Lean Principles | Overview of Lean Principles |
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Page 5 of 10 Batch production and queuing should be eradicatedUncoupling the supply chain from the forecast and connecting it to actual customer demand is frightening. How can you do it when you produce everything in batch quantities that are much larger than a days worth of demand in any one product or variant? Any single customer order is buried within a batch that will supply a hundred other customers. Each batch is processed one painful step at a time. Half the floor space (or computer memory) is taken by incomplete product. Most businesses don't have the short interval capacity to immediately fulfil customer demand while still batch producing. Most businesses have purchased plant and equipment with the imperative that it is engineered big enough to support large batch production. This is a burning issue for all document or computer based work processes.Similarly, how many cases should one lawyer hold open at any one time? How many loan applications should a bank officer have incomplete in working backlog at any one time? How many commercial rental properties should an agent try to negotiate to a close at any one time? Make no mistake, batching is everywhere. It is the automatic default to continuous processing. Batch production doesn't serve anyone's needs. It eats space (real or virtual), demands the wrong equipment and is anathema to a focus on cycle time and speed. It makes individual customers wait longer. It does however meet the imperatives of the Unit Cost and Cost Recovery model. Distribution is also keyed to deliver large one off deliveries when small short interval deliveries are what you need to meet immediate demand. Most businesses have enough space under cover to hold weeks or months of raw material, work in progress and finished goods. Do I need twelve wheeler semi-trailers or one ton utilities? Should I deliver monthly or twice daily? Further, your suppliers may not want to play the 'customer connect' game. They may still want to deliver four weeks worth of material at once. The things or services you produce may not take up space and your work processes may inhabit the virtual realm of computer memory but the speed at which you meet your customer demand is still the dominant issue. This means you don't want to batch produce your output. |