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2020/02/26 | Time to read: 2 min
Jake Summers is the head of continuous improvement at Drishti. In this capacity, Jake leads a team to help Drishti’s customers navigate their production transformations. Prior to joining Drishti, he worked in both aerospace and automotive manufacturing, coaching leadership and kaizen teams at Boeing and Tesla. Jake began his career as an EMT where he learned first-hand the lean principles of standardized work, 5S, and visual controls. Jake continues to practice lean, guiding customers through AI-enabled production system innovations.
Prior to joining Drishti, I was a lean practitioner at Tesla and Boeing. So I’ve been in the trenches, looking for ways to eliminate waste (or muda). When I discovered Drishti, I could immediately see its alignment with the lean manufacturing philosophy, and waste reduction was one of the biggest ways.
Here’s how Drishti addresses five out of the seven mudas in lean manufacturing:
Waiting and motion
Drishti’s technology provides continuous measurement of cycle times. And each cycle time is backed by video evidence (think hundreds of thousands of cycles on video available to you). Let’s say there’s a cycle that’s eight seconds longer than takt time. You quickly pull up that specific cycle and see that your line associate is waiting for a piece to arrive in her station.
You then pull up the cycle at the station directly before that one and note that the associate there is struggling to affix an adhesive strip.
You confer with the design team and revise standard work requirements to dictate a different shape for the adhesive, making it easier to affix and eliminating the upstream bottleneck. The same scenario works for excessive motion: you can eliminate waste like walking from one station to another or repositioning an item as it enters a station by identifying the upstream issues. In fact, one Drishti customer identified opportunities to improve productivity by 29% using this methodology.
Quality defects
There is nothing that can torpedo the relationship between a customer and supplier faster than quality issues. That’s why quality metrics and root cause analysis are enormously important to the lean engineer.
Drishti analytics identify and escalate abnormal cycles for your review, and video documentation makes root cause analysis easy while eliminating the blame game. Meanwhile, Drishti’s rich process data empowers engineers to design more intuitive processes, or illuminate the brilliant outlier, keeping the defect rate low. One customer improved its defect rate by 50% with Drishti – imagine if you could realize even a percentage of that number.
Overproduction and inventory
Products or parts sitting on the floor or in the warehouse are the classic definition of waste. If you’re not assembling what you’ve sold, you have sunk costs. Drishti’s data populates a line flow dashboard refreshes regularly that helps supervisors forecast shift output and avoid either overproduction or overtime costs. The same dashboard identifies bottlenecks and automatically surfaces video.
What happens when you have a major bottleneck at a station that is resulting in half-assembled parts waiting to be transformed into finished products? And what if your finished product is a big ticket item, like a truck or an airliner? How much money is sitting on your factory floor, waiting for you to process it – and how much are you losing every day that it sits? Every week?
A lot of manufacturers want to be lean. A smaller segment of that group calls itself lean. And an even smaller subset actually practices lean. If you’re not addressing waste in the system, you’re not truly lean. Why not give Drishti a chance to show how it can help develop your lean maturity?
Drishti’s deployment programs can identify muda in your factory. Let us show you how.
