planning and project phases.............................................................108
Analysis and design...................................................................................... 114
Equipment installation.................................................................................124
Cell startup and finishing............................................................................. 127

CHAPTER 7 From operator job design to task assignment........................133

Operator job design..................................................................................... 134
Related charts...............................................................................................142
Daily task assignments................................................................................. 148

vi Working with Machines

CHAPTER 8 Cell automation and chaku-chaku line..................................... 155
What is a chaku-chaku line?...........................................................................156
Detailed features of chaku-chaku lines........................................................... 158
Multiple cells in one big room......................................................................167
Operators in chaku-chaku lines...................................................................... 169
Chaku-chaku line implementation..................................................................170

CHAPTER 9 Grouping cells into focused factories................................... 173

Cells versus focused factories.......................................................................174
A failed cellularization example.................................................................... 174
The better way............................................................................................. 177
A general approach......................................................................................180

PA R T III Common services and monuments................................ 185

CHAPTER 10 Working with monuments....................................................187
What is a monument?.................................................................................. 188
What is wrong with monuments?.................................................................191
What to do about monuments..................................................................... 192
Examples of monuments.............................................................................200

CHAPTER 11 Setup time reduction............................................................ 215

Setup time reduction, monuments, and flexible lines................................... 216
Setup times for individual machines versus lines......................................... 216
SMED......................................................................................................... 220
Setup time reduction management...............................................................222
Outline of a setup time reduction project.................................................... 225
Changeover time analysis of a machine........................................................227
General principles for external setup tasks.................................................. 237
General principles for externalizing internal setup tasks.............................. 238
General principles for improving internal setup tasks...................................239

PA R T IV A utom ation .......................................................................243

CHAPTER 12 The lean approach to automation.........................................245
Is lean manufacturing anti-automation?........................................................246
Jidoka, autonomation, and automation......................................................... 246

Working with Machines vii

 The seven steps of automation for machining............................................. 250
Underlying principles................................................................................... 253

CHAPTER 13 Improving legacy automated systems...................................257

What are legacy systems?............................................................................. 258
Legacy automated systems in machining...................................................... 258
Increasing availability...................................................................................261
Routine operations.......................................................................................263
Starting the machine.................................................................................... 268
Periodic actions........................................................................................... 268

P A R T V M achine m aintenance......................................................... 271

CHAPTER 14 Machine and facilities maintenance...................................... 273

About maintenance......................................................................................274
The economics of maintenance................................................................... 275
Participants in the maintenance business..................................................... 277
Balance between planned and unplanned activities.......................................281
Preventive maintenance productivity........................................................... 283
Failures and microstoppages................................................................ 284

CHAPTER 15 Improving maintenance................................................. 287

Strategies for maintenance improvement..................................................... 288
Reliability-centered maintenance (RCM)...................................................... 288
Total productive maintenance (TPM)...........................................................292
Maintenance organization............................................................................ 304

CHAPTER 16 Maintenance information systems........................................ 309

Computer systems for maintenance............................................................. 310
Diagnosis and failure analysis....................................................................... 314
Administration, documentation, and paperwork.......................................... 317

CHAPTER 17 Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE).............................323

Is faster better?............................................................................................ 324
OEE as a machine performance indicator....................................................325
OEE calculations.........................................................................................328
OEE analysis and machine performance improvement................................331

viii Working with Machines

 Appropriate and inappropriate use of OEE to improve machine
performance................................................................................................ 337

Where to go from here?.................................................................................. 339

Bibliography....................................................................................................343
Books about machining................................................................................343
Books on usability engineering..................................................................... 344
Industrial engineering.................................................................................. 345
Operator job design in cells......................................................................... 345
Chaku-chaku lines......................................................................................... 345
Focused factories......................................................................................... 345
Setup time reduction............................................. 346
Automation.................................................................................................. 346
Maintenance................................................................................................ 347

Index.............................................................................................................. 349

Working with Machines ix

 Jidoka = Working with Machines

Introduction

Jidoka = Working with Machines

In his presentation at the 2006 Shingo Prize conference, Art Smalley
emphsized that American literature on lean manufacturing addresses
exclusively the production control topics which Toyota executives refer to
as the “JTT pillar of the Toyota Production System,” and lacks the other
pillar, “jidoka.”As shown in Figure 1-1, without jidoka, the whole “tem­
ple” of lean manufacturing is subject to collapse, which, in practice, means
that the companies that ignore it fail to achieve the expected benefits and
competitive advantage.

But what is jidoka? As Quarterman Lee1 notes, the word is used with a
bewildering variety of different meanings, such as:
• On the Toyota website jidoka refers to “the ability to stop production
lines, by man or machine, in the event of problems such as equipment
malfunction, quality issues, or late work ”

1. See http://www.strategosinc.com/jidoka.htm

Working with Machines 1

Introduction

FIGURE 1-1. Lean manufacturing implementation without Jidoka

• Jidoka is also used to describe techniques that separate human activity

from machine cycles, thereby allowing each operator to attend to multi­
ple machines, preferably of different types working in sequence, with
the output of each machine being the input of the next.
• Jidoka also refers to a stepwise automation strategy that gradually
reduces the amount of work done by people in a production operation.
This approach differs from the radical change strategy, traditionally fol­
lowed in automation projects in the United States or Europe.
• More recently at Toyota, jidoka has referred to the automation of tasks
that are dirty, dangerous, or awkward, and cause fatigue in the course of
a shift or cause repetitive stress injuries over months and years. The
goal is that all operator jobs should be suitable for short or tall men
and women from their twenties to their sixties, and performed at the
same level of productivity and quality from the beginning to the end of
the work shift.

What makes an accurate definition even more challenging is that Toyota’s

jidoka is an untranslatable play on words. As shown in Figure 1-2, it sounds
exacdy like the standard Japanese word for automation but is written dif-
ferendy. Adding the radical for “human being” to the character for
“move,” results in the character for “work.” The pronunciation doesn’t

2 Working with Machines

 Working with machines and competitiveness

change but the meaning and the connotation do. Toyota’s jidoka includes
the human being; classical jidoka— or “automation”— does not.

The human being actually is the common element in all the above defini­
tions of jidoka. In its broadest sense, jidoka is the engineering of the way
people work with machines.

FIGURE 1-2. Jidoka versus Jidoka

Working with machines and competitiveness

Excellence at working with machines is a pillar of the Toyota Production
System, providing some readers a sufficient reason to dig into the subject,
but others will legitimately ask, why it is relevant to their circumstances.
The current situation remains that almost every manufacturer in the world
has competitors with lower and higher labor costs. The United States is a
low-wage competitor to Denmark but a high-wage competitor to Mexico,
which itself is a high-wage competitor to China. Within China, the Sze­
chuan province is a low-wage competitor to the Pearl River Delta, and
now Vietnam is emerging as a low-wage competitor to China.

Working with Machines 3

Introduction

Figure 1-3 compares the labor costs and manufacturing’s share of gross
domestic products (GDP) in a few countries. Although German workers
are paid nearly 30 times more than their Chinese competitors, Germany’s
manufacturing sector is holding on and still accounts for 29 percent of the
country’s GDP, or about $700B, which is the same size as China’s manu­
facturing sector in the same year.

FIGURE 1-3. Labor costs and manufacturing’s share of GDP

In countries that develop successfully, wages rise and competing through

cheap labor is only a temporary opportunity. In recent years, Chinese
wages have been rising at a rate in excess o f 13 percent. At this rate, in 9
years, wages in the Pearl River Delta will be $12/hour, or higher than in
Korea in 2003.

How do companies in high labor cost countries manage to remain com­

petitive? In the United States, Japan, or Western Europe, the more manual
a manufacturing process, the more severe the competitive handicap of
high wages. Mass customization is a possible strategy, but applicable only
to a few markets, such as PCs or prestige cosmetics. Capital equipment is
frequently customized, but the overwhelming majority of consumer
goods, from shoes to cars, are not. Others, instead have pursued full auto­
mation and “lights-out” factories as an alternative that would make labor
costs irrelevant but this practice has proven impractical in most industries.

4 Working with Machines

 Inside the book

Most successful manufacturing processes in advanced economies are nei­

ther fully manual nor fully automatic. Instead, they involve interactions
between small numbers of highly skilled people and machines that account
for the bulk of the manufacturing costs, and thereby, equalize the playing
field, as this equipment is no cheaper to competitors.

Effectiveness in the use of production machines is rarely limited by their

technology. Outside of leading-edge plants in high-technology industries
or mature industries introducing new technology, machines have the tech­
nical capability to hold the required tolerances. The performance differ­
ences observed between factories result from the way people use the
machines. This book begins the human interfaces of individual machines
and progresses towards the linking of machines into cells, as well as the
management of monuments and common services, autonomation, main­
tenance, and production control. While separate books exist on each of
these topics, this one pulls together all these threads into a cohesive
approach, and provides manufacturing managers, engineers, lean champi­
ons, and consultants with strategies and tools to make the technical and
managerial decisions that turn working with machines into lasting business
success.

Inside the book

Part I stresses that the application of usability engineering principles to the
human interfaces of production machines is key to reducing training costs,
enabling operators to become multiskilled, and preventing mistakes with
modern, computer-controlled machines. Chapter 1 starts with the basics
of using individual controls and the way control panels should be designed
to ensure that operators press the button corresponding to the action they
want to take. Chapter 2 takes the next step and shows the combination of
actions through which the operator causes a machine to process a part or a
load of parts through an operation.

When machines work perfectly, operators can use them without any
understanding of the physics and chemistry of the process— the way con­
sumers typically use sophisticated household appliances. At work, how-

Working with Machines 5

Introduction

ever, it is different, and participation in projects, which target setup time

reduction or improvements in process capability requires some process
knowledge. Chapter 3 covers the appropriate level of process understand­
ing that operators need, the means to acquire it, and the pitfalls of exces­
sive reliance on 4‘tribal knowledge.”

The discussions in Chapters 2 through 4 are academic unless the user orga­
nization has control over the machines’ operator interfaces, either by
requiring suppliers to meet specs, by hiring a system integrator to reengi­
neer the suppliers’ default interfaces; or by developing the interfaces in
house. In order to make any of these approaches technically feasible the
machines must be programmable. Chapter 4 discusses programmability as
the most sweeping change affecting human—machine interactions of the
past 50 years. Starting from an overview of the currently available technol­
ogy, the chapter explains how programming has changed the jobs of oper­
ators, maintenance technicians, and manufacturing engineers, and caused
the emergence of control programs as a new class of assets.

While Part I deals with individual machines, Part II covers the art of bring­
ing some groups of machines together into cells, to allow a team of opera­
tors to perform a sequence of operations on a product or a family of
products. There are other ways of organizing machines, but, where the cell
concept is applicable, it has led to excellent productivity, lead time, and
quality performance, while enriching the operators’ work experience and
keeping them safe. The cell concept is not a panacea, but certainly
deserves a detailed discussion, spotlighting on the differences between
cells that involve machines versus those with manual operations.

Chapter 5 reviews examples of machine cells from the automotive and

aerospace industries, as well as other approaches, such as “cluster tools”
used in the semiconductor industry in pursuit of the same goals. The defi­
nition of a lean manufacturing cell then arises from an analysis of the com­
mon characteristics of the given examples. The chapter concludes with a
discussion of other uses of the word “cell” in the literature on flexible
manufacturing systems or group technology.

After Chapter 5 defines cells and demonstrates why they are desirable,
Chapter 6 shows how to select appropriate targets for cell conversion in a

6 Working with Machines

 Inside the book

plant, how to design machine cells, and how to implement them (with the
exception of operator job design, which is covered in Chapter 7, using
work combination charts in cell design). Chapter 7 also discusses the task
assignment adjustments needed daily in cells populated with real opera­
tors, as opposed to the ideal, fully multiskilled operators assumed in the
design.

Chapter 6 and Chapter 7 show how to implement cells, at the level

achieved at Toyota in the 1960’s. Both machine technology and the art of
cellular manufacturing have continued to evolve, and Chapter 8, on chaku-
chaku lines, shows the type of cells commonly seen in Japan today.

Chapter 9 attempts to clear up the common confusion between cells and

focused factories, also known as “value streams.” Plant managers read
about the benefits of cells and want to reap them. Thinking that cells and
focused factories are the same, they directly implement focused factories,
while expecting the benefits o f cells, and are disappointed when these ben­
efits don’t accrue.

Unfortunately, not all manufacturing operations can be organized in cells.

Part III addresses the issues of the machines commonly called “monu­
ments,” that provide services for production lines across a broad variety of
products. Monuments are not desirable and the common services depart­
ment running them should be shrinking over time. As long as common
services exist, however, like every other part o f the plant, this department
must be designed, operated, and improved. Chapter 10 provides as much
of a general theory of monuments as can reasonably be formulated, and
then gets specific, by zooming in on three very different examples: a roll­
ing mill, an electroplating shop, and Toyota’s Global Body Line (GBL).

The topic of setup time reduction, covered in Chapter 11, is relevant to

flexible lines as well as monuments, but remains in this section because
monuments are expensive resources in short supply and deal with the wid­
est variety of products and volumes in the plant.

Part IV compares automation, as it has been developed, as a stand-alone

discipline in the United States with the lean manufacturing approach to it;
first, in a general way in Chapter 12, and then Chapter 13 hones in on a

Working with Machines 1

Introduction

special case of the management of automated systems implemented

before a plant has started its lean conversion.

Part V is about maintenance, the other task that ultimately remains for
people to perform on machines, beside programming them. Chapter 14 is
about what maintenance is and its current economic weight as an activity,
in manufacturing and in other industries, as seen from multiple perspec­
tives. Chapter 15 then discusses the means of improvingxhe maintenance of
manufacturing equipment, focussing first on the strategies of reliability-
centered maintenance (RCM) and total productive maintenance (TPM)
and concluding with recommendations on organizational structure for
maintenance.

Chapter 16 reviews the capabilities of software systems available to sup­

port maintenance, focussing on the impact they have already had on the
activity and its skills requirements, as well as on their unfulfilled potential.
Chapter 17 differs from the rest of the book in that it is a contribution
from a different author, my partner Jose Ignacio Erausquin, who has made
extensive use of the concept of Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE)
in helping manufacturing companies, and who I felt was best to explain it.

8 Working with Machines