Mura & Load Leveling

In my last post, Muri: Overburdening People and Equipment, I examined Muri, or overburden. In this post, I'd like to address Mura, or "unevenness."

The bar chart above is a perfect example of Mura (imbalance). The green line is Takt Time (TT), while the blue bars are each individual process step's Cycle Time (CT). It's easy to see the disparity.

For those not familiar with the concept of Takt Time, it is the pace at which you need to perform  every process step in order to meet customer demand. Corollary:  Anytime CT is greater than TT, you cannot meet customer demand without overtime.

In the first third of the value stream (above), the processes all take far less than Takt Time. Then we get to the fourth process and things go haywire.

Read the rest here.