Fundamentals Of World Class Manufacturing

Fundamentals of World Class Manufacturing

It could be known by different terminologies; some call it TPS (Toyota Production System), others WCM (World Class Manufacturing), some call it LEAN and some call it Operational Excellence – finally, to sum it up, all world-class organizations have different frameworks or structures. But as it is said, ‘All roads lead to Rome.’ All systems lead to one destination of world-class performance.

World Class Manufacturing is a management philosophy that helps to eliminate waste, improve efficiency and effectiveness of man and the machine, streamline the process, optimize inventory levels and the most important improve employee morale. It aims to inculcate the culture of continual improvement in the employees. It trains the employees to accept change and imbibes the thought – Change is Permanent. It is based on the principle that there is always room for improvement and we as an organization should continuously work towards it.

Team Faber strongly believes that World Class Manufacturing (WCM) practices or as we call it Operational Excellence (OE) practices always help organizations to be more effective and efficient and in turn helps them to perform better. In this field of WCM / OE, team Faber has several modules that can be customized to build and sustain highperforming teams.

Let us look at the fundamental principles of World Class Manufacturing: Operational Excellence Foundations The focus here is to work on elimination of waste and non-value adding activities in the organization. Physical workplace improvement is also part of OE Foundation and tools like Five S can be deployed to strengthen it. As a part of OE foundations, Team Faber looks at the basic stability of man, machine, material, and methods.

Flow Management Material or information flow improvement can be achieved via traditional yet powerful Value Stream Mapping (VSM) tool. The aim is to identify every non-value adding activity and all inefficiencies in the process and to reduce/ eliminate it. It is done using Current and Future State maps.

It also involves maintaining optimum inventory levels by various inventory management modules, Kanban implementation, supply chain management, milk runs and other tools.

Equipment Management Machine health is as important as managing the human resource. Equipment management ensures that the machines are up and running and are performing at rated capacity and quality levels. This is delivered by Team Faber by deploying elements from the house of Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) like Autonomous Maintenance (PM), Planned Maintenance (PM), Kobetsu Kaizen (KK) and measurement matrices like Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) and Mean Time To Repair (MTTR).

Lean Six Sigma Lean Six Sigma is Quality Management framework which aims at the elimination of waste along with the reduction of defects in the process. It can be achieved by using tools like Total Quality Management (TQM), 7 QC Tools, Low-Cost

Automation, Poka Yoke, Six Sigma Achievement (DMAIC) and others as applicable.

Sustenance Management All the above can be achieved, but what is important and difficult is making OE a part of organization’s culture. As the organizations start reaping gains with OE practices, it needs to understand that it is not a one-time process, it needs to be a continuous activity. 90% of the organizations which start structured improvement initiative complain that they do implement OE tools but sustenance has always been an issue. To solve this issue of sustenance, Team Faber helps client teams with Daily work Management (DWM) framework. DWM is a methodology that focuses on preserving and improving the performance of an organization’s productivity, quality, cost, delivery, safety, and morale.

To conclude I would like to quote Benjamin Franklin- “Whenever you are finished Changing, you are finished”. So watch out for the change, accept it, work on it and sail smoothly in this competitive world.