Chapter 4Lean and Machine Shops and Job Shops
It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.
W. Edwards Deming 1
What We Find
Machine shops vary as much as the work they handle. Some machine shops have fairly steady demand products, but most are job shop-type environments where lot sizes can run from one piece to hundreds. Most feel Lean doesn't or can't apply to them, and with rare exception they would be wrong. We have yet to find a machine shop where no Lean principles could be applied. In a worst-case scenario, one could still apply 5S, total productive maintenance (TPM), setup reduction, visual controls, and material flow (i.e., Kanban, CONWIP, COBACABANA, heijunka)2 to most machine shop environments. ...
Get Implementing Lean now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
