Author: Muhammad Ahmad

Lean Leadership The role of the leaders within the organization is the fundamental element of sustaining the progress of lean thinking. Experienced kaizen members at Toyota, for example, often bring up the concepts of Senpai, Kohai, and Sensei, because they strongly feel that transferring of Toyota culture down and across Toyota can only happen when more experienced Toyota…

Sigma (σ) denotes the standard deviation of a population. Six Sigma is the term used in industry to describe a process that has no more than 3.4 defects out of a million. The reference to Six Sigma suggests six standard deviations away from the center of a normal distribution, but the assumption of a perfectly…

Although the elimination of waste may seem like a simple and clear subject, it is noticeable that waste is often very conservatively identified. This then hugely reduces the potential of such an aim. The elimination of waste is the goal of lean, and Toyota defined three broad types of waste: muda, muri, and mura; for many lean implementations this…

Sakichi Toyoda Toyota’s development of ideas that later became lean may have started at the turn of the twentieth century with Sakichi Toyoda (Figure 8.12), in a textile factory with looms that stopped themselves when a thread broke. This became the seed of autonomation and Jidoka. Toyota’s journey with JIT may have started back in 1934 when it…

Benjamin Franklin Benjamin Franklin (Figure 8.8) contributed greatly to waste reduction thinking. Most of the basic goals of lean manufacturing and waste reduction were derived from Benjamin Franklin through documented examples. Poor Richard’s Almanac says of wasted time, “He that idly loses 5s. worth of time, loses 5s., and might as prudently throw 5s. into the river.”…

Lean manufacturing or lean production, often simply lean’s origins date back to the post World War II era in Japan. It was developed by Taiichi Ohno, a Toyota production executive, in response to a number of problems that plagued Japanese industry. The main problem was that of high‐variety production required to serve the domestic Japanese market. Mass production techniques,…

In any manufacturing process and operation, variability exists in the process output. In a machining operation, which is one of the most accurate processes, the machined parts may appear to be identical, but close inspection reveals dimensional differences from one part to the next. Manufacturing variations can be divided into two types: random and assignable. Random…

Data are often collected in a manufacturing process over time in many practical situations. Phenomena that might affect the process or system often become more visible in a time‐oriented plot of the data, and the stability of the process can be better judged. For example, the control chart is a technique that displays data over…

This section is about SPC, a collection of tools that are essential in quality‐improvement activities. Statistical methods play a vital role in quality improvement. Some applications are outlined next: It is essential that engineers, scientists, managers, and policy makers have an in‐depth understanding of these statistical tools in any industry or business that wants to be…

A display that further summarizes information about the distribution of the values is the boxplot. Instead of plotting the actual values, a boxplot displays summary statistics for the distribution. It is a plot of the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles, as well as values far removed from the rest. Figure 8.2 shows an annotated sketch of a…