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Component Manufacturing dverti$er
Adverti$er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
March 2018 #10224 Page #30
Industrial Engineers Needed in Our Wood Component Manufacturing Industry
Industrial engineering – “The branch of engineering that is concerned with the production of industrial goods, especially by the design of efficient plants and procedures and the management of materials, energy, and labor.” (Source – The Free Dictionary)
T
he Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma best practices movements in our industry are becoming well known, or at least spoken about quite often. What is not spoken about is the “where and why” these tools were developed; in truth, they were started by industrial engineers. Industrial engineering is not widely understood or known in our industry, which is truly a tragedy because ours is a manufacturing industry. The origins of lean manufacturing start with Shigeo Shingo, an industrial engineer at Toyota credited with being the principal force behind developing lean manufacturing principles. There are others who made the terms more popular and better understood worldwide, but our main focus in this article is Shingo. His work was based on the works of previous industrial engineers, but he applied his process to every level of the manufacturing process. Lean is a further development of what was started in the early 1900s by Ford and Boeing. Six Sigma is an offshoot of lean that was developed in the late 1980s. It was Shingo’s work which showed that every aspect of the work environment should be viewed with a critical eye. At the very heart of lean manufacturing principles are motion and time studies performed by industrial engineering practices. Today Toyota is one of the most admired and most profitable automobile companies in the world. But back in the late 1960s, Toyota was a floundering company; it was blatantly obvious to everyone that the company needed to make changes or they would be out of business. Everyone was going to lose their jobs. In other words, what had been done in the past was no longer good enough. Hence, they embraced the philosophy of Kaizen (good change), better known as Continuous Improvement. Now ask yourself: does this sound like the Toyota that exists today? Of course not. As someone who is trained in industrial engineering, I was shocked to learn that the largest and most wellknown players in our industry do not have industrial engineers on their payrolls. One in particular that comes to mind is considered a leader in our industry with many locations across the country; the company is using Six Sigma extensively, but there is not a single industrial engineer on their staff. They performed a six-month Six Sigma study to improve the loading of their delivery trucks at one of their lumberyard locations. Six months of study to understand that moving the trucks closer to their inventory, rearranging the inventory and a few other things would improve their process by about one third. Any industrial engineer, including myself, could have performed a time study observation in a single day to come to the same conclusion that took them six months. Metaphorically, sometimes people use a sledge hammer when all they need is a framing hammer. Continued next page PHONE: 800-289-5627
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