Do you see designers in your organization busy with their daily work?
I work overtime until late at night and drink coffee with a lifeless look every morning.
I often see engineers who have become normal every day.
The economy is recovering, the sales of products are doubling, and the amount of the recession so far.
There may be cases where you want to survive without increasing the number of engineers trying to recover.
Even if we try to increase the number of staff, it is tough to find and train excellent engineers immediately.
Even in such a case, it is too early to give up.
It is a standard of Kaizen, but we will start by looking at the actual situation of the designer's work.
Many designers work 200 hours a month.
Let's analyze the actual situation of the designer in detail.
It is also Kaizen's standard, but we will stratify his work from the perspective of adding value to our customers.
Stratification is a QC term that means to classify.
Designer It is to design a good product that pleases our customers.
His output will be a product drawing.
When creating a product drawing, he inputs information on design conditions, such as customer requirements, into his head.
The information input in his head is written in the product drawing, with the technical knowledge in his head added.
By repeating this, the product drawing is completed.
So you can see that the information written in the product drawing has changed from the information that was initially input in his blain.
Seeing if the information changes can help determine if it has added value.
From this point of view, they can say that the added value of the designer is the time to process the information in his head and the time to write it out.
Usually, it's not that much time.
Still, I think it will take a lot of time to consider new technologies, structures, quality standards and cost reductions, but I don't think it will take much time to customize detailed designs and standard models.
Since the designer is a person who has accumulated technical expertise, I would like him to spend his time only on the above-mentioned value-adding work.
It is the same at the manufacturing site in physical space.
In the Toyota Production System, we use net person-hours and incidental person-hours, but you can see if things are changing.
It is also called processing and stagnation.
In any case, it means whether or not we are adding value to the customer's request.
You can see the physical changes at the manufacturing site and measure the time with a stopwatch.
In the designer's information space, you cannot see the information being processed in your head, but you can devise various ways to visualize it.
Designer It is to design a good product that pleases our customers.
His output will be a product drawing.
When creating a product drawing, he inputs information on design conditions, such as customer requests, into his brain.
The information input in his head is added with the technical knowledge that was in his head,
It will be written in the product drawing.
So you can see that the information written in the product drawing has changed from the information that was initially input in his head.
Seeing if the information changes can help determine if it has added value.
By the way, I tried to show the concept of KaizenKaizen by stratifying the designer's work that I just explained in the above figure.
The actual time of the designer before KaizenKaizen is the leftmost bar.
It is stratified with and without added value.
The first thing that you should cut at the top is not immediately.
Next, the work that the computer will replace will be replaced.
Designers are relied on because they have more technical knowledge of the product than anyone else.
It's quick and easy for some people to make a good decision based on the disclosed technical knowledge, so I often ask the designer over the phone.
The designer must interrupt his work and answer the call.
Not only that, but due to the designer's mistakes, he is called from the manufacturing site and receives questions.
Such interruptions can also be a significant source of mistakes.
Eradication of mistakes is to collect sample cases of mistakes, identify the factors by why-why analysis, and eradicate them.
(Please refer to the separate article for a why-why analysis.)
If you don't solve these problems, real automation won't work.
If there is a machine that can answer such mistakes and inquiries, we should proceed with mechanization, but unfortunately, we have never heard of such a dreamy story in our world.
In addition, some jobs cannot be eliminated or reduced at this point and can be transferred to people without design expertise.
Another person can help with procedural tasks such as drawing registration and processing.
If you consider it carefully, you will remove most of the waste.
And for the designer, only "what the designer should do" remains.
Improving the invisible information space
Kaizen's idea of manufacturing in physical space is alive.