It has taken many years, but the component industry has finally caught onto the practices of lean manufacturing and applied them to truss and wall manufacturing. An example is the huge turnout at the sponsored seminars by Todd Drummond Consulting at the 2016 BCMC show of “The Path of Least Resistance: A Lean Analysis Seminar” and “Efficiency Essentials from the Lean Toolbox Seminar.” But many still do not know that lean manufacturing practices, including Six Sigma, are all based on industrial engineering practices. A summary definition from Wikipedia: “Industrial engineering is a branch of engineering which deals with the optimization of complex processes, systems or organizations. Industrial engineers work to eliminate waste of time, money, materials, man-hours, machine time, energy and other resources that do not generate value.”
One of the critical tasks an Industrial Engineer (IE) performs is creating performance control systems. Imagine recording the times for 100 different people to walk 100 feet and using the average time of all 100 people to walk that distance as being the normal length of time. Now, take it one more step and tell everyone the average time to walk the 100 feet and set that as the acceptable time standard for which they are now accountable; this is called a performance control system. (Just FYI, most IE use 264 feet per minute as normal walking.)
Per industrial engineers with PhDs, the average gain in productivity is 42% when a performance control system is properly implemented*. This gain applies to all areas, not just the manufacturing environment. In the truss manufacturing industry, we commonly refer to this as the “Houlihan method” when implementing a performance control system called short-schedule time standards. Short scheduling means comparing the rate of expected and actual performance every couple of hours (see my 2007 article). However, a performance control system will not work using measurement units such as BF, piece count, or sales/cost dollars in the truss manufacturing process. Only properly developed man-minutes, R.E. or S.U. units. (http://todd-drummond.com/time-standards-article/). The added benefit is knowing every two hours how every order is progressing in the manufacturing.
Some companies have implemented performance control systems without realizing that that was what they indeed did. An example of this was in 2001 at Builders FirstSource (BFS) in Jacksonville, Florida. In their design department, the average time from job intake to a finished design ready for production was 20 days before BFS implemented AppWright communication and a scheduling browser application. Six months after implementation, with the same workload, average job turnaround time was reduced to just 10 days, which was a 100% gain in processing time (see their case study testimonial). The reason for their improved productivity while implementing the AppWright application was that they implemented a performance control system by scheduling each designer with an expected time to perform the task, and BFS’s management could hold each designer accountable by tracking the results via the AppWright system regardless of the designer’s physical location. BFS claims they made no other changes except implementing the AppWright system that allowed them to gauge and track each designer. They have since implemented this practice throughout their entire company. A common refrain in our industry is the lack of designers for many companies. Perhaps your company needs the tools to implement a performance control system.
Six Sigma and other lean practices, as I mentioned before, are all based on industrial engineering practices. An IE measures every task and tries to find ways to eliminate, combine, rearrange, or simplify every task while measuring the time to complete it. Six Sigma is the data-driven approach to eliminating defects and is also the very definition of what an industrial engineer is trained to do in every area of a company. TDC is trained in industrial engineering practices and provides clients with 120+ time standard elements for truss labor estimation for performance control systems (Houlihan method).
*Source from Motion and Time Study for Lean Manufacturing Third Edition by Fred Myers and James Stewart.
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