Heijunka (production leveling) under 10 minutes!

[Music] um [Music] so [Music] or production leveling i'm going to explain that to you by by giving you an example so we have a producer of sweaters and they produce green blue and orange sweaters okay this what you see here this is a so-called production schedule with time slots the factory works four hours per day that's quite generous maybe it's in scandinavia this is our one hour two hour three and hour four and they work 20 days per month so this is day one this is day two this is day three this is day four day 20 day 19 day 18 you get the picture and each product requires one hour of processing so here we can produce one product so either a green one or a blue one or an orange one and here we can also produce a product either a green one a blue one or an orange one now i'm going to give you a task think about the following if you were the production manager a plant manager how would you uh schedule the production what would you produce when okay maybe you first produce all the orange ones maybe you first produce all the green ones maybe you mix them up how would you produce what would you produce when would you produce it pause this video and give it some serious thoughts all right i assume you paused it and gave it some serious thoughts i have used this example in in class with my students a lot and 99 of the time they they answer like this so they say well you know what since this is so dominant i'm going to first take care of this so i'm going to first produce all the green ones and then either randomly the blue ones orange ones so sometimes they switch these two but they always stick to the green ones as the most important i always ask them why do you do that why they say well it makes sense because it is the largest in terms of monthly demand so i take care of that first and then i continue to the rest it is will also they sometimes they also make a reference to economics of scale which i do understand but then i make a reference to smat which they also understand which you will also by the way understand in a later lecture i will explain smart which will make things uh even clearer than now but i point out several problems what if you have a lot of clients that want to have green blue and orange so they want to have maybe one of each or maybe they want to have one of this and two of the other ones or maybe two of this and maybe one of this entry of this what if you have a lot of clients that want to have a combination of the variety of products that you offer when can you satisfy those clients needs well in this particular case if this is your production schedule you can satisfy their needs very very at a very very late stage namely at the earliest at this point why because it is at this point you remember and this was day one day two day three day four day five day six it is at this point that you have produced at least one green one blue and at least one orange so it is at the client has to wait these clients here they have to wait at least until this very very late uh time to you know to to to have their demand a math might be very unacceptable for the client the client is going to look whether your competitor is able to uh meet their demand faster than you are because you know this is quite unacceptable this amount of of waiting so this is already one problem that my students typically overlook there is another problem you know what the world is a dynamic place okay sounds like a very very cheesy introductory line to a very very very poorly written book but it's it's just like that the world is a very dynamic place it changes sometimes unexpectedly demand for something goes up demand for something goes down that's just life now suppose that this month the demand for orange is very high okay maybe the dutch national team is playing in the finals and this was unexpected so suddenly the demand for orange which is the dutch national color uh is very very high and the demand for this and this is actually very low then what you're actually stuck with if this is your production schedule is you stuck with a a huge access inventory of green a huge excess inventory of blue and the inability to satisfy the demand for orange okay another problem which is the result of this this is very unresponsive this this kind of bulk production so hijunka tries to circumvent those problems by leveling the production so you go from the monthly production maybe to weekly production okay simply by dividing them by four and then you let each week one day one two three four five so this is one week okay so you'll have each week reflect the total demand okay you let each week reflect the total demand by doing that you circumvent many of the largest part of the two aforementioned problems okay you circumvent the largest part of the two aforementioned problems because now if there are clients that want to have a combination of green blue and orange you can already satisfy the demand for the you know if if they want to have one of each then the first one can already be you know can can um be delivered in day four day one day two day three by day four you have produced at least one green at least one blue and at least one orange so by day four you can already respond to that demand whereas in the previous case it was much later furthermore if you find out in week one that the demand for orange is much higher than you anticipated and the demand for green much lower than by week two you can already reschedule okay so you can respond to the change in the market much faster than you would be able to do in in the old in the previous case a world of warning though because this is a beautiful principle but it does require that you're able to switch from green to blue from blue to orange and back from orange to green very very fast if you're not able to do that if the setup time so the time that you require to go from green to blue from blue to orange from orange to green is very high then you're better off sticking to this old production schedule okay the thing is that when when we go when we make our organization lean and we adopt principles like ajunka we also adopt principles like a smart single minute exchange of dies which will be explained in another lecture by the way it is going to be explained in another lecture we also adopt concepts like smed single minute exchange of diets which make this changeover from green to blue from blue to orange occur at a much faster pace and in in that scenario hijunka makes a lot of sense because then you have the production nicely leveled and changing the production from one thing to another is not very time consuming so you also do not suffer any kind of negative economic effects there that's it for this session hope everything was clear thank you very much for your valuable time

Channel: Six Sigma Academy Amsterdam

Views: 9,297

Rating: 4.9740262 out of 5

Keywords: heijunka, production leveling, lean, six sigma, lean six sigma, kanban, easy, fast, explanation, lecture, tutorial

Id: 410ZWu45_Fg

Length: 9min 54sec (594 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 01 2020