Recently on a trip to Spain I was reminded how easy it is to be misled into thinking that a company using high tech equipment understands lean manufacturing methods. The fact is the two are not related. Sometimes it is actually easier to see if a company understands lean manufacturing when the equipment is low tech because you can easily identify the proper understanding of Kanbans (properly proportioned part queues), poke yokes (error proofing), good work instructions and communications. The understanding
The facility I recently visited had a very nice assembly line that manufactured circuit boards. The first step was to screen print the solder on the board and send it to a very advanced high speed robotics station which handled the assembly of surface mounted components onto the PCB (printed circuit board). After the components were assembled, the PCB was fed into a computer controlled oven that completed the soldering process. The whole assembly process was almost entirely hands off at this point, with
The final process step was to solder a wire to the PCB. For this, there wasn’t any automation or high tech equipment, but rather a simple clamp fixture to hold the wire, a soldering iron, soldering wire and an operator. With these things in place, it would still be possible to show lean manufacturing implementation, and have good results from the process. In this instance there were a few simple things missing. First the operator work instructions didn’t reflect the process that the operator I observed wa