Lean approaches are beneficial for the development and maintenance of management systems compliant with ISO 9001, ISO 13485, ISO 14001 ISO 45001 standards and 21 CFR 820 FDA regulation.
As a Master Black Belt I teach Lean Six Sigma courses and often provide definitions of common terms. One such term is “value” which I define as the ratio between quality and price (value = quality/price).
“It may sound like an older version of the iPhone,” writes Dean Marsman in Quality, “but it’s actually a very simple and helpful system that can make the fundamentals of lean manufacturing even clearer to both business owners and employees.”
Quality professionals see many costs of quality firsthand. These include our salaries and benefits, the equipment used to measure and analyze quality outcomes, and the waste generated by these processes when they fail to meet requirements.
Sometimes adopting lean manufacturing means adding more people to a process. Eric Ethington, a lean product and process development coach, previously worked in the auto supply business. In a pump assembly product line, the typical cell had six operators.
I was recently retaught a lesson that, ironically, I teach for a living. The consulting firm I work in covers not only lean, but also consults and guides clients along with building and improving their quality management systems.
In a lean manufacturing process, a poka-yoke method is employed to eliminate product defects by preventing, correcting, or drawing attention to human errors in real time. Industrial engineer Shigeo Shingo first applied the term poka-yoke (“mistake-proofing” in Japanese) to the Toyota Production System.
Lean and agile can work alone but can be very powerful together.
May 15, 2019
Lean and agile are well recognized in the manufacturing sector and in the quality community. Like many quality methodologies, lean and agile work in tandem and separately, depending on an organization’s needs. Where do these methodologies meet and diverge, what are their driving principles, and how you can add them to your toolbox (or convince others to do so)?
In the previous article, we touched upon NDT 4.0 and provided a glimpse into what it is and how it is transforming industries around the globe. Now we will dive into a segment of NDT 4.0, automation, and look at some examples that highlight how it is changing companies for the better.