From "lean Manufacturing" to "lean Engineering"? 2

[sheiko]

Dears,

I am a process engineer working in an engineering company.

Recently, i have been proposed to participate to a conference on "lean manufacturing" and "lean engineering" with people from various fields (automotive, aeronautics, ...) but i am not familiar at all with these concepts.

I have made some research on the net. I have found a lot of info. but i hardly succeed in relating the "lean" concepts to my day to day activities.
What i understand is that "lean" aims at maximizing the production of valuable product by minimizing the so-called "wastes". But this seems very vague to me.

Then, i would like to know if you have experienced these concepts as chemical engineers (in an engineering or manufacturing company) and if you would accept to share your views on it. Any ideas/references will be more than welcomed.

To put it in a nutshell: What?, Which?, When?, Why?, Who? and How?



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[rb1957]

my business' opinion of staff/contractors goes in cycles.

sometimes its "permies good, contractors bad" ... permies are perceived to have more interest in the company, will make better long term decisions, not just interested in how many hours they can scribble down on their timesheet this week, nor would they jump ship at the drop of a hat for an extra $1/hr.

other times it's the opposite ... contractors are a skilled flexible workforce that can be tuned to the work load, permies are inexperienced (and thus too brave or not brave enough), too slow to react to changes, unwilling to reach outside the box.

 

[MechEng2005]

Good point Ajack, the quantity definately makes a difference. In cases of assembly line mass production, it might still make sense to keep screw sizes consistant for each stage of the assembly. I certainly would not expect to see the same size bolt holding my wheels on as the bolts holding the hinges on the glove box. However, if the same size screw could be used at each stage (i.e. all exhaust pipe clamps are the same), there might be a benefit. There might not be.

To me, the concept of "lean engineering" would be to understand the whole process from first concept to shipping it out the door and warranty issues, and basing the design on what works best throughout the process.

Personally, I feel that "lean engineering" is just some jargon for what has been expected of engineers/designers for a long time. Just some new buzz words to "repackage" an idea that's been around forever to sell it to management.

-- MechEng2005

 

[KENAT]

So all the to my understanding all the talks of using one type of screw etc. would be covered by DFMA (Design For Manufacture & Assembly), which is another buzz word (or I suppose Acronym).

What gets me about my current place is they seem to want to apply principles based on production rates/quantities similar to mainstream automotive when our actual run rate is more like Morgan or Ferrari.

Sure, we could spend hours fine tuning these things, $1000's on tooling fixtures, man weeks spent creating step by step assy procedure etc. but when we only build maybe 5 a month of any particular product, with maybe a product life of 5 years are we really recouping our investment? Or would we be better off having slightly more highly skilled shop floor staff that can work without these aids, freeing engineering up to design the next new product and beat our competitors to the market? Of course, given the way we (don't) track engineering time and amortize tooling costs etc. we may never know.

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[xnuke]

"Lean engineering" means increasing the ratio of engineering work to engineers. :-D

My office is currently attempting to practice lean engineering as it lays off more and more engineers. Of course, the engineering work load has dropped as projects fail to materialize. Sometimes it seems like it is simply a matter of time before the value of lean engineering approaches either infinity or an indeterminate state.

xnuke
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[kontiki99]

Are you leaning the processes that work or the processes that are broken?

It's my experience the processes owned by the politically weak targets are the ones leaned. Politically unassailable divisions that cannot be looked at with a critical eye are spared the exercise.

We had a politically strong group conducting exercises to lean error correcting processes. At the same time, we couldn’t get resources to develop tools to support core functions to keep us from making the errors to begin with.

I do support improvement, sometimes the packaging and motivational stuff gets to be a bit much.

Make it look good whatever you do.