Lean Simulation Exercise

The Lean Simulation exercise gave our team a unique look inside the managing of a process and how one or two bottlenecks can have drastic effects on the outcome. During the first round, it seemed easy enough to spread out the tasks by number of folds. The first phase of the process was easy, one fold. The second phase was simple as well, just two folds. The third phase was more difficult and this is where the process slowed down substantially. Airplanes were bottlenecking just before the third phase building up WIP and shrinking our profitability. Lean production is based around the concept of continuous flow and any type of bottleneck can turn into waste very quickly. We had waste at every stage of the process by not utilizing our team to its maximum potential. It became obvious that our third stage was overloaded with too many folds while our first and second stage was moving far too fast and under-utilized. Not to mention the fourth stage was simply testing the airplanes to make sure they flew. This resulted in stage four impatiently waiting for stage three to complete the folds while sitting there with nothing to do. Not utilizing the observer was also wasteful. The observer should have been helping at the bottleneck to assist and smooth out the process. We did beat the other team by a significant dollar amount because our WIP was so much smaller. We only created a few more airplanes, however, having less waste in the process proved to be the real boost in profitability.

In the second phase of the competition, we decided utilize the observer to assist with stage 3’s heavy workload. We also decided to have a floater that would walk up and down the assembly line and help out where needed. The floater turned out to be another folder at stage 3 because the workload was still not spread out evenly enough to create a smooth process. The final stage was still being under-utilized, testing