How to Tell If a Factory is Legitimately Lean in 30 Minutes

AUSTIN, Texas - July 25, 2016 - PRLog -- Not sure if your manufacturing facility is performing at its best?
Perhaps you're negotiating to acquire a factory and you need to determine if it's running on all cylinders. Or maybe you're about to place a major order with a supplier, and you wisely decide to visit their operations before signing the contract.

In all of these scenarios, the challenge is to find the answers — to determine if you are running a lean plant operation or not. And if not, where should you focus your efforts to make the key changes needed to operate more efficiently at higher levels of quality.

You're probably familiar with traditional formal approaches used to quantify the productivity of a manufacturing plant. Typically, this involves tasks such as:

• Downloading and analyzing production numbers
• Reading detailed financial statements
• Analyzing supplier data
• Compiling formal due diligence reports

If you've done it before, you know this process can take anywhere from several days to a few weeks to pull everything together into an executive briefing.

"Rapid Plant Assessment" is the quick-and-dirty complement to formal due diligence reports
But what if your only opportunity to learn about the factory is to walk through the plant and talk to the employees?

How much could you possibly learn without pulling financial reports and the like?

Quite a lot, it turns out.

In fact, a small team of trained observers visiting a manufacturing plant can uncover enough insightful information in the first 30 minutes to determine if a factory operation is:

• A top-notch lean manufacturing machine.
• A diamond-in-the-rough that would benefit greatly by implementing a few key improvements in specific areas.
• A plant burdened by an unfortunate combination of planning, production, maintenance, management, or employee workforce issues.

So, you're probably asking yourself: 'How can you learn so much about a factory in as little as 30 minutes?'

The answer comes from a tried-and-true method — known as "Rapid Plant Assessment" — developed by Professor R. Eugene Goodson at the University of Michigan.

Professor Goodson is the former chairman and CEO of Oshkosh Truck and leader of the Automotive Systems Group at Johnson Controls. He served as Chief Scientist for the U.S. Department of Transportation and was a professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University for 18 years.

Take the 30 Minute Rapid Plant Assessment Challenge
We are believers in Goodson's Rapid Plant Assessment approach. To be clear, it's not a formal due diligence program; but, it can tell you important things in just a very short amount of time — things you might never pick up just by looking at a set of printed production reports.

Here's a quick overview of how and why it works.

During a short factory tour, trained observers carefully note how material flows through the plant. They also ask some of the production workers on the line a few simple questions.

For example, in today's modern lean manufacturing operations, best practices tell us there should be very little inventory or in-process material stored in the plant. If you see a large buildup of production goods waiting to be processed, something is wrong.

Workers on the production line can also be a source of useful information. Asking a production worker where their completed work goes next is a good indicator of worker training and involvement. If a plant worker knows the answer to your question without hesitation, it's a good sign they are committed to the outcome. If, on the other hand, they respond that their work 'travels to the next transport bin', this is an indication that the factory isn't fully engaging its workforce to their full potential.

Rapid Plant Assessment: Step-by-step


Jeff Turk, Formaspace CEO on the right.

Here is how Rapid Plant Assessment works in practice.

First, it requires four or five trained observers to tour the production plant. Each of the observers will focus on specific aspects of the facility's operations. The goal is to create a rapid audit of the factory's current state of operations using a series of questions outlined below.

Immediately after the plant visit, the observers will confer on what they have seen.

They will compile their individual checklists into a matrix that will determine an overall rating for the relative leanness of the factory. Shortcomings will be noted and prioritized to create a prioritized list of needed improvements. From this, a management action plan is built to facilitate improvements.

Here are the eleven different areas of focus that make up the Rapid Plant Assessment. Each one includes a summary of the questions used to determine the rating for each focus area. You will note that certain questions are repeated across different focus areas – for example, the question "Would you (the visitor) buy the product?" is repeated for each of the focus areas.

1          Questions to Determine Customer Satisfaction
The Customer Satisfaction rating is based on three questions: Does the plant offer tours that make visitors feel welcome? Is there a prominent display of customer satisfaction ratings? Would you (the visitor) buy the product?

2          Questions about Safety, Environment, Cleanliness, and Order
The Safety, Environment, Cleanliness, and Order rating is based on four questions: Is the factory clean, orderly, and quiet? Does visual labeling identify everything? Is everything stored in its own dedicated place? Would you (the visitor) buy the product?

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