In this series of articles, we discover the real purpose behind 5S: to instill a waste elimination thought process in our people. 5S is NOT a cleanup campaign! Since we’re told that 5S is the cornerstone of any continuous improvement initiative, like Lean Manufacturing, why do we just ask our people to do clean?
In the last five articles we have followed this line of thinking, exploring the actual thinking mechanism embedded in the 5S’s. In this article we will consider transport waste through the 5S lens. When I say transport, I mean moving material that is between stages between points A and B. So we can imagine that this could literally mean transporting material on conveyors. Or it could mean shipping material from one state to another. We are not talking about human movement, but specifically the movement of machines and materials in stages and batches.
When classifying transportation waste, we must stratify transportation into necessary and unnecessary transportation. Accumulators that excessively protect upstream and downstream processes from variability are unnecessary. This waste of moving material only exacerbates the problem of excess inventory. In fact, because our local processes are independently efficient, we typically justify backlog automation. It looks good in the books.
In classifying transport waste, do we agree that red priority shipments are unnecessary? This is a good indicator of wasteful activity: red tag priority items shipped overnight when they arrive at your dock. By doing so, we can measure the time between labeling and when they are used. It is not uncommon to find that the actual delivery time between receipt and use is longer than the normally accepted delivery time with substantially less shipping cost. The same usually happens with outgoing shipments. Work with your customers, distribution centers, and sales groups to really determine what really is a shipping priority and what isn’t.
To tidy up the conveying problem, we designed the process to flow without build-up, sometimes eliminating conveyors altogether. We can often drastically shorten conveyors to maintain the necessary automation of part orientation, for example. In some cases, this will mean that we need to improve TPM practices. In others, we will have to improve our standard labor practices. In any circumstance, we need to understand why accumulators are here in the first place and design them with robust and reliable processes. The reason we do this is to force identification of waste in the process and force leadership to encourage further improvements. The most fragile process demands it of us.
To achieve flow within our own four walls, we must work closely with our suppliers and customers. The reason is that the flow will sensitize the process to variability due to lack of accumulation through transport. By working hard to achieve the required reliability, we can reliably ship products on time, avoiding costly priority shipping.
Murphy’s Law says that if we let it go, it won’t flow. Therefore, we must monitor and sanitize the process of any variations in transport standards. Are there ways that allow accumulation to occur? Are we creating excess inventory and unnecessarily moving it to staging areas for later use? What is the trend of our priority shipping cost? When we do these spot checks of the process, we need to understand why variability might exist. This is standardized process contamination and needs to be addressed.
We need to standardize inventory limits, moves, and pull schedules so that unnecessary moves are eliminated. This is often best achieved through robust pull and kanban systems. By controlling your process through kanban control, we establish the classification, establishment and sanitization standards necessary to achieve the 4S level when it comes to the elimination of transport and transportation waste.
By following up on these pull/kanban standards and training the supervisors in your process on the required process inspection standards, we can always improve the process. Transferring this knowledge to others is vital to continually improving the process. Always go back to your standards and ask the simple questions of what, why, when, who, where and how. You will find unlimited opportunities to eliminate transportation and transportation waste.
