L e a n with I T special feature
Mike Hodge is manufacturing IT director at Cimlogic, a provider of software solutions for process control, industrial automation and MES that has also developed a product specific to lean, called LEANTrak™. He discusses the difficult relationship between IT and lean.
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appreciate why many lean practitioners are frustrated by IT solutions, and even see them as an obstacle to lean progress. In larger companies, management will often ask Cimlogic not to act before they have decided the global direction for the entire company. But we often get local site requirements: lean practitioners are often after small changes. This kind of political conflict can cause problems.
We do understand that companies with operations around the world don’t want hundreds of different attempts at tackling the same issue and there is a very good reason why they try to deploy a global strategy in terms of IT. But this process can create frustration for the lean people down at a single site level. We see a lot of different scenarios and systems through working with our clients, and I think it doesn’t have to be like that: there are tools that can actually help lean practitioners. A solution that’s implemented for the sake of implementing is going to be limited in its ability to improve and to reduce waste. Five years ago, IT systems were pioneered by engineers, they were merely an add-on to bigger projects and used to provide general data. They have become much better, also in response to a changed client base: most companies now hire people with job titles like operations excellence manager or CI manager. The IT solutions are now being developed with their requirements in mind. Most IT systems capture facts in the background, with very little input from the operator. Some companies rely on a paper-based system because having somebody write down that, for instance, a machine has stopped for a certain reason makes them conscious of the fact that there has been an issue with downtime. With an IT solution in place, the operator may not give the right importance to the problem, and it might only be the production managers looking at data at the end of a shift.
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A production line may stop just for one or two minutes, but that can happen hundreds of times a week. With a manual recording system, even with the best will in the world, the operator will not be able to record all the stoppages and the risk of inaccuracies increases. You end up with a scenario where you might put resources into tackling a problem which might not even be the real problem. IT solutions prevent that from happening. E N D
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In this sense, it is important to get the balance right: how can an automatic system complement the benefits that a paper-based system would have? The system is going to record the amount of seconds or minutes a machine hasn’t worked, for example, and the operator has to enter the reason behind the stoppage.