ABSTRACT
The next step in stabilizing production is to evaluate your own operations. You have already begun your self-evaluation by creating your safety stock, but there is much more to know about your own operations before you can shift your production process to a pull system and go lean. Self-evaluation includes looking at five aspects of your operation:
1. Determining and verifying operator cycle times
2. Balancing the line
3. Calculating machine capacity
4. Assessing process capability
5. Calculating WIP inventory
Once you understand customer demand, you are almost ready to design and staff an assembly operation that will meet demand successfully and efficiently. When you created your value stream maps, you probably took some simple cycle time measurements of the process steps to complete the maps quickly. At this point, as you move toward a future state cell that works the way you want it to work, you must delve more deeply into each step to evaluate your operation. This can only be done on the shop floor.
