One Piece Flow

One Piece Flow

        Henry Ford is known as the father of the Mass Production System.  The more cars he produced at a single time, the less the overall cost to manufacture each individual car.  The Toyota Production System or, “One Piece Flow”, is in many ways the very opposite.

        In traditional manufacturing, producing large volumes of a given product was more economical than producing smaller volumes.  Reducing the cost per part manufacturing companies could lower prices, sell more parts and in turn enjoy larger profits.  The key factor is reducing the cost to manufacture the product overall.  

        A big way to reduce manufacturing cost is to reduce inventory.  Storing large amounts of inventory is a bad idea as it routinely is moved, lost, found and moved again.  Also there is always a risk of quality and engineering issues causing you to lose all built inventory.  With large amounts of work in progress, problems are not visible as everyone is busy.  Inventory can be greatly reduced through the use of a, “Just in Time”, methodology.  “Just in Time” can be accomplished through the use of a “Kanban”.  This could just be a designated space at a set workstation.  When this space becomes empty, that in turn generates an order to the previous workstation for more parts.  This is done from the buyer back through the production process.  

        Through these practices you are limiting inventory and, in turn, quality and engineering risks.  Also, if a problem occurs in the manufacturing process, it will be immediately recognized.  Believe it or not, mass production is still an ideology that many companies still can’t see past.