Agile Manufacturing Update: Progressive Lean: Straighten and See: Part 1

Agile Manufacturing Update

Keeping You Informed On Lean and Agile Manufacturing

Agile Manufacturing Update: Progressive Lean: Straighten and See: Part 1 - Training

Progressive Lean: Straighten and See: Part 1 - Training

You'll remember that you held a short training session for supervisors and team leaders back at the start of the Sort and Shine phase. Well you're going to conduct a similar session to start this phase.

Here is a set of slides that I use in the training. (It includes pictures I found on the internet so it's a pretty big file.)

Straighten and See Presentation Slides

(As always you're free to use these any way you want but I'd ask that you leave my company name on them and give credit where credit is due.)

As with most training most of the necessary learning is going to take place outside the classroom. You want the team leaders to understand the basics of what's expected of them:

Develop a map of what will go where from major equipment and inventory down to individual tools and documents.
Develop a list of what's needed (shelves cabinets shadowboards tables etc.) to get the area in order
Develop a schedule for implementing Straighten and See. The schedule needs to include labeling existing machinery and storage moving what needs to be moved and implementing hourly production charts.

This phase will also provide a good time to implement regular and frequent shop floor walks and meetings to make sure everything is proceeding well. More about all that later.

If the team leaders have large areas or several operating machines or locations within their areas you'll probably want to have them attack one piece at a time i.e. develop a map and schedule for one location that can serve as a model for other locations until the entire area is complete. As an example at a present client one team leader is oversees three roll forming lines. Each line is about 30 yards long and has its own tools quality desk etc. The team leader is tackling one line at a time rather than developing maps and schedules for all three at once.

In my next post I'll start going into the three points above in more detail.