By: Ireland (boh.delete@this.outlook.ie), January 25, 2017 4:36 pm
Room: Moderated Discussions
anon (anon.delete@this.anon.com) on January 25, 2017 3:27 pm wrote:
> You can keep a coal furnace fed all the time.
In theory, you absolutely can, which is why a lot of production processes end up with large furnaces designed to maximum efficiency and profit.
However, here is the glitch.
The thing to think about here, which might help imagine it, is actually 'Lean manufacture'. One of the problems that often one finds in a production process, is there is one very large, powerful machine in the middle of the process, that doesn't balance well with the whole process. What they often do, in designing a 'lean manufacturing' system, is to pull these large machines out of the process, and replace them with smaller ones. The flow going through the whole process then, works a lot better. The literature on lean manufacture is actually very illuminating about this phenomenon.
There's a whole lot of aspects to it really. There's the ability with smaller machines, to be able to re-configure them fast, in order to run different products through the line, and so forth. I.e. If there are 'reject' finished items falling off the end of the line, then it's easy to go back and fix the problem at where it needs to get fixed, before you've ended up with a giant pile of inventory, that is all defective in some way. If that makes sense?
> You can keep a coal furnace fed all the time.
In theory, you absolutely can, which is why a lot of production processes end up with large furnaces designed to maximum efficiency and profit.
However, here is the glitch.
The thing to think about here, which might help imagine it, is actually 'Lean manufacture'. One of the problems that often one finds in a production process, is there is one very large, powerful machine in the middle of the process, that doesn't balance well with the whole process. What they often do, in designing a 'lean manufacturing' system, is to pull these large machines out of the process, and replace them with smaller ones. The flow going through the whole process then, works a lot better. The literature on lean manufacture is actually very illuminating about this phenomenon.
There's a whole lot of aspects to it really. There's the ability with smaller machines, to be able to re-configure them fast, in order to run different products through the line, and so forth. I.e. If there are 'reject' finished items falling off the end of the line, then it's easy to go back and fix the problem at where it needs to get fixed, before you've ended up with a giant pile of inventory, that is all defective in some way. If that makes sense?