[AT] OT Lean

[James Peck]

Back in the late 80s I was assigned to a project to build some reaction injection molding equipment for Toyota. It was costed and quoted like it was the same as four previous systems. Turns out that Toyota had 27 Kaizens that they wanted the equipment to meet even thought they had not been incorporated into the spec we quoted. Those were dangled as bait. The man with company profit and loss responsibility took the order including the 27 kaizens at the quoted rice.

This required us to do a lot of redesign instead of running off the prints and making two more. We eventually got a PO to modify the four originals to include the Kaizen changes which brought us back up to break even.  We ended up cutting the press frame apart and rewelding it on the Toyota factory floor.

I got to see a Kaizen team meeting for 5 minutes at the end of their shift.

Dennis Johnson AT List Member (moscowengnr at outlook.com); Generally designed by the company building them. Most of them had averaged around 2000 man hours per unit for assembly, paint, startup and testing. Part fabrication was subcontracted. Examples are Frac pumps, cement units, blending units, etc. I have been part and lead of teams for cost reduction at various times. The biggest impact was generally design changes to reduce part cost, and sometimes make assembly easier.