Lean management gets even more lean with precise traffic analysis
At Indoorway we are on the mission to smarten up indoor spaces. That’s why we’ve put so much effort to develop and still improve our analytical Dashboard and features. We believe that the knowledge about foot traffic is precious. Such insights might be used in shopping malls to better arrange products and boost sales or by office managers to improve employees comfort. But what about industrial sites? Can traffic analysis have impact on manufacturing plants and magazines? The answer to this question is simple — just look back a few decades and recall the Toyota factory image, where one of the most popular methods of production management, Lean, was born.
At the beginning the scheme was only known in Japan. Only after 1977, when an article about the system and Toyota Company great success was published, it escalated worldwide and quickly became the main concept of many well-managed entrepreneurships.
The entire Toyota Production System (TPS) is built around the so-called ‘3M’ model, which is an abbreviation of Japanese words — muda, muri and mura. These concepts are interrelated and interact with each other. It is an important fact, because in order to achieve the maximum possible optimization, it is necessary to pay attention to all of these three elements at the same time.
Muda
Muda is translated as waste. In the production process, these are things and phenomena that do not bring added value. TPS focuses on identifying the source of wastage and its reduction or complete elimination. The most often identified causes of muda are overproduction, unnecessary traffic or unused space. Redundant movements of both machines and people can be frequently encountered in factories and warehouses. They usually result from weak surface layout, but also poor work organization. These factors lead to situations, in which people employed in factory areas are often forced to waste their valuable time to, for example, gather all of components, which are necessary to perform the task. The elements are sometimes located in different places of production space, which means a big waste of time on walking and searching. Most of you will surely agree with me, that nobody likes to do superfluous work. It usually causes frustration,weariness and, as a result, we become less productive and even lose motivation.
Muri
The second ‘M’ stands for muri, which means overloads and strains of machines and workers. In manufacturing reality it’s visible in, among others, failures, defects and stoppages. In consequence it results in threat to health & safety of an organization or a decrease in the quality of work. TPS solves the problem of muri by maximizing existing resources and gaining the same work rhythm, which leads to the standardization of work.
Unification of the work system is impossible without simultaneous observation of the work of machines and the movement of assets and people. In order to improve the comfort of work in such specific labour environments, the most accurate synchronization of both factors in necessary.
Mura
The last of the three concepts — mura, refers to irregularities, which together with the variability of the production cycle cause downtime in the entire production chain. The Toyota Production System gets rid of them by eliminating cycle variability and reducing non-productive time.
As mentioned at the very beginning, it is almost impossible to separate these three definitions: muda, muri and mura, from each other. The idle time is closely connected with downtimes and the lack of standardization of work. This, in turn, boils to the logistics organization and ergonomics of the workplace.
So, coming back to the question posed a few lines earlier — traffic analysis seems to be a great weapon against muda, muri and mura. According to Toyota, it can lay the foundations of the optimization of the factory or other industrial area.
Want to know more? Stay tuned — more details coming soon!
