Fundamentals of World Class Manufacturing

It could be known by different terminologies; some call it TPS (Toyota Production

System), others WCM (World Class Manufacturing), some call it LEAN and some call it
Operational Excellence finally, to sum it up, all world-class organizations have
different frameworks or structures. But as it is said, All roads lead to Rome. All
systems lead to one destination of world-class performance.

World Class Manufacturing is a management philosophy that helps to eliminate waste,

improve efficiency and effectiveness of man and the machine, streamline the process,
optimize inventory levels and the most important improve employee morale. It aims to
inculcate the culture of continual improvement in the employees. It trains the
employees to accept change and imbibes the thought Change is Permanent. It is
based on the principle that there is always room for improvement and we as an
organization should continuously work towards it.

Team Faber strongly believes that World Class Manufacturing (WCM) practices or as we
call it Operational Excellence (OE) practices always help organizations to be more
effective and efficient and in turn helps them to perform better. In this field of WCM /
OE, team Faber has several modules that can be customized to build and sustain high-
performing teams.
Let us look at the fundamental principles of World Class Manufacturing:

Operational Excellence Foundations

The focus here is to work on elimination of waste and non-value adding activities
in the organization. Physical workplace improvement is also part of OE
Foundation and tools like Five S can be deployed to strengthen it. As a part of OE
foundations, Team Faber looks at the basic stability of man, machine, material,
and methods.

Flow Management
Material or information flow improvement can be achieved via traditional yet
powerful Value Stream Mapping (VSM) tool. The aim is to identify every non-value
adding activity and all inefficiencies in the process and to reduce/ eliminate it. It
is done using Current and Future State maps.

It also involves maintaining optimum inventory levels by various inventory

management modules, Kanban implementation, supply chain management, milk
runs and other tools.

Equipment Management
Machine health is as important as managing the human resource. Equipment
management ensures that the machines are up and running and are performing
at rated capacity and quality levels. This is delivered by Team Faber by deploying
elements from the house of Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) like
Autonomous Maintenance (PM), Planned Maintenance (PM), Kobetsu Kaizen
(KK) and measurement matrices like Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE),
Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) and Mean Time To Repair (MTTR).

Lean Six Sigma

Lean Six Sigma is Quality Management framework which aims at the elimination
of waste along with the reduction of defects in the process. It can be achieved by
using tools like Total Quality Management (TQM), 7 QC Tools, Low-Cost
Automation, Poka Yoke, Six Sigma Achievement (DMAIC) and others as
applicable.

Sustenance Management
All the above can be achieved, but what is important and difficult is making OE a
part of organizations culture. As the organizations start reaping gains with OE
practices, it needs to understand that it is not a one-time process, it needs to be
a continuous activity. 90% of the organizations which start structured
improvement initiative complain that they do implement OE tools but sustenance
has always been an issue. To solve this issue of sustenance, Team Faber helps
client teams with Daily work Management (DWM) framework. DWM is a
methodology that focuses on preserving and improving the performance of an
organizations productivity, quality, cost, delivery, safety, and morale.

To conclude I would like to quote Benjamin Franklin- Whenever you are finished
Changing, you are finished. So watch out for the change, accept it, work on it and sail
smoothly in this competitive world.