The Visual Factory

If you're aware of the tremendous improvements achieved in productivity and quality as a result of employee involvement, then you'll appreciate the great value of creating a visual factory. This book explains why conventional work areas, where fragmented information flows from ""top to bottom,"" must be replaced by the ""visual workplace,"" where information flows in every direction. It details how visual management can make the factory a place where workers and supervisors freely communicate so that every employee can take improvement action. The author's year-long worldwide research resulted in an abundance of practical recommendations. The communication techniques he suggests will: Foster cohesion within groups of employees. Turn fault-based into fact based communication. Overcome such problems as absenteeism and high defect rates. Stimulate an unending flow of suggestions from employees. A valuable resource for plant, operations, and human relations managers, this text discusses how successful companies develop meeting and communication areas, communicate work standard production controls such as kanban, and make goals and progress visible. Over 200 diagrams and photos illustrate the numerous visual techniques discussed.

An effective visual communication system can help manufacturing employees eliminate significant waste from daily tasks. From work-zone color coding to posted metrics, visual controls clarify and simplify the path to enhanced processes and profits. Leaving little to chance, Visual Controls: Applying Visual Management to the Factory provides a detail

Everyone has heard the phrase about doing twice the work in half the time, but instead of focusing only on time, this book focuses on driving increased output with consistently less input. Implementing Lean: Twice the Output with Half the Input! teaches readers not only about Lean and its major concepts, but it drives the leader toward implementing a true Lean system. The authors have used the methodologies in this book everywhere from hospitals to service industries to manufacturing plants in order to impact businesses by providing proven principles, techniques, and approaches that yield substantial improvement to any business, small or large, in any sector. Learn about the benefits of implementing Lean in your company as the authors walk you through the major components as well as show you how to implement them. This guide is already being used by Lean Practitioners every day on shop floors to educate and refresh how tools are used in real-world applications.

Most business readers have heard of the Lean principles developed for factories a set of tools and ideas that have enabled companies to dramatically boost quality by reducing waste and errors producing more while using less. Yet until now, few have recognized how relevant these powerful ideas are to individuals and their daily work. Every person at

For three summers beginning when he was 16, cartoonist Guy Delisle worked at a pulp and paper factory in Quebec City. Factory Summers chronicles the daily rhythms of life in the mill, and the twelve hour shifts he spent in a hot, noisy building filled with arcane machinery. Delisle takes his noted outsider perspective and applies it domestically, this time as a boy amongst men through the universal rite of passage of the summer job. Even as a teenager, Delisle’s keen eye for hypocrisy highlights the tensions of class and the rampant sexism an all-male workplace permits. Guy works the floor doing physically strenuous tasks. He is one of the few young people on site, and furthermore gets the job through his father’s connections, a fact which rightfully earns him disdain from the lifers. Guy’s dad spends his whole career in the white collar offices, working 9 to 5 instead of the rigorous 12-hour shifts of the unionized labor. Guy and his dad aren’t close, and Factory Summers leaves Delisle reconciling whether the job led to his dad’s aloofness and unhappiness. On his days off, Guy finds refuge in art, a world far beyond the factory floor. Delisle shows himself rediscovering comics at the public library, and preparing for animation school–only to be told on the first day, “There are no jobs in animation.” Eager to pursue a job he enjoys, Guy throws caution to the wind. Translated by Helge Dascher and Rob Aspinall

If you currently employ knowledge workers who do most of their work on computers or with computers, access the Internet, utilize internal and external databases, use e-mail or other new messaging technology, then this book is for you. Quite simply, this handbook is for any organization with a lot of Web DNA that wishes to cut costs, improve perform

Hiroyuki Hirano‘s five pillars of the visual workplace: sort, set in order, shine, standardize and sustain are the most fundamental and often overlooked aspects in continuous improvement initiatives. Together, these concepts form the framework of the 5S System, a set of principles whose simplicity often betrays its powerful impact on the workplace.So much of the 5S System seems like common sense, that it is astonishing how often such seemingly simple practices are absent in manufacturing operations. This is a hands-on book that explains the principles, rationale and implementation details of the 5S System. Easy-to-read and apply, each section of the text is loaded with questions, outlines, summaries, diagrams and illustrations. Most importantly, 5S for Operators provides the foundational knowledge that is essential for implementing not just the 5S System, but overall manufacturing improvements like shorter equipment changeovers, just-in-time inventory, total quality management and total productive maintenance. Since its publication in 1996, 5S for Operators has been and continues to be hugely popular and its popularity is not hard to understand. 5S has proven its worth in one company after another, consistently reducing waste, guaranteeing product quality, ensuring safety and increasing the bottom line. With 5S for Operators, the 5S System can have the same profound effect on your operations.

The never-ending global search for a country with a low labour wage is almost bottoming out. The so-called labor-oriented apparel manufacturing industry is poised to change. Due to fierce global pressure on reducing price and lead time, the textiles and apparel producers will have to banish all waste from their supply chain. Lean manufacturing which removes waste and smoothens the process flow is gaining popularity among textiles and apparel producers and will be a key element for the survival of the industry in the years ahead. An overview of various lean tools with a balanced mix of conceptual knowledge and practical applications in the context of apparel manufacturing Valuable industry information which managers and engineers can follow themselves without the need to hire outside consultants Case studies and examples from apparel manufacturing demonstrating how lean tools are being used successfully by leading organizations; an academician’s delight Possible use cases of several lean tools having potential use in the apparel manufacturing scenario