Process design: Productivity and quality
How to transform the shop-floor/ assembly process and the procurement/ design process to increase quantity and quality?
Quality/ quantity trade-off
When the focus is on quantity, quality often suffers, as workers are provided incentives and punishments which, focusing on quantity, largely ignore quality. Quality control is often postponed to a later stage.
The Toyota process, observing that correcting/ tolerating mistakes can be costly, tries to ensure that they get it right the first time - workers have the ability to stop the assembly-line in order to fix a mistake when they make/ detect it.
Supplier coordination
Workers on the shop floor, besides designers, often make valuable suggestions and observations about how the parts they assemble could be improved for their purposes. To implement these improvements, it is important to work closely with the suppliers.
Teamwork
Workers working in small teams, with minimal hierarchy; rotating and exchanging jobs often to resolve monotony; encouraging and helping each other to finish the job and to improve the process show excellent productivity.
But, workers stuck to individual jobs, antagonistic to management due to a lack of mutual trust and with a hierarchy, tend to have very low productivity. Eg: GM in the 70’s.
Continuous improvement
Aka kaizen in japanese. Every movement/ procedure can be timed and measured, and skills can be improved. The processes (including worker comfort) and parts can be continually improved based on worker suggestions.
Quality check
Before the goods are deployed to the market-place, faulty goods must be detected.