"World Class Manufacturing"

I'm posting this in response to Tumbleweed's post "Just in time Manufacturing".

The place I work spends tons of money chasing all these buz words. Now their into "Focus Factory" and before that
"World Class Manufacturing".

First, "Just in time Manufacturing" or "JIT" was something the accountants had a hand in. After all, Quality control had all their programs over the years. Accounting saw all this money wrapped up in inventory and JIT was to address that. It is not a bad idea as long as a company is willing to work overtime for a period of time then allow workers to do nothing for another period of time latter on. I never asked the accountants if paying the overtime then paying people to do almost nothing covered the cost of inventory reduction or not.

Next, "World Class Manufacturing". This was a program to clean and organize the manufacturing environment. They wanted people to organize, clean and take pride in their work areas. Everything is to have a specific place for storage, everything marked or labeled and anything that has not been used in the last 2 years was to be discarded. Even trash cans were labeled and marks on the floor for location. The problem was with a lean workforce, nobody had time to impliment the plan. It was incredible the stuff that was in the dumpster and it was there for the taking as long as employees took it home and didn't bring it back. Everyday was like Christmas for me. I have a lifetime supply of air cylinders, valves, electrical parts, endmills, motors, boxes and most of which are new. I almost cried over the stuff I couldn't take, file cabinets, storage cabinets, larger (expensive) items. Well,
"World Class Manufacturing" was certainly good for me. However, I'm still not sure it was good for the company.

I'm looking forward to their next program.

Jim



[This message has been edited by JimGlass (edited 03-08-2003).]

I sat in on a briefing by a local company that was just finnishing its "lean manufactureing" system. They commented about the stuff that they tried to throw away. They discovered that if they did not distroy what they threw away that it would show up in some other part of the plant or it would magically appear back where they removed it from. As a result they had someone with a torch cut up everything that they wanted to get rid of. I wonder how many employees were crying over stuff they wanted to take home but could'nt.

Charles