ABSTRACT
The essential activities of Manufacturing Value Analysis (MVA) are making and using operations improvement sheets and improvement planning charts, all in pursuit of the main objective of doubling productivity. In reality, the direct-manufacturing departments are in many ways driven by the indirect departments. Operations improvement sheets break operations into work elements that can be analyzed to identify waste and other problems. When using MVA, improvement teams should plan countermeasures that have a cumulative work element time savings of about 50 percent. Having reached level four, the factory has implemented both labor-saving and efficiency improvements and has thoroughly eliminated waste from work processes, thereby doubling productivity. Automated manufacturing systems were popular in Japan during the high-growth era, when they were mainly designed and used for large-lot production. The entire plant celebrates success at manufacturing value analysis. Waste has been eliminated from the coupling points between different types of processes and operation times have been cut in half.
