All 2 entries tagged Piuss

Reflective from Lean

PIUSS PMA, I finally chose the 5th question to start, because I think it would be easy to do the research, at least, I wont lack in words to write... and at the end, I have too much information.

Lean and Six Sigma, both are admired by many organisations who want to be sustainable in the future.

We all know lean is basically about elimination of waste, supply matching demand, so inventory cost can be reduced, similar to the concept of Just-In-Time, lean explores more on closing the gap between organisational performance and the requirements from customers and shareholders.

Toyota, the first company to embrace Lean into their production system, now is the global leader in the field. the company is very generous about their experience of success and every year, lots of managers from different firms all over the world are welcomed to visit the Toyota plants. However, not many of them can learn the concept and put it into their own organisation.

Lean is a big contributor to Toyota's success today's, however, it can not be easily copied by other firms. even after leaning all the tools and concepts of lean, it is still hard to implement it. first of all, implementing Lean not only needs taking into account of the company's structure and feature, but also needs to look at the human aspects. People are always the most valuable assets of an organisation. Same for Lean, if a company wants to implement Lean into its production system, it needs to first talk to its workforce. Only if the workforce has the knowledge of where waste can be elimated.

Lean also needs continuous commitment. People easily shift their focus on their day-to-day activities. however, no improvement can be sustained unless effort is put into maintaining it (Drew, McCallum & Roggenhofer, 2004).

: 15 Mar 2009 16:22 |  Tags: Piuss |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Taguchi

I think some of us find Taguchi is a difficult part for our PIUSS study, because of the statistical elements involved. To be honest, I don’t think it really involves that much statistics, even if it does, probably just some easy math calculations. And we all know in the real world, we don’t need to do those complicated Orthogonal Arrays calculations, nowadays, we have our computer which can help us to do the calculations.

Taguchi theory is mainly used as a way to improve process, not by simply tampering the process, but looking at all the elements involved in a process, and by altering one or two at a time to see if there is any difference in the end result, so we can see clearly what the most influential factors are. If we don’t look at the calculations involved, I think the concept is quite simple. By looking at the Interactions and Noise Factor, the process can be optimised.

Running the Taguchi theory in practice might be costly and time consuming, but the benefit of an improved process are endless.

: 05 Feb 2009 21:49 |  Tags: Piuss |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem