Kaizen Method

Kaizen Japanese for "improvement", or "change for the better" refers to philosophy or practices that focus upon continuous improvement of processes in manufacturing, engineering, game development, and business management. It has been applied in healthcare
psychotherapy, life-coaching, government, banking, and other industries. When used in the business sense and applied to the workplace, kaizen refers to activities that continually improve all functions, and involves all employees from the CEO to the assembly line workers. It also applies to processes, such as purchasing and logistics, that cross organizational boundaries into the supply chain. By improving standardized activities and processes, kaizen aims to eliminate waste (see lean manufacturing). Kaizen was first implemented in several Japanese businesses after the Second World War, influenced in part by American business and quality management teachers who visited the country. It has since spread throughout the world[4] and is now being implemented in many other venues besides just business and productivity.Kaizen is a daily process, the purpose of which goes beyond simple productivity improvement. It is also a process that, when done correctly, humanizes the workplace, eliminates overly hard work ("muri"), and teaches people how to perform experiments on their work using the scientific method and how to learn to spot and eliminate waste in business processes.

In all, the process suggests a humanized approach to workers and to increasing productivity: "The idea is to nurture the company's human resources as much as it is to praise and encourage participation in kaizen activities." Successful implementation requires "the participation of workers in the improvement."People at all levels of an organization participate in kaizen, from the CEO down to janitorial staff, as well as external stakeholders when applicable. The format for kaizen can be individual, suggestion system, small group, or large group. At Toyota, it is usually a local improvement within a workstation or local area and involves a small group in improving their own work environment and productivity. This group is often guided through the kaizen process by a line supervisor; sometimes this is the line supervisor's key role. Kaizen on a broad, cross-departmental scale in companies, generates total quality management, and frees human efforts through improving productivity using machines and computing power.


In modern usage, a focused kaizen that is designed to address a particular issue over the course of a week is referred to as a "kaizen blitz" or "kaizen event". These are limited in scope, and issues that arise from them are typically used in later blitzes.

Industrial Engineering of Systems

Have you industrial engineered your systems?

The Toyota man,  Ohno said industrial engineering is profit engineering. If you have not industrial engineered your systems, you are leaving potential profit on the table. Industrial engineering is a set of techniques to evaluate your systems' functional designs for efficiency. Wherver there is scope, IE will improve the system's efficiency. What is efficiency? Efficiency or productivity is output/input. A functionally designed system is expected to achieve certain output. Actually the system is designed for a specific installed capacity. Industrial engineers work on this functional design and reduce resource input.

What is Industrial Engineering?

"Industrial Engineering is Human Effort Engineering and System Efficiency Engineeering. It is an engineering discipline that deals with the design of human effort and system efficiency in all occupations: agricultural, manufacturing and service. The objectives of Industrial Engineering are optimization of productivity of work-systems and occupational comfort, health, safety and income of persons involved."

The definition emphasizes human effort engineering and system efficiency engineering.

What are techniques of Industrial Engineering?

Human Effort Engineering - Techniques

1. Principles of Motion Economy

2. Motion Study

3. Workstation Design

4. Application of Ergonomics and Biomechanics

5. Fatigue Studies

6. Productivity/Safety/Comfort Device Design

7. Standardization of  Methods

8. Operator training

9. Incentive Systems

10. Job Evaluation

11. Learning effect capture

Efficiency Improvement Techniques of Industrial engineering 

1. Process Analysis 

2. Operation Analysis 

3. Time study

4. Value engineering

5. Statistical quality control

6. Statistical inventory control and ABC Classification Based Inventory Sytems

7. Six sigma

8. Operations research

9. Variety reduction

10. Standardization

11. Incentive schemes

12. Waste reduction or elimination

13. Activity based management

14. Business process improvement

15. Fatigue analysis and reduction

16. Engineering economy analysis

17. Learning effect capture and continuous improvement (Kaizen, Quality circles and suggestion schemes)

18. Standard costing

19. 5S

20. SMED

References

Industrial Engineering - Knols of Narayana Rao K V S S

Nabil Raja Damanik (115060700111107)

The Concept of Human Effort Engineering

Development of Industrial Engineering

Industrial engineering emerged as a discipline of graduate and post graduate education based on the pioneering effort done by F.W. Taylor, Frank Gilbreth and Harrington Emerson in the areas of human productivity improvement and efficiency improvement in methods and systems.  American Institute of Industrial Engineering (AIIE) started in January 1948 became a focal point for industrial engineering profession and evolved into an international professional body, Institute of Industrial Engineering. AIIE adopted the following definition for Industrial Engineering in 1955. “Industrial engineering is concerned with the design, improvement, and installation of integrated systems of men, materials, and equipment. It draws upon specialized knowledge and skill in the mathematical, physical, and social sciences together with the principles and methods of engineering analysis and design, to specify, predict, and evaluate the results to be obtained from such systems.”[1]

Robert N. Lehrer, Editor-in-chief of the Journal of Industrial Engineering, had proposed the following definition for industrial engineering in 1954. “Industrial engineering is the design of situations for the useful coordination of men, materials and machines in order to achieve desired results in an optimum manner. The unique characteristics of Industrial Engineering center about the consideration of the human factor as it is related to the technical aspects of a situation, and the integration of all factors that influence the overall situation.”[2]

  

Lehrer’s definition emphasizes that the unique characteristic of Industrial Engineering is the consideration of the human factor. It is the industrial engineer that brings abilities and disabilities of human beings into the design process of work systems such that work systems are optimized. Lehrer’s emphasis on human factor as the unique characteristic of Industrial Engineering was not explicitly emphasized in the definition evolved by the AIIE and it chose to articulate knowledge and skill in mathematical, physical and social sciences, principles and methods of engineering analysis for design, installation and improvement of integrated systems of men, materials and equipment.

  

This lack of emphasis on the focus of the discipline is resulting in a situation where even the students of industrial engineering in postgraduate programmes are unable to articulate the uniqueness of industrial engineering in an organization. Narayana Rao discussed the issue in detail and proposed the following definition.

  

“Industrial Engineering is Human Effort Engineering. It is an engineering discipline that deals with the design of human effort in all occupations: agricultural, manufacturing and service. The objectives of Industrial Engineering are optimization of productivity of work-systems and occupational comfort, health, safety and income of persons involved.” [3]

  

If one needs to explain the focus of industrial engineering more briefly, two areas can be specified as exclusive focus of industrial engineering: Human Effort Engineering and Systems Efficiency Engineering. As industrial engineers have a role in system design as well as in human effort design they have a role in implementing projects, systems and processes. Thus, they are part of project management teams and can lead such teams also. As, industrial engineering is concerned with individual human effort as well as  relations between various employees as a part of system efficiency engineering, it has a significant role to play in the human resource issues of an organization.

 


 

  

 

Relationship between Industrial Engineering and HRM Department

  

Flippo [7] identified that job analysis is often confused with motion study conducted by industrial engineers. These are two different ways of studying the same job, but motion study is a process of analyzing a job to find out the easiest, most effective, and most economical method of doing it or portions thereof. The purpose of job analysis done by HRM persons is descriptive, broad and less detailed. The results of job analysis are used for recruitment, wage determination and training. Motion study is very detailed and it is conducted by industrial engineers for standardization of method and improvement. If a job is subjected to both processes of study, motion study should preferably precede job analysis done by HRM persons. Thus Flippo recognized the role of industrial engineers in companies and their interaction with HRM activity.

  

Flippo [8] also recognized the role of industrial engineering in safety management. He said sound and forward-looking engineering must certainly be an essential requirement of any safety effort. Workplaces should be clean, well lighted, and properly ventilated. Appropriate mechanical devices for material handling should be provided. All dangerous equipment needs to be safeguarded. Flippo also advocated use of human factors engineering so that machines, equipment, and tools can be used by workmen within their limitations and abilities. He emphasizes that the first objective of human engineering is to improve performance. This aspect is closely associated with motion study and work simplification. The second objective is to protect the individual’s physical and mental condition through making work more comfortable, less fatiguing, and less hazardous. Industrial psychologists and physiologists need to work along with design engineers to have designs that make less demand on the limitations of workers. Once industrial engineers develop new methods, training the employees in those methods becomes a responsibility of industrial engineers. Thus in the area of training production operators, the HRM training specialists create the training environment and schedules and industrial engineers act as trainers. In Job evaluation exercises, industrial engineers are involved actively to arrive at the job analysis. Incentive scheme calculations are undertaken by IE departments in many companies. Industrial engineers operate incentive schemes as they can adjust standard times appropriately from time to time and calculate incentives and explain the rationale to workmen more easily.

THE PURPOSE AND EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING

 EMPIRICAL ROOTS AND EARLY THINKERS

The empirical roots of the profession date back to the Industrial Revolution, which began in England during the mid-eighteenth century.

The concept of a production system, which lies at the core of modern industrial engineering practice and research, had its genesis in the factories created as a result of innovations in industrial revolution.

The concepts presented by Adam Smith in his treatise The Wealth of Nations also lie at the foundation of what eventually became the theory and practice of industrial engineering. His writings on concepts such as the division of labor and the “invisible hand” of capitalism served to motivate many of the technological innovators of the Industrial Revolution to establish and implement factory systems. Examples of these developments include Arkwright’s implementation of management control systems to regulate production and the output of factory workers, and the well-organized factory that Watt, together with an associate, Matthew Boulton, built to produce steam engines.

   An early contributor to concepts that eventually became associated with industrial engineering was Charles Babbage. The findings that he made as a result of visits to factories in England and the United States in the early 1800s were documented in his book entitled On the Economy of Machinery and Manufacturers. The book includes subjects such as the time required for learning a particular task, the effects of subdividing tasks into smaller and less detailed elements, the time and cost savings associated with changing from one task to another, and the advantages to be gained by repetitive tasks. In his classic example on the manufacture of straight pins, Babbage extends the work of Adam Smith on the division of labor by showing that money could be saved by assigning lesser-paid workers (in those days women and children) to lesser-skilled operations and restricting the higher-skilled, higher paid workers to only those operations requiring higher skill levels. Babbage also discusses notions related to wage payments, issues related to present-day profit sharing plans, and even ideas associated with the organization of labor and labor relations

 Babbage’s ideas got further support by the efforts of Eli Whitney and Simeon North’s innovation of interchangeable parts. Under Whitney’s system, the individual parts were mass-produced to tolerances tight enough to enable their use in any finished product. The division of labor called for by Adam Smith could now be carried out to an extent never before achievable, with individual workers producing single parts rather than completed products. The result was a significant reduction in the need for specialized skills on the part of the workers—a result that eventually led to the industrial environment, which became the object of study of Frederick W. Taylor, the person who was given the honor being name founder of industrial engineering or father of industrial engineering.

Pioneers of Industrial Engineering

Frederick Taylor, Frank Gilbreth and Harrington Emerson have to be given the principal credit for giving birth to industrial engineering discipline. Taylor and Gilbreth worked in the area of human effort engineering that promotes efficiency in production systems. Emerson specifically worked on the efficiency dimension of systems.

Taylor and Scientific Management

One cannot presume to be well versed in the origins of industrial engineering without reading Taylor’s  books: Shop Management and The Principles of Scientific Management. An engineer to the core, he earned a degree in mechanical engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology and developed several inventions for which he received patents. His engineering accomplishments would have been sufficient to guarantee him a place in history. His contributions to management that resulted in a set of principles and concepts  which were considered by Drucker to be “possibly the most powerful as well as lasting contribution America has made to Western thought since the Federalist Papers.”

   

The core of Taylor’s system consisted of breaking down the production process into its component parts and improving the efficiency of each. He honed manual tasks to maximum efficiency by examining each component separately and eliminating all false, slow, and useless movements. Mechanical work was accelerated through the use of jigs, fixtures, and other devices—many invented by Taylor himself. In essence, Taylor was trying to do for work units what Whitney had done for material units: standardize them and make them interchangeable.

  

Improvement of work efficiency under the Taylor system was based on the analysis and improvement of work methods, reduction of the time required to carry out the work, and the development of work standards. With an abiding faith in the scientific method, Taylor’s contribution to the development of “time study” was his way of seeking the same level of predictability and precision for manual tasks that he had achieved with his formulas for metal cutting.

  

Taylor’s interest in what today we classify as the area of work measurement was also motivated by the information that studies of this nature could supply for planning activities. In this sense, his work laid the foundation for a broader “science of planning”: a science totally empirical in nature but one that he was able to demonstrate could significantly improve productivity.

To Taylor, scientific management was a philosophy based not only on the scientific study of work but also on the scientific selection, education, and development of workers. His classic experiments in shoveling coal, which he initiated at the Bethlehem Steel Corporation in 1898, not only resulted in development of standards and methods for carrying out this task, but also led to the creation of tool and storage rooms as service departments, the development of inventory and ordering systems, the creation of personnel departments for worker selection, the creation of training departments to instruct workers in the standard methods, recognition of the importance of the layout of manufacturing facilities to ensure minimum movement of people and materials, the creation of departments for organizing and planning production, and the development of incentive payment systems to reward those workers able to exceed standard outputs. Any doubt about Taylor’s impact on the birth and development of industrial engineering should be erased by simply correlating the previously described functions with many of the fields of work and topics that continue to play a major role in the practice of the profession and its educational content at the university level.

Frank Gilbreth

Frank Gilbreth’s application of the scientific method to the laying of bricks produced results that were as revolutionary as those of Taylor’s shoveling experiment. He  extended the concepts of scientific management to the identification, analysis, and measurement of fundamental motions involved in performing work. By applying the motion-picture camera to the task of analyzing motions he was  able to categorize the elements of human motions into 18 basic elements or therbligs. This development marked a distinct step forward in the analysis of human work, for the first time permitting analysts to design jobs with knowledge of the time required to perform the job. In many respects these developments also marked the beginning of the much broader field of human factors or ergonomics.

Lillian Gilbreth, wife of Frank Gilbreth,  provided significant insight and contributions to the human issues associated with their studies. Lillian’s book, The Psychology of Management (based on her doctoral thesis in psychology at Brown University), advanced the premise that because of its emphasis on scientific selection and training, scientific management offered ample opportunity for individual development, while traditional management stifled such development by concentrating power in a central figure. Known as the “first lady of engineering,” she was the first woman to be elected to the National Academy of Engineering and is generally credited with bringing to the industrial engineering profession a concern for human welfare and human relations that was not present in the work of many pioneers of the scientific management movement.

Nabil Raja Damanik (115060700111107)

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Industrial Strength Job Opportunities

"I've been in this business for 25 years now and I would say the job prospects for industrial engineering graduates are as good as I've ever seen them," proclaims Dr. Jasper Shealy, professor and department head, industrial and manufacturing engineering, at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in New York. And Shealy isn't the only academician raving about employment opportunities for new industrial engineers (IEs). Professors and engineering department chairs at both Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, are equally enthusiastic.

Options Abound

"The employment outlook is excellent," notes the University of Michigan's Dr. John Birge, who is professor and department chair, industrial and operations engineering. "Major manufacturers, consulting firms and big accounting firms nationwide are recruiting heavily," he says, noting that systems integration work, "Year 2000" problems and the financial service sector are driving much of the demand for quality engineers right now.
"Manufacturing, service, healthcare, transportation, communications...these are all areas where jobs exist," he adds. "And there's a lot of work coming out of consulting firms. Price Waterhouse is just one example of a large company grabbing as many people as they can."
At Northwestern, Dr. Mark Daskin, professor and department chair, industrial engineering and management services, notes that the positive employment outlook is evidenced by the sheer number of students receiving and accepting solid job offers. "I haven't heard of any students having problems," Daskin reports. "A lot of students have at least one offer, many have accepted positions and some even have multiple offers."
Daskin attributes the upbeat job climate to an overall healthy American economy. Add to that the aggressive recruiting being conducted by many consulting firms, where roughly half of Northwestern's industrial engineering grads go to work, and the news is good, to say the least.
Like Birge at the University of Michigan, Daskin also notes the growing number of financial services businesses seeking to hire engineering grads as more firms turn their focus to information systems. "This kind of work includes things such as helping industry identify the information technologies that are going to be needed and setting up both the technical and organizational systems that are going to use high-tech information processing," Daskin explains.
Along those lines, Birge comments that systems integration is an ever-increasing focus for a lot of firms today. "People are looking at trying to get systems to do more things for them," he says. "They're trying to build intelligence into the systems they already have. IEs are well-prepared for that because they are trained to take a systems view."
Technological advancements in the logistics field are also driving a lot of employment, according to Birge. "Managing and structuring global satellite systems has been a particularly strong area for industrial engineers," he says.
A slight variation on the hiring trend comes from Shaly at RIT. "It appears that more medium-sized companies, as opposed to the very large or very small companies out there, are recruiting our students," he says.

Crucial Co-op Connections

Thanks to a strong cooperative education program at RIT, graduates there rarely have difficulty finding industry positions, particularly in a climate so positively fueled by a healthy economy. "Our co-op based program gives RIT students a major advantage," Shealy says. "Roughly half of the job offers that come through are from co-op employers. As a result of five quarters of co-op experience, our students have a wealth of practical experience to draw from. When they join a company they are already contributing members."
Louise Carrese is the co-op coordinator for industrial engineering at RIT and she couldn't agree more. "Our co-op program provides a pipeline for job opportunities," Carrese says. "In the area of industrial manufacturing, right now the demand far exceeds our supply. We've had an absolutely outstanding fall and winter recruiting period. We've had a record number of companies coming to campus."
Carrese cites big names like Eastman Kodak, General Motors and Corning as heavy recruiters at RIT. Additionally, smaller companies and service industries are seeking experienced graduates.
"The truth is," Carrese notes, "most of our students start their careers as industrial and manufacturing engineers and then go into business for themselves as consultants. That seems to be the general progression."
Although reputable universities like RIT draw recruiters from across the country, Shealy believes the strongest pull for his students comes from employers in the Northeast. "Our reach is nationwide, but we're more regionally driven," he says.
As for graduates of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Birge says there's no limit to the kinds of offers likely to come in. "Our students get hired in virtually every sector of the economy," he reports. "It's hard to think of places that wouldn't be hiring. Companies are competing in the areas of responsiveness and customization. Responsiveness is something that requires the development of efficient procedures and efficient systems. That's the kind of thing IEs do."
Birge sites Intel as one company hiring a particularly large number of grads from the University of Michigan. "Even chip manufacturers, such as Intel, and semiconductor manufacturers are becoming more efficiency-based rather than just product-based," he comments.

The Skills They Seek

In keeping with all of the economic and business trends affecting employment in the industrial engineering sector, good problem-solving skills seem to be at or near the top of every recruiter's wish list when seeking new-hires. "Employers want someone to be able to take a systems view of things, to look from a broad perspective and be able to isolate the essential parts of any system," Birge says.
"Computing skills are another important emphasis in our program," he adds. "We want our students to be familiar with systems, but also in terms of diagnosis, to be able to lay out a system, define procedures and processes. We also try to give students a good sense of the bottom line, which is what employers want to see."
Daskin of Northwestern notes that in addition to a strong technical background, employers like to see experience in team projects, as well as a solid grip on written and communication skills. "About 30 percent of our graduates have been through a co-op program, so they have a lot of exposure to the business world already," he says.
Lastly, according to Carrese of RIT, companies want new-hires who can hit the ground running. "They want to see a good sense of inner logic. And they want people who can work as part of a team," she says. "Most of the time you're not designing or reviewing projects in a vacuum. You're sitting around the table with a whole team of people who at some point will design, touch or use the product being developed."


Nabil Raja Damanik (115060700111107)


Taken From : http://www.graduatingengineer.com/articles/20000208/Industrial-Engineering