VELOCITY - DEE JACOB [45]
“Could it be that you’re not moving it fast enough?” asked Amy. “Anyway, it’s kind of puzzling, because my old boss, B. Don, was forever saying how good Murphy was as a plant manager, and how they nailed down something called a ‘Herbie,’ whatever that is, and how shipments became predictable and inventories went down. Of course, Maguire must be slipping, because we’ve had a lot of complaints from customers about late shipments.”
“If he’s not doing the job,” said Zelda, “maybe you’ll have to replace him.”
“Wayne wants to give him a chance. But I’m not sure. I find him to be pretty annoying at times. In any case, Wayne insists there are a lot of opportunities for improvement out there at the plant. A lot of ‘low-hanging fruit,’ as he called it. Once Wayne balances the line and gets everyone loaded to takt as much as possible, we should start recording some quarters that’ll have Peter Winn doing cartwheels across his oriental carpet.”
Zelda was once again perplexed.
“Balance the line?” she asked.
“Right,” said Amy. “Capacity costs money, and if you don’t need it, it’s wasted money. It’s muda, according to Wayne. So you want to balance production – workers, equipment, and inventory – against customer demand. Which is where takt time comes in.”
Now Zelda was doubly perplexed.
“Here, Mom, let me try to explain it. For example, take laundry–”
“Please!” said Ben.
“Thank you, Henny Youngman, and keep moving that iron. Anyway, Mom, think about laundry as a process. It has steps and each step has to be completed before the next can be started. First, we bring the dirty, smelly clothes from the hampers upstairs to the basement. Next, we sort the clothes, lights from darks, and so on. Then we set up the washer – load the clothes, add the detergent, set the cycle, and start the washing machine. Ah! But then comes Michelle’s favorite part of laundry: the dryer!”
“Yes, waiting for the dryer to finish,” said Michelle. “It’s so ex-citing!”
“It is, isn’t it? Then we do the last steps: ironing, folding, and distribution – taking clean clothes in neat stacks back upstairs and delivering them to the appropriate customers.”
“Making sure my sister’s socks don’t end up my drawer,” said Ben, “like they did last week.”
“Good you mentioned that,” said Amy, “because, yes, it all has to be done with quality and safety – reminding Michelle not to mix red shirts with white sheets, and teaching Ben not to burn his fingers on the iron or put in more wrinkles than he takes out.”
“And your point would be … ?” asked Michelle, clearly bored.
“My point, smartie, is that this whole laundry process is a value stream – turning dirty, rumpled, stinky clothes into clean, wrinkle-free, nice-smelling clothes ready on time to start the new week. So let’s say this laundry operation of ours was a business, and the basement here was our little factory. What would we want it to do?”
“Make money,” said Michelle.
“Right, of course,” said Amy, “but as for the factory itself, wouldn’t we want it to be efficient? Wouldn’t we want it to run smoothly with minimal effort and minimal waste? Wouldn’t we want the whole laundry process to get done in the least amount of time?”
“You’ve got that right,” muttered Ben.
“And,” Amy continued, “we would want output to be equal to demand. In other words, we don’t want to do any more laundry than necessary, but we also don’t want dirty laundry piling up or a shortage of clean clothes. Therefore, we want the amount of work being done by us, the laundry workers, to be exactly equal to the weekly demand for clean clothes from us, the laundry customers. Now, takt time–”
“Finally!” said Michelle.
“Takt sets the pace of production. It’s the maximum allowable time to finish each step and pass along the product to the next step. So let’s say Wayne Reese was running this laundry operation,” said Amy. “What Wayne would do is study the laundry process and keep good statistics on each step. Then he would balance the line to takt time so that each process would be running continuously and everyone