Tool Box
Issue No. 8 - December/ 2002/january
The Eff-Word is Banned
How value mapping adds a new production perspective
Ken Craig bans the word ‘efficiency’ from any discussion of his work – which makes the job of interviewing this Centre for Innovation Business and Manufacturing expert a bit difficult. The reason becomes apparent as he makes his point.
Ken’s task for the two years he has been at CIBM has been to coach progressive SA manufacturers in ways to make their operations perform better.
Efficiency is a rude word here, because it applies too strongly to individual processes – how fast? how many? how expensive? – and can act as a barrier to change.
Ken applies the theory of constraints in his work. Briefly this maintains that an industrial process can (and should) make goods no faster than its slowest part. Each manufacturing system has one point that determines its output speed; focus on that and you can optimise the whole system.
“When you schedule department by department, effectively you are back-flushing labour according to what the workers are producing. That leads to over-production. In any manufacturing process it is meaningful to schedule only one process – the constraint – which dictates the speed of production. Any buildup of stock before that is a waste,” Ken says.
The idea is to balance the capabilities before and after that governing process according to ‘just in time’ principles.
“Too often the managing director of a company says ‘TPM’ or ‘JIT’ which becomes a buzzword that gets applied to one little corner. When they reach the goal they say, ‘That’s good—now we can forget about it.’
“Unless you see how that little corner affects the whole the gains may be short-lived—or they may not be gains at all.
“I often wonder what a business would do if they back-flushed labour and overheads only at the time of sale. The fully absorbed standard cost would fly in the face of effort...
