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Difference between ISO 9000 and Lean Manufacturing |
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If you have any questions about our Quality Matrix, or wish to make any comments, please feel free to send a message to us at quality@artige.com. |
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| Overview |
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This analysis is just one of many comparisons that are offered as part of the Artige Quality Matrix, which can be seen here in its original form. The definitions that are used in these comparisons are the ones that we at the Artige Company use internally and with our clients, derived from the research that we perform as a matter of due course. These definitions are derived from natural laws of physics and statistics, in order to screen our work from the effects of the business press. The original article where these terms are discussed appears here. In other words, we like to think that this work will withstand the scourges of time and not be categorized as "management du jour". |
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| ISO 9000 |
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Definition |
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It is one thing to claim that one's firm produces quality products, but it is another for your trading partners to know that this is true. So a bureaucracy was established where third parties could verify a company's claims of quality products. Question is, how do you measure quality? The answer is to document a firm's practices and audit the firm for compliance to its own procedures. |
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This methodology involves administrating a culture of rules and documentation. A natural fit for enterprises that already operate under a bureaucratic culture. The documentation includes not only current practices, but also the methods for implementing process changes. The audit is meant to verify whether the firm follows the documented rules it wrote up. So in other words, ISO 9000 does not ensure that a product or service is has quality about it. Rather, ISO 9000 certifies that certain process were used, and provides for the manner in which the fact that these processes were used will be confirmed. The assumption is that in always following the same method, the same product (of quality or otherwise) will be delivered. |
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| Lean Manufacturing |
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Definition |
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The main concern of lean manufacturing design is to eliminate waste. The main desire is to reduce the production cycle, which eliminating waste should accomplish. Lean also has a focus on retaining tasks that add value, and eliminating non-value adding tasks. Other concepts having to do with time and waste are important to lean manufacturing. Lean manufacturing is normally driven by customer demand. This brings up the point about what the driver of a business process should be. The two concepts are push and pull. Most concepts of lean involve a pull scenario. This is in comparison to the "traditional", "out-of-date", or "old-fashioned" push scenario. In the good old days companies manufactured to stock, filling warehouses with product that marketing was responsible for emptying out. The push method involves carrying costs and results in various types of waste, especially as the product lifetime came to an end. |
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| Pull-driven |
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In a pure pull scenario, the customer demands the product, and the manufacturer creates or delivers the desired product at the moment the demand signal is received. Based on today's technology, the marketing department closely monitors the customer' needs, or the customers themselves can directly make their own demands, so the firm is able to react very quickly to market conditions. Note the word "react". It is a term that lean and TQM aficionados would like to eliminate from business vocabulary, as it foreshadows the waste to come. To accommodate pulling, minimal amounts of work-in-progress and inventory will be desired in the process design, otherwise there must be additional steps that are adding delay, which will result in waste being generated. |
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| Takt time |
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When considering Lean manufacturing, one also has to take into account the concept of flow, which is driven by a production beat, that being called "takt time". Flow reinforces the notion that lean manufacturing requires constancy and cannot tolerate interruptions, otherwise additional amounts of waste will be generated. The term "takt time" describes the average amount of time it takes to manufacture a product or deliver a service, expressed in terms of a cycle. In other words, one might be able to manufacture one unit of a certain part in 120 seconds. However, if one needed to manufacture 2000 units of the part, will it still take 120 seconds per part? Takt time takes into account the flow of production, and requires that a process to run at a consistent rate, to the constant beat of a production clock. The concept of takt time recognizes that many business processes need to run at a consistent rate in order to maintain the highest quality and still deliver product at a particular volume. With takt time, one can visibly see when a problem might be brewing. If the production rate becomes erratic and inconsistent, or changes from a given norm, then some aspect of the process has failed. However, a period of erratic production may occur when the takt time period was purposefully altered. |
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| Lean Management / Lean Thinking |
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One will see the terms of lean manufacturing, lean management and lean thinking used interchangeably. From what we have found, there is no difference between these terms. They are all driven by the same methodology of cutting waste. The vast majority of lean manufacturing implementations have been applied to manufacturing, but there is no reason why it could not also be applied to service processes. Lean manufacturing would be considered incremental in the rate of change being applied. |
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This last concept of purposefully altering takt time helps explain an inconsistency that one might think exists at first glance between pull-driven manufacturing and takt time. If a lean manufacturing process was based upon a consistent, never-varying takt time, how can it deal with changes in demand? The answer lies in the fact that a takt time system does not react to every demand whim on a first order basis. Rather, a second order function is used, that watches the rate of change in demand. This rate change will manifest itself in a change to the takt time period of the production line. The takt time change may result in some waste (time, resources, cost, depending on the situation). In the end the total cost of operating the production line with a takt time is supposed to compensate for the waste that may occur with individual takt time period changes. |
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| The Difference |
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The Differences and / or Similarities |
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At first glance, one would think that ISO 9000 and the Lean principles do not have much in common, other than the fact that they both deal with the topic of quality. They are both methodologies that can result in some sort of improvement in the quality of the products or services offered. One method is in actuality a quality regime, while the other is based upon redesigning the operating processes. So these two methodologies take different approaches, resulting in different outcomes. |
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Lean Manufacturing offers a direct approach to improving quality in an existing system, through process design changes that are aimed at reducing waste. It also imposes the constraint that the business processes should be driven by customer demand, and provides the hint that a process runs with better quality when it can be run at a consistent rate, according to takt time. In summary, the lean principles offers the benefit of higher quality if one is willing to perform some process redesign and then operate them with the customer and clock in mind. |
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Alternatively, ISO 9000 takes an indirect approach to improving the quality of an organization. The idea espoused by ISO 9000 advocates is that the process of documenting an organization's processes and verifying that the organization actually follows those processes will ensure quality. Of course, one could document and audit processes that lose money and aggravate customers, but still be certified as an ISO 9000 process. Plus indirect methods by definition will have leeway that allows for circumvention of the intent, while still staying within the boundaries of the regulations. |
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So on one hand with Lean Manufacturing we have a methodology that provides specific guidance on how to improve processes that should result in improvement in quality. These are direct steps that one can take, but may not be simple or trivial to implement. One must realize that any time process redesign is suggested, effort must be exerted, and probably capital funds will need to be spent. On the other hand, ISO 9000 brings us another process that uses indirect methods to modify quality, but being indirect, has no guarantee of having any effect (good, bad or indifferent) on the quality of an organization. Just that ISO 9000 can be implemented without any change to the underlying processes. In a sense the fact that operating processes need to be changed or not is the main difference between ISO 9000 and the lean principles. |
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