Industrial Engineering, the magic for improving production efficiency

             Frank  Aug. 10, 2013    in Waterloo Ontario Canada

      http://frank-waterloo.blog.163.com/blog/static/20523902920137105829821/ 

    There was a story, it happened in China after economic reform from planning economy to marketing economy.

    A garment factory received a large order, it should have been a good thing, but the factory owner worried about very much without the feeling of happy. Because of, according to the existing production capacity, he could not finish the order on time. Also, it was too late to buy equipments and training new operators.

    Mayor learnt that and came to have a check, then, he gave a solution: Rearranging the sewing machine to be connected each other closely according to the process of production from the state of evenly dispersed, so that operators could push their semi-finished products directly to the operators in next process. 

    This way largely accelerated the efficiency of the production and completed the order ahead of the deadline without penny spending but saved the cost by cutting down the job positions for transferring the semi-finished products’ between the different production processes, which is the way that has been working for decades in the period of planning economy.

    The Mayor told the owner, the improvement method is called as industrial engineering. It can get larger output by a lesser input even without any spending.

    According to <Industrial engineering> of Wikipedia that modified on August 6 2013, that “Industrial engineering is a branch of engineering dealing with the optimization of complex processes or systems. It is concerned with the development, improvement, implementation and evaluation of integrated systems of people, money, knowledge, information, equipment, energy, materials, analysis and synthesis……..”

     “Depending on the subspecialties involved, industrial engineering may also be known as, or overlap with, operations management, management science, operations research, systems engineering, manufacturing engineering, ergonomics or human factors engineering, safety engineering, or others, depending on the viewpoint or motives of the user.” 

     As my experiences, that many initial designs of machines or production technologies are not perfect with somewhat shortcomings despite the designer has considered every possibility carefully. They need to be found and improved in practical use.

    In the realistic production, there is much such room for improving but lacks being paid attention because most of business' owners are never thinking of motivating their employee to think about why and how. The production lines' operatives are the main force of this activity.

    Since that the improvement requires repeated personal observation or experience, the operators who are working daily on the production line is easily to find them, rather than that of technicians or management staff who never practically operate in person.

    The improvement processes are often very simple but have big potential of cost saving. The results are often contrary to the common sense of the public. People would be surprised to ask that, why I did not think of about that before. Because the improvement process is too simple, too easy, so that beneficiaries are even unwilling to pay for the suggestions provider.

    In China, the Enterprises set up three-pronged team by operators of production line, technicians and managements' staff. The operators are able to find the problems, but may be without the ability to solve the problems, so they need the help of the technicians for doing some design, and the managements' staff may help to organize the whole practice.

    In the article <The DNA of the Success of German Manufacturing>, I mentioned that, the driving force for German outstanding manufacturing mainly comes from their legislated management for rationalization proposals - a kind of Industrial engineering, which is with profit-related bonus to motivate all staff to pay their full talent into the business running, since Mr.Friedrich Alfred Krupp initiated it in 1872. Now, in all German businesses, their staff can use computer network systems to easily submit or query their proposals.

    Above incentive methods are common in China for decades, which is why that China's economy has rapidly developed within a decades and it said that is the process of a century in other countries, and now the daily goods that labeled with made in China are throughout the world.

    PWO, a German company located in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada has box for employees' providing rationalization suggestions, Besides the forms and pen for writing suggestions, there is a detailed instruction also. From here, we can learn the reasons that German manufacturing sector has been dominating the world.

    Here is an example. July 13, 2013, I had my car made Wheel Alignment in a garage in Toronto. In there, the talks were certainly about cars. 

    Before my turn, a German Mercedes-Benz car was being fixed on the Machine of Wheel Alignment. The owner was a friendly talkative immigrant from Guyana. We had a friendly chat.

    I asked him with that, “according to your experience, which country made car is the best?” He said: “German car. My home has 3 cars under my name. One is made in Japan, one is made in U.S., and the one here - German car, and this one is the best. The other cars are driving by my wife and my daughter; I make daily maintenances for all cars. Some time we exchange cars for driving”. He continued with finger pointing his car: “this car was made in 1992, now it is more than 20 years already, no any rust on the body, it is amazing. This car saves gas and driving is perfect”.  
    The rust on the car body is the headache for the drivers in North America due to using salt to melt snow on the road in winter. Salt water poured onto the body of car, in the area of paint defects to accelerate corrosion rate by forming reaction of micro-cell. 
    It is why, Guyanan driver said that it is amazing for a more than 20 years car no any rust on the body.

    In contrast, according to my personal experiences in past 11 years working different types of enterprises, many of local Canadian companies are not only have no the box for rationalization suggestions, but also even their employees dared not speak out good ideas. 

    It was a part of my jobs to search and make innovation in large scale production in China. And as a hobby that has made trouble for myself in Canada, due to I can not help but to speak some suggestions for improving production, which made some people displeasure in the workplace of Canadian Enterprises.

    I firmly believed that it is one of important reason that Canada’s mid-sized firms in decline, and it is the motivation that I has been writing articles to discuss corporate management.