Reorganize for Flow Workbook

For people wanting to know more about reorganizing for flow, I have posted a Google Doc online that you can access, post comments to improve, ask questions, etc.

The document has a short version of less than 20 pages broken down following the four principles of flow. The longer version is about 90 pages of notes taken from presentations and training materials developed with a client. Using the longer format, they have increased their productivity 380% in less than three years.

A guide is not there to give your solutions, they are there to help you bring out your potential. If you want to accelerate your learning curve, start with a day or two with a guide to help outline your next steps. While long term guidance is desirable, a day or two will give you a jump-start on your journey.

When you are more interested in RESULTS than ' Looking Lean', you will choose to start by reorganizing your organization for flow

Reorganizing for Flow

Reorganizing for Flow will mean a constant series of experiments. Each series of experiments and improvements builds your skills. With your improved skills, you will see more opportunities... which leads to continuous improvement. Your goal is building an efficient and effective production system to deliver your product or service to your customers.

People have been reorganizing production operations for flow for more than 100 years. When they succeed, they often become the disruptor in their industry. They succeeded because they multiplied their productivity and reduced their lead times to a fraction of their peers.

Eventually a few observant people began to realize that there was a pattern in each of these disruption stories and the Principles of Flow began to emerge. Knowing the rules doesn’t help much if you don't know where to begin or how to effectively apply them. In addition to the Principles of Flow, there were four improvement patterns identified as they Rationalized factories. These patterns are the types of barriers resolved which have a significant impact of the productivity of your production systems. Over time, even though technology has shifted from just reducing the burden based on human labor to mechanical, electrical and electronic innovations, the patterns remain the same.

Awareness of Goal - what it should look and feel like when achieved

Toyota's Taiichi Ohno used a river analogy to help people visualize what they wanted to achieve. A river starts from many small streams that merge to finally become a river. The same can be said for most production flows... materials, parts, information, sub-assemblies are combined to yield your final product. The ideal is a pleasant, smooth flowing river... no barriers, disruptions, obstacles, delays, etc.

Taiichi Ohno early exposure to a competitor's shop that had been organized for flow started his journey. He observed that they were transferring materials in small batches and concentrating on solving the source of a problem instead of teaching the repair skill. To learn more, he started to study Ford's methods. All that was available were a few books that described some of the way the shop was organized, but none clearly explained the principles. This required that he experiment and learn by trial and error. It took him about twenty years to learn enough to improve productivity as much as Walter Flanders did in 18 months in Ford's Shops!

Knowing that there are flow principles can give you a head start over the position that Taiichi Ohno started from. The flow principles look simple, yet manufacturing has many natural hurdles to be overcome during implementation.

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