Posts tagged: lean production

CD production a future for the record store?">On–demand CD production a future for the record store?

More and more peo­ple down­load their music on the inter­net, and record stores are hav­ing a hard time. How come I’ve never heard any­one talk about on–demand CD pro­duc­tion in the stores? The rapid decline in the num­ber of record stores was dis­cussed in a pro­gram on Swedish Radio P2 a cou­ple of hours ago. […]

Saturday May 22nd, 2010 in , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

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 »

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 »

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 »

Toyota, a fallen angel?

Toy­ota is forced to recall 8.5 mil­lion cars due to brake prob­lems. It is tough, but man­age­able. Oth­ers have been in sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tions before and coped with them. Worse is the impact on the until now immac­u­late brand. This is the topic of an arti­cle in SvD on 19 Feb­ru­ary. The “Toy­ota Way”, which supposedly […]

Monday February 22nd, 2010 in , , , | No Comments »

On sandcones and rocky rivers

In a pre­vi­ous post I touched upon the sand­cone model, which may pro­vide a pow­er­ful metaphor and model that link the process of strat­egy to con­tent. I’ll now try to relate the sand­cone model to idea that inven­tory is like a river where dan­gers lurk under the sur­face: “As the level gets lower, boul­ders appear.” […]

Tuesday February 2nd, 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 »

Zen of process

While read­ing Patag­o­nia founder Yvon Chouinard’s “Let my peo­ple go surf­ing: the edu­ca­tion of a reluc­tant busi­ness­man”, I was struck by the sim­i­lar­ity between his descrip­tion of zen archery and climb­ing, and a cen­tral idea in Toy­ota way phi­los­o­phy: that “the right process will pro­duce the right results”. Chouinard writes about archery that “if you’ve […]

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 »

Sustainability and lean production

A cou­ple of years ago I wrote a con­fer­ence paper where I dis­cussed the poten­tial to reduce energy con­sump­tion in steel plants with lean pro­duci­ton meth­ods. The idea was that the phi­los­o­phy expressed in Toyota’s TPS House, which reads “short­en­ing the pro­duc­tion flow by elim­i­nat­ing waste”, shows a way to imple­ment so called hot charging […]

Friday January 15th, 2010 in , , , | No Comments »