Hey everyone, welcome to this lecture difference between traditional mass production and continuous flow. Let us first look at the setup of companies that focus on traditional mass production techniques. That traditionally mass production thinking organizes similar machines and similarly skilled people together. They will set up departments of engineering, accounting, payroll, procurement, manufacturing and the like. This school of thought has the following benefits. Number one, economies of scale, the focus of mass production is to get the most production possible at the lowest per unit out of every piece of equipment or every worker in a manual operation.
The other perceived benefit is potential flexibility in scheduling. When you put individuals with similar skills together in one department, it's easier for them department manager to schedule available equipment and its people to any job that comes up. This is not possible in one piece flow. With the traditional mass production thinking, there may be a potential of capturing these benefits that we just discussed. However, a key question is, how often should you move material or information between departments. Let's look at that with an example.
This diagram illustrates a simplified view of a smartphone manufacturer that is organized into three departments. One department makes circuit board the second makes the body of the phone and attaches the circuit board to the body and the third tests the smartphone. Of course, in the real world, there would be many departments and companies in the supply chain making a complete smartphone. In this model, the management decided it wants to move a batch size of 10 units at a time. Each department takes one minute per unit to do its work. So it takes 10 minutes for a batch of smartphone parts to move through each department, even without considering the time taken to move through each department, it would therefore take 30 minutes to make and test the first batch of 10 smartphones to be shipped to the customer.
And it would take 21 minutes to get the first smartphone ready to ship even though only three minutes of value added work are needed to make that smartphone. Now let's look at the same example from the context of one piece flow or continuous flow. If a lien expert like you were to manage this process, you would take the equipment needed to make the circuit board from the circuit board department. The equipment to make the body of the phone The second department and test and from the test department and then put these three processes next to each other. That is, you would have created a sale to achieve one piece flow, then you would have made clear that operators were not allowed to build up inventory between the three operations. For example, the circuit board maker would not make the next board until the body maker finished building the smartphone body and sending it to the test stand.
In other words, nobody would build more than what is needed immediately. The result is the operators in the sale take just three minutes instead of 21 to make the first smartphone ready to ship, and it takes the lean process just 12 minutes to make 10 smartphones while the batch flow process takes 30 minutes for those 10 smartphones. In fact, the three minutes is pure value added time. What Flo has done is to eliminate overproduction and inventory. With that example, we come to the end of this lecture. Thank you for attending.
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