I am rereading Henry Ford’s 1923 book “My Life and Work”. The best book ever written, in my opinion, on the Toyota Production System (TPS). Yes, TPS. Everything that Toyota does as part of their famous manufacturing philosophy was already being practiced by Henry Ford 100 years ago. Just in time, kanban, kaizen, fanaticism about quality, relentless war on waste and more. If you have not read the book, you need to. Drop a note to johnhenry@changeover.com and I’ll send you a PDF copy. Or you can download it as a free audio book.

Something that caught my eye this time through was this:

“Save ten steps a day for each of twelve thousand employees and you will have saved fifty miles of wasted motion and misspent energy.”

If you’ve read my writing before, you know that I am a bit fanatic about how even small improvements have huge results. Reduce line downtime by 10 minutes a day and you gain a week of additional production. I’ve thought about wasted walking but this sentence really brought it home to me.

At first glance, 10 extra steps per day seems like nothing. Over the course of a year, for one person, it is about 11 miles. What value is being added in those 11 miles? Generally none at all.

A few years ago I was working with a production team to improve changeover on a tube filling and cartoning line. The way they were adjusting the filler required walking around the end of the line several times as shown on the left:

During an observation of the changeover one of the operators timed the mechanic. We found that, in addition to the time spent making the adjustments, they spent 5 minutes walking.

A bit of brainstorming later, the team decided that all adjustments could be made on one side then on the other as shown on the right.

How much time is being lost in your plant just walking around unnecessarily? Charting this on a spaghetti diagram can be an interesting exercise. Then figure out how to eliminate and simplify movement.

Think of the money you’ll save on shoe leather!