Agile Manufacturing - The conclusion!

This blog post marks the conclusion of the Blog post series - "Agile in manufacturing - practical? applicable? possible??"

Having explored how, breakdown of work into small, independent, measurable and testable units goes a long way to make the teams hyper-productive, even in the manufacturing paradigm, in part 2, as well as having seen the amazing impact of information radiators in part 3, let's discuss how some other software best practices were extremely useful when applied to the manufacturing world.

Inspect & Adapt, Iterate & Increment

For one of the products, the client had a peculiar requirement of a component that needed a complete new tool. The traditional wisdom suggested that we get a mould designer on-board, get a "big upfront design" and submit it to a mould developer - only to discover 6 months later (even 6 months is an aggressive estimate) that a few things were missed out from design - Having seen enough software projects failing due to such big upfront and non-flexible designs, it just didn't feel right!

So, I worked with the designer and focussed on "just enough design" - of coarse, no mould developer would be ready to work on a just enough design and hence we figured out a way - inexpensive and very rapid 3D - prototyping to get real, working modules which we actually sent over to the customer for his review who, in turn, sent it to his customer for feedback.?After just a few iterations of improved, working modules, we actually had the one that was "exactly" what the customer needed. (The customer later confessed that even he didn't know what 'exactly' he needed, upfront and he just loved our flexibility and speed).

To our surprise, the customer was intrigued, excited and participative with this way of to-and-fro of real working increments. He shared that his customer found a lot of value in this since he did not have to commit to the final design upfront.

Test, test, test

Plastics moulding involves a lot of pre-processing - hours of pre-heating, drying, cooling et al. The shutdown and startup are costly and hence these units invariably have 3 shifts running so that the machines are working 24 x 7.

With such continuous work flow, testing becomes extremely important. Despite "final testing" before dispatch, there were misses and leakages. That's when I introduced testing-while-producing (an adapted version of our TDD or test-first approach from software). Now the products are tested while the production is going on (100% testing), as well as in post-production (25% items re-tested) and finally pre-delivery (random batch testing). This has brought down the number of customer complaints significantly. A side benefit achieved was "failing early" - whenever the product varied from the threshold limits, it was caught at the production stage itself, thereby reducing wastage and rejection hugely.

Automation

When entrusted with the task of increasing the throughput of the team (we don't use the terms like 'hyper-productivity' in a manufacturing paradigm :-) ), I drew upon my Kanban-days and analyzed the 'weakest links'. It turned that all the "weak links" involved a lot of human effort and most of that could be automated. We discussed, designed and agreed to invest in automation. Needless to say, not just the throughput increased multi-fold, now we even had more hands freed up to take up more tasks!

Conclusion

Having spent a good amount of time in two pretty different worlds - software and manufacturing, I realized that:

1. Most of the challenges are people-challenges, if the team knows to work together, they will pull off anything - Trust and empower them. In software, we express this using terms like 'People over processes' and 'Collaboration over contract-negotiation'
2. What worked in one, will likely work in the other as well - might need to be inspected and adapted to suit that world - don't fear experimentation, don't fear failure, if you fail, adapt and try again.
3. Software best practices like stubbing/mocking, testing, automation, fail-early et al are applicable, even more so, to manufacturing owing to the much higher costs of "wasted/failed" products.

I am waiting, rather excitedly, to listen to what do you think about this - so all my friends out there - the experts, the specialists, the subject-matter-experts, I am looking forward to know your views on this...

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