Lean Manufacturing Articles - How Lean has Made Milspec More Productive

Lean manufacturing articles; LEAN principles are giving Milspec Manufacturing a boost in its capabilities.

So what is this LEAN manufacturing?

Here is an explanation from Gary Kerr, Milspec's LEAN facilitator and editor of the "Association for Manufacturing Excellence" newsletter, a source of many Lean Manufacturing Articles for the Australian region.

Gary says: "I like to draw mental models for myself to help understand concepts.
"The natural order of things is chaotic. If you leave a horizontal work surface alone for long enough it will start accumulating "Stuff".

"All shelves will become full of more "Stuff".
Flow will start to break down in to small elements joined together with inventory.
"This is the natural order of things.

"My mental model of this phenomenon is a large steel wok (Chinese cooking pan) with a marble rolling around inside.
"Excellence is represented by the marble staying to the top-most outer limit of the wok.
"The natural order of things (chaos) is represented by the marble rolling to the centre of the wok.

"It takes continuous and on-going vigilance and effort to keep the marble at the outer edge, take away the effort and the marble rolls to the centre.

"LEAN is counter-intuitive, unnatural and feels wrong (at first) and must be practiced until it becomes more natural.
"Keep up the effort and don't stop applying energy to keep the marble at the outer of the wok.

"And finally I did come up with a single sentence to describe all this.
"Unnatural acts performed by consenting adults in pursuit of business excellence"

To contact Gary Kerr and register for your free copy of the AME Weekly Update:

Gary Kerr, AME Weekly Updates, lean manufacturing articles


Like most manufacturing organizations Milspec Manufacturing has been using batch process methods for most of its 35-year history.
However, with a change of ownership about 18-months ago, the new owners, David and Wendy Cooper, were keen to look at improved efficiencies.

Mr Cooper said where conventional thinking would dictate that manufacturing efficiencies were achieved by doing one task at a time on a large batch of an individual product, LEAN manufacturing called for as much of the product to be completed as possible before moving on to the next piece.

One of Milspec's assembly floors
before the introduction of LEAN.

"With batch processing you don't start on the next part of the process until the first part of the process has been completed on all parts of the batch, " Mr Cooper said.

"With LEAN manufacturing techniques, products move through the process individually so the first products to be completed are finished and in customers' hands while many other products are in production.

"Traditional manufacturing has been built on batch processing, thinking that is where the efficiencies are, but that is not the case at all.

"At the end of the day it makes sense; Henry Ford manufactured using LEAN principles, however since then the manufacturing industry has lost track.

The same Milspec assembly floor
after the introduction of LEAN.

"It comes back to manufacturing logic, when someone picks up an item the idea is to do as much to it as they can at the time, which saves double or triple handling.

"It's about showing people a smarter way of doing things.

"We have been building some of our models of target systems for the past 20-years so we had a really good idea of how long each item took to make and thought we wouldn't be able to do it quicker.

However, in the first test of LEAN manufacturing principles that we run, we saved 45 per cent off the standard time to manufacture a target system.

"And then in the second pass we took a further 40 per cent off the time.

"We have now started to apply LEAN manufacturing principles across the board, we have had six casual workers leave in the time that we have been using LEAN principles and we have not had to replace them due to the extra manufacturing capability we now have."
One of our workstations before and after LEAN and still improving.
Expect more pictures and reports in our future lean manufacturing articles.

LEAN manufacturing articles, the Milspec experience.

Mr Cooper said that to date the system was paying dividends.

"Traditional batch processing can affect a business' cash flow as you have a lot of products tied up in the manufacturing process at any one time," he said.

"Under LEAN principles the time from receipt of an order to delivery is much shorter,you can keep your money in the bank and the enterprise is more efficient."

"For instance, with one of our products which took four people six weeks to make 45 units, we have been able to lift production to 65 units produced in a bit more than two weeks with just two people."
"And the comments from our staff has been that the whole process was a lot easier."
"The beauty of it is that if we find there's a problem with something during testing we need to fix only one or two items rather than the whole batch."

"It also helps engage people and allows them to take responsibility for decisions."

"It's human nature to say it's in your interest to do the job right but a lot of managers are not able to relinquish control."

"I don't think the people in our teams need me to tell them how to do their job, every one of them knows how to improve things."
Mr Cooper said.



LEAN changes becoming evident, by mid 2008 every bin and
machine is signaged, tools are on shadow-boards, lines
on floor denote working and storage areas. It is now easy
to find dies and jigs. All the essential tools are within
practical and easy reach.


The KG assembly area shows LEAN improvements with tool
shadow-boards, correctly signaged bins and allocated
safe areas for the assembly of the stainless-steel utility
and related signal cabinets

At Milspec we have successfully implemented the 5S-Foundation Tool of Lean You can read about it here 5S - lean manufacturing articles.

Come back to this site soon again as we intend to produce more lean manufacturing articles.



Lean manufacturing articles, the Milspec story.
Where is Milspec located you ask?

Milspec Manufacturing Pty Ltd.
161 -169 Fallon Street,
Albury, NSW 2640 Australia

(Albury is a major inland City between Sydney and Melbourne)