TABLE OF CONTENTS Emca's activities have not gone unnoticed at Emca corporate. Today, Emca's other divisions are sending "scouts" to Emca Golf in order to benchmark them and learn their best practices. But Emca Golf still has a great deal to do to realize their "1st generation future state."
Emca Golf's kanban team must now implement the kanban system they designed. This means they must:
Make it real on the factory floor.
Train those who will be using the system.
Test the system.
Adjust it as necessary.
Properly maintain their new kanban pull system.
In doing so, they will further expand their knowledge of kanban pull systems and attain the many benefits they were seeking.
Emca Golf's mid-term focus will address the various kaizen burst opportunities remaining on their value stream map. Prioritizing which opportunities to attack first will require some speculation (also known as "what-iffing") as to the overall impact on the value stream.
Emca Golf needs to ask questions such as, Which improvement will have the greatest positive impact on the customer? Will it be if they:
Conduct a machine reliability kaizen on Machine Center 1 and as a result, its uptime increases from 60% to 90%?
Conduct a set-up reduction kaizen on Machine Center 2 that reduces the set-up time from 30 minutes to 8 minutes?
Extend kanban to raw material suppliers?
Extend flow to include packaging?
An important outcome of robust "what-iffing" with a value stream is gaining an understanding of...
