Manufacturing intelligence vendor tapslean components to ease production bottlenecks
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 9/1/2006 6:00:00 AM
Manufacturing performance management vendor Activplant claims to have discovered a simple way to eliminate production bottlenecks by combining elements of Eliyahu Goldratt's Theory of Constraints (TOC) and the Toyota Production System.
The combination is necessary, says Dennis Cocco, chief product strategist, because most production-management approaches, including TOC, address the process of managing constraints once they are identified, but don't always reveal the best approach for actually finding the most critical constraints.
Cocco says Activplant encapsulated its methodology for finding constraints in a software application called Throughput Analyzer, which generates what Activplant calls the Throughput Capability Metric—a measurement that the vendor wants to patent.
"In manufacturing, identifying constraints traditionally is done by monitoring buffers to see which ones are backing up," Cocco says. "But the buffers aren't always placed in the correct locations to help identify constraints. The variable and seemingly random nature of shop-floor activities makes it almost impossible to understand and pinpoint chronic constraints."
Enter the Toyota Production System and the idea of one-piece flow.
"In theory, you achieve maximum throughput on an assembly line if you eliminate all buffers," Cocco says. "If you pace all the machines to Takt Time [the daily production number required for filling orders in hand divided by the number of working hours in the day], you will have maximum throughput, but that's an ideal."
Throughput Analyzer assumes that every machine is a constraint and measures it against that idea of one-piece flow. The application collects a few pieces of data from each machine and then gauges each machine's performance against the overall plant Takt Time. The resulting numbers are the machines' throughput-capability metrics.
"What happens is that the true constraints will surface, because they will have the lowest throughput capabilities," Cocco says. Once the true constraints are identified, Activplant determines why individual machines have become constraints.
Generally, Cocco says, it's one of four reasons:
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A machine is running too slowly.
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A machine is producing parts at less than optimal quality.
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A machine's uptime numbers are lower than desired because set-up or changeover times are too long.
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A machine is shut down too often due to equipment failure.
Once isolated, Cocco says, it's easier for users to devise strategies for eliminating constraints. He claims early adopters of Throughput Analyzer experience throughput increases of 10 percent to 25 percent.
Julie Fraser, principal at research firm Industry Directions, Cummaquid, Mass., calls Throughput Analyzer a breakthrough in manufacturing intelligence. "It not only lays out an important key performance indicator [the throughput capability metric]," she says, "but it does so by gathering only a few simple data points."
