Great article!

“Akio also seems to put much more emphasis on product development than on production. While previously these two departments had equal power, nowadays production management is falling behind, receiving less budget, personnel, and attention. It is also more difficult to make a career out of production. There are not many directors left that come from production. I have been told that as a result, the production performance suffers.”

Sadly this is increasingly becoming a trend across multiple industries. If you need to grow in career, there is way less avenues in manufacturing. Manufacturing/production is deemed as old school which is so opposite to the truth of advancements and innovation carried by the small companies revolutionizing every day activities with Kaizen!
The field is also getting deemed as non glamorous among millennials and hiring becomes an issue leading to overloaded supervisors leading to a culture of quick fixes and fire fight. Not sure what the end answer is but I love manufacturing!

As for you question: It is comparable for similar systems, and definitely comparable for final assembly lines in automotive. All the assembly lines I visited had a work sequence consisting of a combination of “worker pick up material, walk to car, attach part, attach next part, wait for next vehicle, etc.”. (I noted it if it was not a final assembly but e.g. a door or engine assembly). The method is not comparable for more automated system, e.g. milling of engine blocks, where the worker waits a long time for a machine to have problems and then fixes it, i.e. they would have 100% non-value-add. My data is from different sections along the lines of different workers doing different steps. I don’t want to compare workers doing the same task, but want to compare how well companies set up the assembly line for their workers overall, and I think the approach works quite well.

On team leaders: I tried to figure out the lowest level supervisor that is not assembling full time but is there to help with trouble or if someone needs a bathroom break or so. As such I am dependent on the knowledge of the person talking to me (and my Japanese language skills). I believe the data is as good as I can make it considering the circumstances, but cannot guarantee accuraccy for every plant I visited.

Hope this helps, keep on reading 

Chris

I have two questions. The first is about your methodology for determining value-adding and non-value-adding time. Are you confident that your methodology is a reliable indicator. I am asking because it seems to me that in order for it to be reliable you would need to be sure that a) you are observing the exact same operations (installing doors for example, versus casting or the paint shop. I would assume that within any plant you would have different results in different operations. b) work activities varies in operations depending on cycles of new model start up, new equipment installation, etc. etc. Are these held constant in your observations? And third (not to be a pain in the…), if I understand correctly, these are observations conducted only by yourself. Since they are behavioral observations would you not need inter-rater reliability to validate them. In asking these questions I am not challenging the outcome since I have no basis to do that, but I am wondering how much stock to put in this data.

Second question about team leaders: The term team leader is used in different ways in different companies. I was involved at Honda some years ago and they had a “team coordinator” who was the first level salaried position. A team coordinator might have three teams for which he was responsible. On each team there might be (I have seen this in a number of companies) an hourly “team lead” who may even be elected or rotated among the hourly team members. So, when you looked at the number of team members per team leader are you confident that you were comparing apples to apples, comparable structures and use of the term?

Thanks and again your blog is very informative.

Larry Miller