Posts tagged: flow

Process cost modelling in steel industries: Flexibility, flow and production cost

I’ve writ­ten about how process flex­i­bil­ity and small batch sizes improve pro­duc­tion flow in steel indus­tries in a cou­ple of ear­lier posts (here and here). In this post I’ll dis­cuss how the eco­nom­i­cal con­se­quences of flex­i­ble rolling mill tech­nol­ogy can be stud­ied using a con­cep­tual process cost model. The fig­ure below illus­trates a con­cep­tual cost model […]

Wednesday May 19th, 2010 in , , , , , , , , | No Comments »

Improvement potential in steel plants

Why is it that so few steel plants prac­tice hot charg­ing, i.e. why is the mate­r­ial allowed to cool down after cast­ing only to be reheated again in the next pro­cess­ing step? Con­tin­u­ous cast­ing is today the most fre­quently used method for pro­duc­tion of steel work­pieces. The con­tin­u­ous cast­ing process was devel­oped with high effi­ciency in […]

Thursday April 1st, 2010 in , , , | No Comments »

How small batches improve product development

The idea of lean prod­uct devel­op­ment (LPD) came nat­u­rally when lean pro­duc­tion evolved into the more gen­eral con­cept of “lean think­ing”. Prod­uct devel­op­ment is dif­fer­ent from man­u­fac­tur­ing because, as soon as you tar­get non–trivial devel­op­ment tasks, they will con­tain a degree of risk that intro­duces vari­a­tion. You can’t remove this vari­a­tion, because eco­nomic rewards in […]

Sunday March 14th, 2010 in , , , , , , | No Comments »

Lean product development and creativity

Yes­ter­day I was made aware of this arti­cle on the web­site of the Royal Insti­tute of tech­nol­ogy, KTH, where Mar­gareta Norell Bergen­dahl, pro­fes­sor in inte­grated prod­uct devel­op­ment  at KTH, dis­cusses the dan­ger of uncrit­i­cally adopt­ing lean prin­ci­ples in prod­uct devel­op­ment. It so hap­pens that a cou­ple of days ago I started read­ing Don­ald G. Reinertsen’s […]

Thursday February 18th, 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 »