The Lean Guy's First Post

This is the first blog posting for us at Genoa Design so let's start with a very brief history of our lean journey. We've been working towards creating a lean operation for a number of years now and have many successes to boast of for our efforts. We have created value for our customer by removing waste from our processes. We've been committed to getting there (pursuit of perfection) and have recently been able to begin some analysis that we've been wanting to do for a long time.

At Genoa, we believe ..scratch that...we know that there are relationships between type of ship, type of unit (bow, stern, midbody, superstructure etc.), number of parts, weight, volume of unit, and hours required to model, assemble, etc..

Knowing that these relationships exist, we've been able to collect data from previous and ongoing projects that will help us analyze how they are related. We have 16 projects under analysis with others to add, and we're capturing information on volume, no. of parts, projects hours, type of unit etc. Thousands and thousands of points of data to analyze.

What to do with all of this data? Let's get back to lean...the first question in developing a lean future state in a production environment is ..What is the takt time? ...ie: the relationship between customer demand and available working time. This information will help us get toward establishing customer demand in our environment...no small feat I assure you because in our world, you can't see widgets go down the production line, but we still want to be able to establish a sense of "flow of product" and visual indicators of pace of production.

What we will know for example, is that to model a part in a midbody on a barge it will take (on average) a certain amount of time...as it will also take a certain amount of time to do other types of units for other types of ships. This will bring us ever closer to the establishing the elusive takt time for our operation.

What else will this give us? Among other known and yet to be determined benefits this data will give us;

• the ability to accelerate the bidding process by using models to estimate cost
  improvements in project management
• a basis to create a visual tracking system for projects based on takt time
  and a base to build upon and add to as we move ahead.

This is not rocket science ( or as Don Cherry says "rocket surgery" ) but it's tedious and necessary to achieve our end. Later we'll share the results of our analysis.

Ken Hogan
Lean guy at Genoa