Posts tagged: factory physics

Process flexibility in steel plants

This post is an edited excerpt from my the­sis “Strate­gic and oper­a­tional capa­bil­i­ties in steel pro­duc­tion”. You can down­load a full PDF here. Capa­bil­i­ties that fol­low from flex­i­bil­ity on the machine level become more impor­tant when a steel plant is pro­duc­ing a wide prod­uct range and pro­duc­tion vol­umes are low for each vari­ant. Setup costs […]

Monday April 12th, 2010 in , , , , , , | No Comments »

Lean as factory physics

Return­ing to my post from two days ago, I’ll try to elab­o­rate on the third of the three views on lean that I sug­gested, namely “lean as fac­tory physics”. The term “Fac­tory physics” was coined by Hopp and Spear­man in their book by the same name. On the first page they describe the con­cept as […]

Tuesday January 19th, 2010 in , , , | No Comments »

What is lean, really?

I’m uncer­tain whether it is pos­si­ble to pick up this topic with­out falling into the how-to-define-lean trap. The nature of lean is a ques­tion that is dis­cussed at length by researchers, but sel­dom asked in the “real world”. The rea­son could be that it’s mostly a mat­ter of the­o­ret­i­cal inter­est. How­ever, since I believe that […]

Sunday January 17th, 2010 in , , , , | No Comments »