Konnyaku Stone

Konnyaku Stone is considered as one of the tiny tools but very important in the production system of Toyota. It is commonly used to smoothen the body panels before you decided to get is painted that results to total eradication of the imperfections. Konnyaku Stone is sometimes called as “Devil Tongue” wherein its size can fist. It is not really actual stone rather it is a mix of gritty resins.

Once you apply the Konnyaku stone and brushed it across the surface of metal, you will notice that each tiny imperfections and dust marks will surely be knock off and make it feel smoother. The use of this is very important since it can help you make your Toyota vehicle become incredibly new. Because of this, most of the Konnyaku Stone becomes a part of most of the production line of vehicles including the paint shop.

Although it is not new concept to this kind of industry, it has been proven that it is effective method in the production of vehicle for more than century. That is why it is highly popular to the Toyota Production System in which it serves as the Lean Manufacturing. For many professionals, Konnyaku Stone is a kind of technique that can be employed by all the workers at all kinds of levels in order for their operations to become efficient and effective.

It has been used for many years wherein you will have the assurance that it suits for manufacturing industry that is proven successful for some quite years. Through the use of Konnyaku Stone, your vehicle will create true value that will make your customer to become highly satisfied and not a waste of investment.

Because of the best result it can provide in one vehicle of Toyota, many of the car manufacturers can ensure to you that they can provide you perfect body panels with super smooth surface. There is no doubt that this Konnyaku Stone serves as the best solutions to the manufacturer of Toyota and compromises the best results.

Konnyaku Stone will help lots of workers of Toyota to prevent mistake to their production process and avoid any error. Upon its application before the car painted, it will help to prevent some imperfections and arrange the possible mistakes to cars metal surface.

Most of the Japanese car manufacturing company use the application of Konnyaku Stone and make it as their effective method to create amazing and perfect Toyota car without having any imperfections. Since they do understand what kind of expectations their customers will provide, they ensure that all of their customers expect beyond expectations. Currently, most of the car manufacturers have now better understanding on how to make the Toyota Production System become efficient and it is by adopting the use of Konnyaku Stone.

Konnyaku Stone is the best solution for many car manufacturers when it comes to the creation of perfect vehicles. It can guarantee you that it will deliver high quality cars that you can be used for your daily transportation.

— Slimane Zouggari

Kaikaku

Kaikaku

Are you looking for a best way to improve your own business cycle time, reduce unnecessary waste and minimize the customer response time? Do you need to maximize your own business operational efficiencies in order to save amount of money and available resources? Then it is the right time to engage in lean Kaikaku for your organization. Lean was known as a methodology that helps eliminate the categories of any waste in order to maximize the business efficiency.

Kaikaku is a Japanese word, which means “radical change” in English. Kaikaku is a business concept that is concerned of making a fundamental, as well as radical change to the system of production, unlike Kaizen that has a focus only on incremental minor change. However, both Kaikaku and Kaizen can be applied to the activities other than the production. These Japanese philosophy have relation with each other, which known to have origin and part of the lean management of Toyota Production System.

In-depth Idea about Kaikaku

Kaikaku means a radical change at limited time during the production system. On the other hand, Kaizen is known as a continuous minor change in a certain area of a production system, which often comes with a primary goal to solve any problems that relate to the team. Kaizen is a philosophy based on all employees’ involvement, as well as individual activities, which is generally reaching an improvement of less than 20 percent. The cross between the Kaikaku and the Kaizen is called Kaizen Blitz or Kaizen Events that implies radical improvement to a limited area like in the product ion cell during the intense week.

Kaikaku simply means that a whole business is radically changed, which normally always in a form if a project. It is often initiated by the management for such changes and the result will impact to the business significantly. Kaikaku is regards to introduce new idea, new method, new approach, new techniques for production and new equipment to be used. Kaikaku can be initiated when the management had seen that the ongoing Kaizen work starts to stagnate and is no longer giving an adequate outcome related to efforts.

The Kaikaku Project Types

Kaikaku projects are often resulting to the improvement to the range of 30 to 50 percent and the new base level of the continued Kaizen. In addition, Kaikaku may be call as System Kaizen. The projects for Kaikaku can be manifested in four different types:

  • Radically Innovative – a capital intensive

Example: The introduction of innovative production technology

  • Radically Innovative – an operation close

Example: The introduction of innovative solutions, which is new to the industry

  • Locally Innovative – a capital intensive

Example: The installation of robot automation to a certain factory is generally not new to the industry, but can be new to a certain company. The decision is grounded strategically and can be higher in costing.

  • Locally Innovative – an operation close

Example: The introduction of a conventional method TPM or Six Stigma may be new to a certain company. The direct costing is relatively small.

Engage your organization with Kaikaku today.

— Slimane Zouggari

Heijunka Box

Heijunka is considered as a very important management concept that is created by Toyota Motors. It refers to the smoothing of the production for the purpose of eliminating stress in the system being caused by the spikes and drops in production. This also enables the company to apportion the resources evenly all throughout the year and it also put less stress on people and on machinery as well. Production takes place within small batches in order for the fluctuations to be easily controlled.

What is Heijunka Box?

There are also indeed tools that should be used in order for Heijunka to be successful. And one vital tool used in Heijunka would be the Heijunka box or also called as levelling box. It is referred as visual scheduling tool being used in Heijunka and is the name of the specific tool used in order to achieve the goals of Heijunka. It is generally a wall schedule that is divided to a grid of boxes or a set of the pigeon-holes or rectangular receptacles.

Every column of the boxes represents a specific period of time and lines are drawn down the grid or schedule or grid in order to visually break the schedule to columns of the individual shifts or the days or weeks. Colored cards represent individual jobs which are referred as the Kanban cards and are placed into the heijunka box in order to provide visual representation of those upcoming production runs.

This heijunka box makes it easy to see the types of jobs are being queued for production and when they are being scheduled. Workers on the process remove the Kanban cards as for the current period from the box as for the purpose of knowing what to do. The said cards would be passed to another section once they process the said related job.

How about the implementation?

This Heijunka box allows easy as well as visual control of the smoothed production schedule. A common heijunka box would have horizontal rows for every product. It has vertical columns for the identical time intervals of production. Production control Kanban are being placed into the pigeon-holes being provided by the box in proportion to the number of items that should be built of a given type of product during the time interval.

To make it a lot simpler, the cards are being fitted in every slot according to the work plan for the certain period. These cards would be colored based on the code. Workers arrive and make their way to the said Heijunka box wherein they draw the cards for a certain period. This enables them to do their job based on the plan therefore making sure that the work would be completed within correct manner.

The said management concept can definitely be useful in the manufacturing industry because it eliminates the stress due to drastic fluctuations into the production through the year. Companies that would use the said concept not need to pay overtime to those employees within certain times of the year.

— Slimane Zouggari

Heijunka

What is Heijunka?

Heijunka is known as a Japanese tool used in order to balance production. It is also popularly known as production levelling or production smoothing. Heijunka is the process of reducing the Mura or unevenness wherein in turn it would reduce the Muda or the waste. The said technique is important to the development of production efficiency in lean manufacturing and Toyota Production System. It has this goal of producing intermediate goods within a constant rate in order for the further processing might also be carried out into a constant as well as predictable rate.

Indeed, Heijunka is a vital technique in order to reduce waste and improve production efficiency through levelling the fluctuations in performance into the assembly line. Fluctuation would normally occur within the production or through the demands of the customers.

Toyota Production System would use the Heijunka in order to solve the demand through assembling a mix of models in every batch and would ensure that there would be an inventory of product proportional to the variability that is in demand. In addition, the disruption of the production flow would be minimised through ensuring that the components are being sequenced in order to be available into the right quantity and at the right time. At the same time, changeover periods for important processes like die changes into the steel presses are indeed short or most of the time as little as three minutes.

Five Elements of Heijunka

There are five elements of Heijunka and they are the following:

  • The interval wherein all products would be produced
  • Fixed sequence of the products
  • A pre-determined inventory policy
  • Variable number of items for every product
  • The direction for improvement

Benefits of Heijunka

The biggest benefit that could be observed out of implementing Heijunka would be the stability of the manpower and also the reduction of the unneeded overtime. Based on the current situation, reduction in the inventory level would be due to the control that you will be able to maintain with the use of kanbans.

The consumption of raw materials must also be improved since you would only build which is needed and when it is needed. Building up too much of a certain product as well as consuming components which are needed for another is considered as a thing of the past.

And another major benefit that you might observe with Heijunka would be a reduction of stress levels within the production area. This production schedule must no longer be a guessing game since they would know each day whether how much product is being expected of them and would be able to accordingly plan. And this could go a long way towards improving the morale.

Indeed, there are numbers of advantages or benefits that could be gained by companies that would consider the application of Heijunka. It would be able to service orders without having any problem and also within the committed time frame at the same time offering goods of high quality. And as a result, companies that are both small and large could follow the said management technique.

— Slimane Zouggari

Nemawashi

If there is one thing that human beings do all the time is fail to make the right decisions. This happens in our personal lives, it happens in professional environments and it happens in politics. We learn by making mistakes and we learn by trial and error. The truth is that this is a process that seemed to be essential for our growth, but there is a way around this and the Japanese have called it Nemawashi.

The words Nemawashi basically means that you should consider as many alternative solutions to anything you are planning to do before you make a decision. You need to have a set-based approach if you want to get the best results. You start by finding out the customers needs. Then you do some competitive benchmarking and we learn as much as we can about the competition that is out there.

The Toyota production system has been using this method with amazing results. Nothing that they do comes from assumptions. All of their decisions are made after those steps have been taken and a solid and effective decision can be made.  They verify everything and they make it their priority to get things right from the very first try. This eliminates trial and error, but it does require patience and a great deal of knowledge on how to properly research both the customers needs and the competitors.

You can think of this as the ultimate method to enhance your business and create the perfect product launch or the ultimate service. If Nemawashi is implemented in your business, you will see the incredible benefits that come with it because you will be eliminating the uncertainty of assumptions and creating a very efficiency and accurate work environment.

— Slimane Zouggari

Hansei

Lean is all about culture. It’s an important part and in sometimes the backbone of Lean management. A culture which believes in constant enhancement practices what they speak day in and day out, is the answer to keeping and sustaining lean. However, what is less discussed is what goes into a philosophy which allows it to get the strength required to keep a management lean process, introducing Hansei.
What Exactly Hansei is?
The Japanese word Hansei means reflection, however in lean community and most significantly Toyota has much wider and bigger meaning. Hansei is not only about reflection. It’s really being true to yourself regarding your weaknesses. When you’re talking about just your strengths, you’re bragging. When you’re recognizing your faintness with sincerity, it a good amount of strength.
The art of Hansei is considered one of the main keys to the success of the Toyota Company all through the years and what a lot of people are still attempting to wrap their heads around. Most of the time, people overlook their weaknesses and try to cover up with their assets, as if they will conquer their flaws in due course. However, in reality, this is all about as counterintuitive as you can be if marketing a constant enhancement viewpoint.
You must accept the reality that you have weakness and flaws. Or else your capability to constantly enhance and have a useful effect on the philosophy which surrounds you, is at a considerable advantage.
Key Factors to Hansei
• Aid people know a problem
• Allows you to accept accountability of an issue with an utmost stage of emotion
• Pushes you in a plan of action to enhance
What are the Benefits of Hansei ?
• Aids you know trends well
• It could help people take in a task or provide credit to somebody else on addressing any issues
• Group of people could come as one and could reflect as one as a group. This is advantageous after an occasion or team activity to have what went good as well as what can change to make it well.
• There is a big advantage on sharing an idea of self-reflection to team, peers as well as leadership.
• Hansei could be one of the most valuable and powerful concepts in an organization, when it is accepted. Vital self-analysis is a hard pill to take in the American philosophy. Toyota Technical Center President, Mike Masaki discovered this out first hand.
• Upon an appointment to American facility, he pointed out a number of bad parts to American designers. This censure was met with a painful reaction by most that was not usual to Masaki, who is spent lots of times critiquing diverse factors of Toyota company at the time.
Without this, it is very impossible for you to have kaizen; Hansei is if you do wrong or bad, at first you should feel sad. Then, you should make a future project or plan to address that issue and you should openly believe you’ll never make this kind of error again.

— Slimane Zouggari

Genchi Genbutsu

Genchi-Genbutsu or go, see and confirm is one of the main principles of the Toyota Production System as well as Lean Manufacturing. It suggests that in order to understand clearly and plainly a case or state of affairs you have to go to genba or what you call “the real place”, wherein work or job is done. Therefore, Genchi Genbutsu is an important approach in solving any problem. When the problem happens on the shop floor then it requires be understood and addressing at the shop floor. Go, see and confirm is also known as Genba attitude. It is the Japanese word for “the place” in this event the place where it really occurs. Since true value is made at the store floor in industrial, this is where supervisors have to spend their time.
How does Genchi Genbutsu use to presentations?
• Significant, it means you must know your subject matter from the audience outlook or point of view. How do these audiences view it? What do they have to know about it?
• When you do not know, try to speak to an illustrative sample of the audience and know the issue as they view it. Prior to changing their mind concerning a topic or enhance their comprehending of it, it aids to understand where they are starting from.
• When you are talking to a new audience, maybe a diverse division or department of your business or a new customer, it could aid to physically go to their place before you talk or at least arrive there early, therefore you could walk around, see the culture as well as listen to the jargon.
• Also get comfortable with physical setting. Sit in the audience seat, and know what the front of the space, your slides or the stage seems like.
• When you are a paid expert speaker, genchi genbutsu means that you do not only show up, talk and then leave, you really spend time at the forum or company meeting people and knowing their needs and demands. And you do more to modify your speech to your listener or audience than only occasionally putting in the name of the customer.
• Genba attitude mirrors the idea that no matter what reports, ideas and measures are conveyed to management are just a concept of what is really happening in the genba to make value. Reports and metrics will mirror the outlooks of the organization questioner as well as the office responder and how the responder sees the questioner. Aside from that, it also improves the odd that actual problems and unintended occasions will be perceived first had and could be handled right away; this takes account of problems which are not evident to the workforce of genba.
Using Genchi Genbutsu to the presentation will ultimately lead to a presentation which is more customized according to the needs of your audiences as well as resonated with them. And you’ll encounter a sincere as well as well-informed professional instead of a self-important and arrogant talking head.

— Slimane Zouggari

Hoshin Kanri

Hoshin Kanri is also known as Policy Deployment wherein it is a method for ensuring that the strategic goals of a company drive action and progress at every level within that company. Converting plans into actual actions is actually a very common problem across many industries in countries all over the world. Many companies put in a lot of effort to come up with strategic plans but are unable to implement them. As a matter of fact, these companies find it almost impossible to work on strategic objectives because the employees are so busy with the routine aspects of their work. The other problem is that many employees simply do not have sufficient information about strategic plans. The only way that you can help your organization achieve its important goals is by using Hoshin Kanri.
What is Hoshin Kanri?
Hoshin Kanri is a Japanese concept that has been adopted by large organizations and small companies all over the world. The term Hoshin indicates a compass to provide direction whereas Kanri refers to management or control. In other words, this concept is immensely useful to help point organizations in the right direction to move. Adopting this concept is therefore the best way to help your company achieve its goals. It has been derived from the American concept of Management by Objectives and is actually an improvement on it. If you start implementing Hoshin Kanri in your organization, you will need to have a proper system of rules and forms in place so that everything goes according to plan. Not only will action be formally charted out but there will also be regular performance checks conducted.
What makes Hoshin Kanri so powerful?
It encourages all employees to study various work situations and create appropriate plans for improvement. People from different levels of the company are encouraged to work together to bring out positive change. Your organization will benefit greatly from adopting the principles of Hoshin Kanri. All the effort that you and your employees have out into coming up with strategic plans will finally benefit your company since there will be companywide communication about what the plans exactly are. Once people know what is expected of them, they will then be able to work towards it.
In addition to this, the system of regular checks that you put into place will ensure that the plans are implemented correctly. In case you are having difficulty implementing this highly useful management concept in your company then you should get expert help. Your company’s productivity will then increase considerably since it will be able to achieve its many goals.
Hoshin Kanri is absolutely essential to ensure that strategic plans do not go to waste. Ensure that all employees know about the plans and also undergo the necessary checks so that they stick to the plans. Hoshin Kanri is considered as one of the many immensely useful management techniques that Japanese manufacturers have given to the corporate world. Use Hoshin Kanri method and rest assured that you will see a dramatic improvement in business within the first year itself.

— Slimane Zouggari

Kamishibai

Kamishibai Board
Kamishibai is a type of storytelling utilizing visual cards or boards. This come from Japanese Buddhist temples in the twelfth century wherein monks utilized picture scrolls to convey stories with moral lesson to a largely illiterate audience.
At this point in time, it is being utilized as a management technique for doing audits in a manufacturing process. As part of the TPS or Toyota Production System, Kamishibai boards are utilized as visual control for doing audient in a manufacturing process. A sequence of cards are put on a board and chosen at random or in accordance to schedule by managers and supervisors of the area. This make sure cleanliness and safety of the workstation is maintained and which quality checks are being done.
Why Use Kamishibai Board?
Some important reasons to use these cards are to start standardize work, to put in accountability into the system as well as to establish needed positive discussion between members of the management as well as the operators that really do the job. All this largely aids to keep lean application.
Self-discipline by the organization to utilize it accordingly could make it happen. Part of the routine of the organization in a lean management is to audit current standards in order that any deviation could be solved and lean action is taken. Kamishibai is an approach to make devotion to this procedure visual on the Gemba.
Benefits of Kamishibai Board
• Kamishibai could facilitate Gemba walks. Rather than needing general small discussion between a supervisor and a worker, the card could facilitate a particular procedures oriented discussion regarding improvement.
• This can aid keeping a clean, well-organized as well as safe workplace. Through asking queries such as do all things have an ordinary place on this office and is the office cleaned conformed average. This turns out to be not only a one-time cleaning meeting, but a constant process.
• This system could also check the performance of the behavior, whether or not workers work according to the clear Average Work in the manner that it shows how to do a specific task. If an individual doesn’t work according to the standard work there are 2 chances either isn’t informed regarding the manner of working and so requires training , or the standard defines is not clear or wrong and requires modification.
• Last but not the least, this system can check the side of the average or standard work. Even if a development is recognized into average work, it’s not uncommon for workers to slip ban unconsciously into their old method of working. Therefore, Kamishibai board not just aids keeping 6S, on the other hand it also aids in keeping improvements.
Kamishibai board is easy to use. Aside from that, it also delivers lots of remarkable and amazing results. It could be utilized to great effect in order to make create habit as well as drive behavior. What makes this technique apart from the rest is the fact that it is low cost and so fast to apply and implement.

— Slimane Zouggari

Taktzeit

Takt time is an essential indicator that is used in lean manufacturing and can be defined as the amount of time that is allowed to develop one product to be able to meet the demand of customers. This is also known as beat of production that is used by a number of organizations as a reference point on which they target the processing times against. Taktzeit upon calculation is stated in seconds.
How to Calculate Takt Time?
In order to calculate Takt time, one will have to determine certain factors and variables which include the following:
• The daily demand value or the daily order
• The number of time units in minutes or seconds in a working day
To be able to calculate Takt time from the above mentioned variables, you will have to take the total production time per day and divide this by the daily customer demand. For example, taking eight hours of processing time per day gives 480 minutes and which further gives 28800 seconds. Now, if the demand per day is 350 widgets, then Takt time can be found by dividing the total seconds with the demand value. In this case, you will divide 28800 by 350 and will be getting 82 seconds. Since most businesses do not have a 100% running efficiency, an efficiency percentage will be applied to the working time. This will give a shorter time which means that the running pace of the production line has to be slightly faster. Beat of production is essential when it comes to making process improvements and calculating total time required for process steps.
Understanding Takt time is to understand that on any given day, the volume at which your units are produced must match that as closely as possible to the daily demand for those units by your customers. In organizations that build large products like modular building or electrical power equipment, the demand for finished products might take place over the course of weeks or months. In high-speed manufacturing environments, like bottling plants or paper mills, there can be thousands or millions of units produced per day. To meet Takt time correctly, vendors located all over the world must be able to supply components and parts at the same rate they are consumed by the primary manufacturer’s customers. The closer the vendor’s are physically located to the primary manufacturer, the easier it generally is to control this rate, however, in today’s global environment, many companies have to import components from all over the world.
Not only is it required to meet customer demand at the right time, but the suppliers and the sub suppliers must meet that same demand as well. For instance, in a production line of small modular steel boxes, the customer demand is 15 units per day. Two shifts of production total 14 hours per day. When calculating total production time, remember to subtract for breaks, lunch, meeting, 5S cleaning and many more. In order for the manufacturer to meet customer demand, each of its suppliers and sub suppliers must also meet that same demands by producing a unit at least every 56 minutes. This is how Takt time is calculated.

— Slimane Zouggari