Value Stream Mapping Workshop

I have a VSM workshop that will be beginning here in a couple of weeks. I intend to post a review of this workshop and the details during my time in it.

Return from hiatus

I have been on a 5 month hiatus from blogging. Let me give an update on where my Kanban project currently is. This blog entry is more of an organizational behavior observation than a project update.

The Kanban project has temporarily stalled for a number of reasons. First and foremost, my employer has moved me to a new position which has been consuming a bit of my time. I am now a Senior Test Engineer and not a business unit manager. This move was made as a necessity of what the business currently needed versus my personal preferences. I.e. they needed me to move back into engineering.

The flow racks are on the floor and there are targets set to actually begin training for the team members on the floor.

It’s interesting to see how the economic environment has made the staff managers more in tune to wasteful processes on the shop floor. I still see a lot of preaching as far as what we should be doing. This of course is not being backed up with resources and direction as to allow us to execute any initiative to reach our goals.

One thing that I have accomplished is a 5S initiative for changeover carts for my former area. One of our primary issues in my former area is the lack of organization of raw material and tooling. The problems that are created are not knowing if fixtures are missing, missing components, wrong components, and poor material management.

This activity has greatly increased our visual management of our material flow and every component and fixture has its place on a standardized, color-coded cart. I am pretty proud of it.