Climbing the highest mountain in Northern Europe, a few thoughts on the Theory of Constraints came to my mind. To get to Galdhøpiggen, 2469 meters above sea level, the most common route takes you over a glacier where rope teams are used for safety reasons. In his must-read book “the Goal”, Eli Goldratt (1984) uses rope teams to illustrate an efficient production system.
In rope team towards Galdhøpiggen, Norway, 21-7-2013
It has become extremely popular for companies in any business to pursue the principles of lean production, Six Sigma, TQM, TPM etc. A new development in recent years is that multinational companies develop global and group-wide systems for process improvement based on all these concepts: The XPS. Then, what are the top XPS/lean principles in use?
[This post is an excerpt from my article “People at the wheel – Volvo’s lean journey” co-authored with Ebly Sanchez at Volvo, and freshly published in the Lean Management Journal.]
High-tech products are foreseen to build the future competitiveness of the Western economies’ manufacturing sectors. However – what probably will become the most important manufacturing paradigm for the Western economies – lacks proper theoretical concepts and frameworks for industrialisation. Lean & co are simply not suitable enough for high-tech, customized, knowledge-intensive and lower-volume production. In order to remain competitive there has been a need to develop new production concepts with belonging methods, systems and tools for modern high-tech and mass-customised production systems. A good thing then that someone has made an effort to close this gap…
Do you need a company-specific Production System (XPS) to boost your operational improvement? Yes you do. Here are three reasons why:
XPS stands for “Company-specific Production System” [1], and describes a corporate-wide system that aims to improve and maintain a competitive operations system. Many multinational companies have implemented an XPS today: Examples are the Bosch Production System, Boeing Production System, Audi Production System, Lego Production System, John Deere Quality and Production System, Alcoa Business System, REC Production System, Electrolux Manufacturing System, and so on and so on…
Example of a typical XPS: the Electrolux Manufacturing System [2]