ABSTRACT
To achieve continuous flow in the work cells, it is important to have and maintain a robust material delivery and pickup system. A medical device company was very consistent with the completion of their daily production form, which allowed them to quickly identify critical issues that caused the production line to not flow in a continuous manner. You can see by the production form in Table 13.1 that missing and bad parts were a major problem. One company I was working with used an Andon clock to track, for one year, the amount of time their production line was down. To their surprise, they had over 2200 man-hours of lost time, of which 66% was due to lack of parts on the production line. That meant that 1452 production man-hours were lost due to a lack of usable parts on the production line. So now you can see how important proper flow of materials is. One big question is: How does a Lean material system fit with MRP (Material Requirements Planning)? There are some major changes in the way you will manage your raw material. However, MRP does not go away; instead, it becomes more of a highlevel strategic tool used for long-range planning and a tool for purchasing negotiations. For the small company, it may not even have an MRP system and may already be using a spreadsheet or other type of database, or even a manual system to plan material.
