Monthly Archives: March 2011

The Lean Approach to Context Switching

A great insight of lean manufacturing was recognizing the pivotal importance of reducing changeover costs. American manufacturers would run the same parts on their stamping machines for two weeks because it took 24 hours to changeover the machine. Along came the Japanese, who reduced the changeover time by 100x, and suddenly short run lengths became cost-effective. With shorter run lengths, batch sizes became smaller, and this improved quality, efficiency, and flow-through time. The great blindness of the American manufacturers was accepting the cost of changeovers as immutable. This condemned them to use large batch sizes. Continue reading