Three Major Channels of Process Improvement.
1. Process Redesign by Process Planning Team.
2. Process Improvement Study by Industrial Engineering Team.
3. Continuous #Improvement by Involving Shop Floor Employees and All Employees.
Continuous Improvement - Employee Participation Principle of Industrial Engineering
In manufacturing and operations strategy books, improvement strategy is discussed as one of the four important strategic decision areas (Nigel Slack and Michael Lewis). Industrial engineering is the first formal improvement discipline in engineering and management. "Improvement" is part of IE definition of AIIE, IIE and IISE. Still, industrial engineering is not discussed in the manufacturing and operations strategy books. IEs have to look into the reasons why their discipline is not given recognition by the professors of a subject that is extremely close to their professional practice.
Industrial Engineering - Definition
AIIE: “Industrial engineering is concerned with the design, improvement, and installation of integrated systems of men, materials, and equipment.
(AIIE, 1955, Maynard, H.B., Handbook of Industrial Engineering, 2nd Edition, McGraw Hill, New York, 1963.)
(IISE official definition)
Industrial and systems engineering is concerned with the design, improvement and installation of integrated systems of people, materials, information, equipment and energy. (Accessed on 12 March 2021 https://www.iise.org/details.aspx?id=282)
Was improvement defined in IE terminology? I could not locate it in IE terminology.
But these two definitions are available on IISE website in featured lean definitions.
Kaikaku
A radical change, during a limited time, of a production system. Often means that an entire business is changed radically, normally in the form of a project. Kaikaku is most often initiated by management, since the change as such and the result will significantly impact business. Sometimes called a kaizen blitz.
Kaizen
The systematic, organized improvement of processes by those who operate them, using straightforward methods of analysis. It is a "do it now" approach to continuous incremental improvement to create more value with less muda. Kaizen establishes what needs to be done and instills the principles of continuous improvement. Also called point kaizen, process kaizen or blitz.
https://www.iise.org/Details.aspx?id=1104
There are articles and related materials on improvement in IISE publications.
The generations of improvement
Lessons from the past can leverage the greatest opportunities in history
Industrial Engineer Magazine: Industrial Engineer Engineering and Management Solutions at Work
August 2012 | Volume: 44 | Number: 8
https://www.iise.org/IEMagazine/Details.aspx?id=31872
The first generation
Although improvement has existed since the beginning of time, the first formal generation of continuous improvement occurred from the 1880s.
During this time, folks like Frederick Taylor, Walter Shewhart, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth and others created the discipline of industrial engineering and scientific management. Taylor was an early improvement pioneer. His productivity science, study and improvement techniques were adopted widely by companies with varying levels of success and challenges.
Industrial Engineer Engineering and Management Solutions at Work
June 2013 | Volume: 45 | Number: 6
https://www.iise.org/IEMagazine/Details.aspx?id=34646
The synergy of continuous process improvement
Integrating lean, Six Sigma and theory of constraints can multiply their benefits
By Reza M. Pirasteh and Srinivasan Kannappan
The seven-step approach to iTLS (Integrated TLS) is summarized as follows:
Mobilize and focus on the process bottleneck at the system level.
Exploit the constraint by attempting to get the most out of existing resources and equipment.
Eliminate the sources of waste (muda) at the bottleneck to increase the throughput at the bottleneck.
Control process variability through understanding the sources of variability and the key input/output variables and their behaviors.
Control supporting activities to the bottleneck. The sources that feed the bottleneck must be controlled and never allowed to starve the bottleneck. Any bottleneck starvation would translate into throughput starvation.
Remove the constraint and stabilize the process.
Re-evaluate the system, as the bottleneck could have shifted to another process.
Industrial and Systems Engineering at Work
October 2017 | Volume: 49 | Number: 10
https://www.iise.org/ISEmagazine/Details.aspx?id=45378
CL6 allows three shots at better improvement
By John D. Hudson Jr.
A trio to boost focus, flow and stability
To be competitive, organizations need three key advantages: focus, flow and stability. All three can be accomplished with a vigorous application of what we will call CL6 for constraints management, lean and Six Sigma.
Constraints management (aka theory of constraints or TOC) provides the leverage from proper focus.
Lean principles aim to maximize flow by avoiding or minimizing impediments to smooth flow or velocity.
Six Sigma has tools to reduce the variability that harms organizational performance and makes improvement elusive.
LEAN MANAGEMENT
Topic Leader: Dr. Wiljeana Jackson Glover
Affiliation: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
https://www.iise.org/SEMS/details.aspx?id=31004
WHAT IS CHANGE?
Change Is.....
https://www.iise.org/Details.aspx?id=3290
OPERATIONAL ANALYTICS FOR INTEGRATED LEANSIGMA PROCESS IMPROVEMENT PROJECTS
Presenters: Jared Frederici, The Poirier Group and Scott Sink, The Ohio State University
https://www.iise.org/details.aspx?id=45487
GEMBA: MANAGING FOR DAILY IMPROVEMENT
Presenter: Sheena Butts, MEM, CLSSBB, director organizational effectiveness, Lakeland Regional Health
https://www.iise.org/details.aspx?id=42176
Improvement Strategy - Hayes, Pisano, Upton and Wheelright
Hayes, Pisano, Upton and Wheelright discussed improvement strategy in two chapters in their book on Operations Strategy. According to them, improvement strategy must include five basic aspects.
1. A direction in which the organization should focus its efforts.
2. Establishing and cultivating expectations and goals.
3. Organizing for implementation.
4. Providing appropriate resources.
5. Developing contingency plans.
Fit of operations refers to the need for an operations structure being coherent or compatible with infrastructure of the organization and the business strategy. The structure consists of facilities, capacity, sources of supply, and process/information technologies. Focus refers to the establishment of priorities to concentrate the resources of an operations facility on a restricted set of activities even in serving a single product market. These decisions are not sufficient for the success of the firm. The firm has to adapt to the changing conditions as time progresses and improve its performance relative to the competition (The authors give the analogy of teams which are ahead in a roving competition, with all teams having similar boats).
Organizational Improvement - Macro-Level and Micro-Level
The concept of learning effect is an interest macro-level improvement topic. According to this concept, labor hours required to produce decrease per unit, as cumulative production increases. The concept was later extended to total cost of production and is termed experience effort. Similar effects can be seen in other similar measures of an organization like quality, flexibility etc.
The macro level improvement is possible only because micro-level improvement is taking place at individual level, group level and across many groups. The important issues in the micro-level improvement topic are:
1. How do group level and multi-group level improvements takes place?
2. Importance of analyses by experts versus the suggestions of operators regarding improvement (Learning before doing vs learning by doing).
3. Is learning predominantly discontinuous (process redesigns) or continuous (continuous micro or incremental changes)?
4. Does improvement come from internal operations or improvements carried out out-side the organization and transferred to inside?
Some Aspects of Improvement in Organizations
Improvement in organizations, occurs at three levels. One at the individual employee level, second at the group level and third across the groups. An organization has multiple groups or departments.
Different types of improvement occur at different time horizons. Improvement arising from individual learning, continuous improvement in learning initiated by industrial engineers or shop floor persons, introduction of new materials in existing products, introduction of new equipment in existing processes etc. can happen within a few months. Recruitment of more effective people, training them and achieving benefit from their initiatives requires one to three years. Similarly improvements in process based on process R & D, and introduction of improved products in the existing product portfolio takes one to three year time horizon. Building bigger plants to exploit scale economies, introducing totally new products and new processes require many more years.
Improvement - Tasks Requiring Explicit Knowledge and Tacit Knowledge
Tasks are executed based on some amount of explicit knowledge and some amount of tacit knowledge. Explicit knowledge can be given through an instruction sheet. Tacit knowledge improves through practice and interaction with experienced persons based on practice. Improvement in the explicit knowledge can be obtained by employing the services of experts. But improvement in the tacit knowledge happens through practice and interaction between persons working in groups on similar tasks and supervisor who is observing closely the work and providing inputs as required. This explains the success of companies that specially encourage their operators and supervisors to suggest improvements as well as to do actual improvements and demonstrate to others.
Improvement Based on Developments in Other Companies and Firms
World-level competition or global competition is forcing companies to learn from others and improve their operations. The knowledge obtained from other companies is mostly explicit knowledge that the companies are willing to share through various channels. The first of these sources is customers. Companies are increasing contacting their customers to know from them the features they want improvement in their products. Companies are asking their product designers and production people to interact with their customer and know their difficulties in using products and the improvements they desire.
The next sources of improvement ideas are supplier base. They can inform the development likely to take place in the products they are supplying and possible final product design changes based on likely developments at their end. Supplier involvement in design is now a very popular design initiative.
Companies started sending production operators also to machinery exhibition along with engineers as operators have observations more relevant to the actual shop floor operation.
Co-operative benchmarking arrangements are being made by companies in industry associations to share certain performance measures so that the best possible performance can be identified and other companies can think of ways to attain that performance.
The authors write that companies can learn from the performance of National Malcolm Baldrige Award as they disclose number of their performance measures.
Companies engage experts and consultants and buy technology. Even though lot of explicit knowledge is available in various including number of books with descriptions successful system, companies find it difficult to implement them in their companies effectively. Authors cite Toyota Production System as an example. There are hundreds of books describing various practices of the system but many companies are unable to enjoy the benefits claimed in the books. This may be because the explicit knowledge needs to be accompanied by significant amount of tacit knowledge. So companies have to make lot of effort to develop the tacit knowledge inhouse through number of months and years of implementation accompanied by creative minor improvement projects to solve the problems encounters and the optimizaiton opportunities unravelled.
Breakthrough Improvement vs Incremental Improvement - Process Design vs Industrial Engineering/Improvement Engineering
The sustainability of a company's competitive effectiveness (ability to be a player in the market with adequate market share, revenue and profit) depends on improvement in cost (lower cost), quality (better quality), features (more features) etc. The improvement in various product characteristics and accompanying service characteristics can be obtained through breakthrough improvements incorporate through process designs. The design changes occur normally based on technology breakthroughs. Industrial engineering is incremental engineering and improvement. Industrial engineering are present in the shop and are observing operations on a continuous basis to improve operations by identifying and eliminating waste or by responding to element level engineering developments like appearance of a new tool, or a new lubricant. There are alert to very minor developments and have to ability to do the engineering changes required in the system to take the benefit of these minor changes to product designs and processes. The suggestions by operators can also be used by industrial engineering and production engineers to improve products and processes on an incremental basis.
In the recent days, BPR became popular as a breakthrough improvement technique giving major process redesigns and TQM as an incremental improvement technique. Industrial engineering is oldest the formal improvement engineering discipline (
Industrial engineering history).
2 X 2 Matrix of Improvement Strategies.
Authors Hayes et al. developed a 2 X 2 matrix with nature of knowledge base as rows (y axis) and type of improvement as columns. This gives four quadrants.
First Quadrant (I) - Tacit knowledge - Incremental learning
Improvement activities in which operators are encouraged to give suggestions for improvement and do those improvements. This strategy is very successful in some organizations. The success of this strategy depends on the supporting activities and policies.
The steps in the incremental improvement include;
1. Problem identification by some operators.
2. Problem prioritization by some related group
3. Problem analysis
4. Controlled experimentation
Second Quadrant (II) - Explicit knowledge - Incremental improvement
The improvement done in one group through tacit knowledge development efforts are to be transferred to other groups. The alternative ways of doing this are transferring some employees to group to be improved, deputing employees from the group to be improved to the group that made the improvement and assigning the responsibility to a staff group to development explicit knowledge from the implementation to educate other groups.
Third Quadrant (III) - Explicit knowledge - Breakthrough improvement (Strategic leap)
These improvement require involvement of top management and a specialist group to acquire the knowledge and implement. The employees at the lower level have to learn and acquire skills imparted by the external suppliers of technology and equipment.
Fourth Quadrant (IV) - Tacit Knowledge - Breakthrough improvement
Authors Hayes et al gave the opinion that break through improvements through tacit knowledge are difficult to achieve. Such breakthrough improvement has come in Toyota Motors. But this requires sustained effort to increase the level of expertise in many lower level executives and operators. It will not create heroes who can be specially identified. The authors gave the opinion in western world, where heroes are worshipped, the approach may not take root.
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