A
Abizaid74
Hello Everyone,
I am so glad I found this board. Very helpful indeed. I am currently in need for serious advise. I am currently employed and just accepted an offer from much larger company ; compensation is more. Here is the situation this company has a facility that ran out of capacity, so they built a new facility not far from it. The facility is not operational yet, it will be in about three months , ok?
The proceses are complex and they use batch and queue in the existing facility with villages of operations (departments). high amount of batching- some of which is justified based on the nature of certain operations. The new facilty is a little more lean freindly in that the parts are transported using an overhead system in a FIFO order. I was just hired to the new facility in IE lean mfg leader role. The GM knows about lean believes in it but he says its up to me to lead the efforts.
I asked during the interview if he will back me up. He replied positively but said he cant force people , there will have to be some effort on my part to inject lean as I go. My first day is in a couple of weeks. I will spend time in the existing facility to learn the processes, collect info, talk to people, collect reports info etc.
The workforce for the new facility has not been hired yet; only a few will be transferred from the existing facility to train and get the new workers up to speed, possibly stay at the new facility. HR told me that they are going to select those few with good attitude and open minded. My fundamental question here is the following..what is it best for me to start on given there is another three months before the new plant will make product (new equipment and all but I think there will probably be some hiccups).
The plant has already been laid out in terms of where the major equipment will be..the finer workstations, etc. are still up in the air and I can have influence there. My question is would you try to establish lower batch size, 5S, etc.from the get-go before the actual employees are hired and start working or would you purposely wait to involve them so they have a say in how to design their area and let them implement 5S, etc. so they gain that ownership feeling which is critical for sustaining 5S, etc.?
The existing facility right now has tremendous buffers and much batching. Would you spend the next few weeks studying what that buffer should be then standardize that for the new facility from the get-go so that there is no shock later (especially acconting treats WIP as an asset and once it's in the books it's generally hard to tolerate writing them off it effects gain and loss columns which is a killer for a publicly traded company. What would you do to start? What would increase my chances to succeed with implementing a lean culture?...do you think it's better to let the new facility start off like the existing facility with batching then make a few changes and impress everyone and get their hearts and minds or should attempt to do things from the get-go?
…if the latter, any improvement may be attributed to having the new facility new equipment, new overhead transport AGVs, etc. and not to lean, 5S, etc. which you guys think is the best approach..sorry long post. Any suggestions are appreciated. thanks!!
I am so glad I found this board. Very helpful indeed. I am currently in need for serious advise. I am currently employed and just accepted an offer from much larger company ; compensation is more. Here is the situation this company has a facility that ran out of capacity, so they built a new facility not far from it. The facility is not operational yet, it will be in about three months , ok?
The proceses are complex and they use batch and queue in the existing facility with villages of operations (departments). high amount of batching- some of which is justified based on the nature of certain operations. The new facilty is a little more lean freindly in that the parts are transported using an overhead system in a FIFO order. I was just hired to the new facility in IE lean mfg leader role. The GM knows about lean believes in it but he says its up to me to lead the efforts.
I asked during the interview if he will back me up. He replied positively but said he cant force people , there will have to be some effort on my part to inject lean as I go. My first day is in a couple of weeks. I will spend time in the existing facility to learn the processes, collect info, talk to people, collect reports info etc.
The workforce for the new facility has not been hired yet; only a few will be transferred from the existing facility to train and get the new workers up to speed, possibly stay at the new facility. HR told me that they are going to select those few with good attitude and open minded. My fundamental question here is the following..what is it best for me to start on given there is another three months before the new plant will make product (new equipment and all but I think there will probably be some hiccups).
The plant has already been laid out in terms of where the major equipment will be..the finer workstations, etc. are still up in the air and I can have influence there. My question is would you try to establish lower batch size, 5S, etc.from the get-go before the actual employees are hired and start working or would you purposely wait to involve them so they have a say in how to design their area and let them implement 5S, etc. so they gain that ownership feeling which is critical for sustaining 5S, etc.?
The existing facility right now has tremendous buffers and much batching. Would you spend the next few weeks studying what that buffer should be then standardize that for the new facility from the get-go so that there is no shock later (especially acconting treats WIP as an asset and once it's in the books it's generally hard to tolerate writing them off it effects gain and loss columns which is a killer for a publicly traded company. What would you do to start? What would increase my chances to succeed with implementing a lean culture?...do you think it's better to let the new facility start off like the existing facility with batching then make a few changes and impress everyone and get their hearts and minds or should attempt to do things from the get-go?
…if the latter, any improvement may be attributed to having the new facility new equipment, new overhead transport AGVs, etc. and not to lean, 5S, etc. which you guys think is the best approach..sorry long post. Any suggestions are appreciated. thanks!!
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