Quotes About Production

The daring nature of Ford's method is revealed when one realizes that a direct consequence of limiting the space is that when the allotted space is full, the workers feeding it must stop producing. Therefore, in order to achieve flow, Ford had to abolish local efficiencies. In other words, flow lines are flying in the face of conventional wisdom; the convention that, to be effective, every worker and every work center have to be busy 100% of the time.

A bottleneck," Jonah continues, "is any resource whose capacity is equal to or less than the demand placed upon it. And a non-bottleneck is any resource whose capacity is greater than the demand placed on it.

Actually, the flow should be a tiny bit less than the demand.

You mean make them into non-bottlenecks," says Stacey. "No," he says. "Absolutely not. The bottlenecks stay bottlenecks. What we must do is find enough capacity for the bottlenecks to become more equal to demand.

Kanban system directs each work center when and what to produce but, more importantly, it directs when not to produce. No card—no production.

Adhering to the flow concept mandates the abolishment of local efficiencies. Ohno addressed this issue again and again in his books, stressing that there is no point in encouraging people to produce if the products are not needed in the very short-term. This emphasis is probably the reason that outside Toyota TPS first became known as Just-in-time production.7

We want to make production a dominant force in getting good sales. Sales which will fit both the client's needs and the plant's capabilities like a glove.

You forced us to view production as a means to satisfy sales. I want to change the role production is playing in getting sales.

What my people and I have done is to examine daily the queues in front of the assembly and in front of the bottlenecks— we call them 'buffers.' We check just to be sure that everything that's scheduled to be worked on is there—that there are no 'holes.' We thought that if a new bottleneck pops up it would immediately show up as a hole in at least one of these buffers.

You see, whenever there's a hole in a buffer—and I'm not talking about just the work that's supposed to be done on a given day, but the work for two or three days down the road—we go and check in which work center the materials are stuck.

We don't break setups, or light a fire. We just point out to the foreman of that work center which job we would prefer he gets to next.

The key is in the hands of production. These techniques to manage the buffers should not be used just to track missing parts while there is still time, they should be used mainly to focus our local improvement efforts. We must guarantee that the improvements on the CCRs will always be sufficient to prevent them from becoming bottlenecks.

Throughput," he says, "is the rate at which the system generates money through sales.

If you produce something, but don't sell it, it's not throughput

If we cut our batch sizes in half, then I guess that at any one time we'd have half the work-in-process on the floor. I guess that means we'd only need half the investment in work-in-process to keep the plant working. If we could work it out with our vendors, we could conceivably cut all our inventories in half, and by cutting our inventories in half, we reduce the amount of cash tied up at any one time, which eases the pressure on cash flow.

Once the somebody is already on the payroll, it doesn't cost us any more to have him be idle. Whether somebody produces parts or waits a few minutes doesn't increase our operating expense. But excess inventory . . . now that ties up a lot of money.

If Ralph can determine a schedule for releasing red-tag materials based on the bottlenecks, he can also determine a schedule for final assembly. Once he knows when the bottleneck parts will reach final assembly, he can calculate backwards and determine the release of the non-bottleneck materials along each of their routes. In this way, the bottlenecks will be determining the release of all the materials in the plant.

By running non-bottlenecks for "efficiency," we've built inventories far in excess of demand.

Eighty percent of your products require at least one part from a bottleneck. What are you going to substitute for the bottleneck part that hasn't shown up yet?" Bob scratches his head and says, "Oh, yeah . . . I forgot." "So if we can't assemble," says Stacey, "we get piles of inventory again. Only this time the excess inventory doesn't accumulate in front of a bottleneck; it stacks up in front of final assembly.

I've got the machines. I've got the people. I've got all the materials I need. I know there's a market out there, because the competitors' stuff is selling. So what the hell is it?

The most demanding assumption that TPS makes about the production environment is that it is a stable environment. And it demands stability in three different aspects.

With production alone as the goal, industry in North America was dominated by the assembly line, standardization for mass consumption.

the Ukraine. Its rich grain-producing lands would be essential for the Bolsheviks to feed Russia's hungry masses, and its industries produced 75 percent of Russia's iron and 60 percent of its steel.

When Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill first met at Tehran in 1943, and Stalin raised his glass in a toast "to American production, without which this war would have been lost," it was a stunning tribute from the leader of world Communism to the forces of American capitalism.