Comments on: Artificial Ignorance https://oldleandude.com/2015/01/29/artificial-ignorance/ A Blog About Understanding The Toyota Production System and Gaining Its Full Benefits, brought to you by "The Toast Guy" Fri, 30 Jan 2015 17:22:32 +0000 hourly 1 By: Bret Watson https://oldleandude.com/2015/01/29/artificial-ignorance/#comment-7446 Fri, 30 Jan 2015 17:22:32 +0000 http://oldleandude.com/?p=1660#comment-7446 Perfect timing Bruce. Our old system is no longer supported and crashes often. We made a very careful investment in a new ERP system (necessary evil?) yet we must make sure the tail does not wag the dog. It’s up to us to implement Lean IT so that it is not “mean” to our internal and external customers.

]]> By: gary lucas https://oldleandude.com/2015/01/29/artificial-ignorance/#comment-7441 Fri, 30 Jan 2015 01:58:20 +0000 http://oldleandude.com/?p=1660#comment-7441 So first the good news. At my last job in a small company I implemented a system automating our bills of materials and ordering. I actually entered the first 2000 parts into the system myself and also got a programmer to create an Excel macro to extract data from our Solid Edge library, massaged and corrected it and then wrote it all back into about 4000 parts in that system. Once we had that critical mass we rolled it out to everyone in engineering and purchasing. Every BOM for a year or so had a dozen parts without part numbers, and when it got to purchasing there were a dozen more that were missing prices, vendors etc. But that was manageable. When I left last year we had gone past the 12,000 parts mark and the time from creating a bill of materials for an entire job to getting it all ordered had gone from 2 weeks in purchasing to one day. The number of wrong parts ordered dropped to a level so low we stopped tracking how many were ordered wrong, it was now just an occasion thing, and once fixed it stayed fixed. We spent very little money to do this, less than $10,000 with 10 seats of software.

Now for a chuckle.
The company recently moved from 8,000 square feet in two locations 10 miles apart to one location of about 21,000 square feet. In the old 6,000 sq. ft. shop all the materials were stored upstairs on a mezzanine. So 20 feet from where the products were assembled was a staircase that you had to carry everything up and down. That was very tiring.

A few days ago I visited, as I now work for their rep firm in Baltimore. A tour of the 16,000 sq. ft. shop showed they now had a dedicated recieving area, and a dedicated inventory area, at opposite ends of a building 200 feet long! So to put away inventory you had to cross through the shop to the far end of the building and back again. They put the old mezzanine back up too. They put all the most used small materials on top of the mezzanine with the idea that small parts would be easier to carry up and down! So what used to be a 20 ft plus a staircase trip to get parts is now a 150 ft. trip plus a staircase to get parts! The piles of old, obsolete or wrong parts are sitting in large boxes on pallets where they comsume all the floor space. I would really love to see the impact of these decisions on their productivity!

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