I spoke with Peter L. King this past week about his new book, Value Stream Mapping for the Process Industries: Creating a Roadmap for Lean Transformation. This book is Peter's the third book on how Lean concepts apply to process operations, so I asked him: "What fuels this interest?" Here is his complete reply:
Actually, it’s much more of a passion than an interest -- a passion created during my 18 years applying Lean concepts to DuPont’s operations. I found it very frustrating that none of the available literature nor any of the courses I took could put Lean in a context that was appropriate to the kinds of processes I was working on, such as synthetic rubber extrusion, sheet goods manufacture, household and automotive paints, bulk chemicals, food and beverages, and carpet manufacture. These processes were quite different from the discrete processes, such as bolting sheet metal together to make refrigerators or automobiles, discussed in the then current books. I wanted to share my experiences with others in similar process industries to help them climb the Lean learning curve much faster than I did.
Value Stream Mapping (VSM), the subject of the latest book, is a very good example. While the format presented in Learning To See is very appropriate to both parts assembly and process operations, it must be expanded and adapted to completely describe the wastes and flow barriers found in process operations. Because the number of material types tends to expand significantly as material moves through a process operation, the VSM must clearly illustrate this diverging product flow. Traditional Lean deals with takt (customer demand) as a time factor, whereas in processes it is much more effective as a rate factor. While the assumption is often that takt is constant throughout the operation, in process manufacturing, however, it often must increase as you move back through the process to accommodate yield losses. And, the fact that key pieces of equipment are often shared across several product families presents a challenge on how to balance the need to clearly and simply illustrate flow with the need to be thorough and complete; bad choices in this area can understate utilization and hide bottlenecks. These are just a few of the issues I faced in creating effective VSMs for DuPont’s processes which are all described in the book.
A well-constructed VSM can be the blueprint that a Lean architect uses to guide a complete Lean transformation, as the examples in the book demonstrate.
Do you have experience applying value stream mapping to the process industries? What have been the challenges?
Showing posts with label process industry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label process industry. Show all posts
1.19.2010
Special Applications of SMED in Process Plants
Initial adoption of lean initiatives in the process industry was quite slow. Many of the early lean techniques used in traditional manufacturing, such one-piece flow and u-shaped work cells, had little application in a chemical plant, so most leaders in that industry concluded that lean could only benefit discrete-parts manufacturing.
On tool, however, that can have a major impact on waste reduction in the process industry is SMED (Single Minute Exchange of Dies). Peter King, author of the book Lean for the Process Industries: Dealing with Complexity has some comments about SMED:
"The benefit of SMED in simplifying product changeovers has been widely documented: SMED allows for shorter campaigns, lower inventory, and faster response to customer needs.
SMED has enabled significant improvement in process plants, operations which produce chemicals, paints, plastic films, food products and personal care items. But its benefit goes far beyond product changeovers. Many process lines never undergo a changeover, but have seen dramatic improvement through the application of SMED. A chemical plant may produce a single product 24 hours per day, 365 days per year, and thus never experience a product change. But these plants generally are taken off line periodically, say once a year, for a complete overhaul. These overhauls can take days or weeks, and involve the same wastes that changeovers do: inventory build-up in preparation for the outage, wasted time due to lack of coordination, tasks being done internally which could really be done outside of the overhaul window, and yield losses getting back to on-aim conditions after re-start. SMED has provided great benefit to these plants even though there is never a true product change!
SMED has also been used to improve process operations that can go down due to a process upset. Again, there is no product change, but getting the process restarted after the upset includes all of the wastes that SMED is so capable of reducing or eliminating."
On tool, however, that can have a major impact on waste reduction in the process industry is SMED (Single Minute Exchange of Dies). Peter King, author of the book Lean for the Process Industries: Dealing with Complexity has some comments about SMED:
"The benefit of SMED in simplifying product changeovers has been widely documented: SMED allows for shorter campaigns, lower inventory, and faster response to customer needs.
SMED has enabled significant improvement in process plants, operations which produce chemicals, paints, plastic films, food products and personal care items. But its benefit goes far beyond product changeovers. Many process lines never undergo a changeover, but have seen dramatic improvement through the application of SMED. A chemical plant may produce a single product 24 hours per day, 365 days per year, and thus never experience a product change. But these plants generally are taken off line periodically, say once a year, for a complete overhaul. These overhauls can take days or weeks, and involve the same wastes that changeovers do: inventory build-up in preparation for the outage, wasted time due to lack of coordination, tasks being done internally which could really be done outside of the overhaul window, and yield losses getting back to on-aim conditions after re-start. SMED has provided great benefit to these plants even though there is never a true product change!
SMED has also been used to improve process operations that can go down due to a process upset. Again, there is no product change, but getting the process restarted after the upset includes all of the wastes that SMED is so capable of reducing or eliminating."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)