Industrial technology [is the field concerned with the application of] basic engineering principles and technical skills in support of industrial engineers and managers. [Industrial Technology programs typically include] instruction in optimization theory, human factors, organizational behavior, industrial processes, industrial planning procedures, computer applications, and report and presentation preparation.
Planning and designing manufacturing processes and equipment is a main aspect of being an industrial technologist. An Industrial Technologist is the engineer's partner in implementing certain designs and processes. Industrial Technology involves management operation, and maintenance of complex operation systems.
Accreditation and Certification
The Association of Technology, Management, and Applied Engineering (ATMAE), accredits selected collegiate programs in Industrial Technology. Additionally, an instructor or graduate of an Industrial Technology program may choose to become a Certified Technology Manager (CTM) by sitting for a rigorous exam administered by ATMAE and covering essential topics in the field.
ATMAE accreditation is recognized by the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) and holds the same acknowledgement that is given to the Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology (ABET). CHEA recognizes ATMAE and ABET as independent fields which are equal in academic stature but have different objectives in focus and career intentions. It is fitting to conclude that an Industrial Technologist is equal in intellectual distinction to that of an ABET engineer.
Knowledge Base
Industrial Technology includes wide-ranging subject matter and could be viewed as an amalgamation of industrial engineering and business topics with a focus on practicality and management of technical systems with less focus on actual engineering of those systems.
Typical curriculum at a four-year university might include courses on manufacturing process, technology and impact on society, mechanical and electronic systems, quality assurance and control, materials science, packaging, production and operations management, and manufacturing facility planning and design. In addition, the Industrial Technologist may have exposure to more vocational-style education in the form of courses on CNC manufacturing, welding, and other tools-of-the-trade in manufacturing. This differentiates the field of Industrial Technology from other engineering and business disciplines. Graduates of Industrial Technology programs are seen as moderators between engineers, top management and production-line workers.
Industrial Technologist
A common title that Industrial Technologist are characterized under is Production Manager. The reason they are seen as a production manager because they work with a budget on behalf of what the company gives them to work with. Every cost of the materials they use must fit according to the budget that is given to them.
Since Industrial Technologist is not a common job title, the actual bachelor degree obtained by the individual is obscured by the job title. Typical job titles include industrial engineer, construction engineer, detail/fabrication engineer, production supervisor, manufacturing engineer, and variations of these titles.
Industrial Technology program graduates obtain a majority of positions which are engineering and manager oriented. Based on the number of graduates from many Industrial Technology Programs throughout the nation, the next time you meet a manager or engineer you may well be talking to an Industrial Technologist.
The Technologist term is an unknown commodity within the United States and it is not clearly understood by employers so Technologist are inappropriately placed in positions as technicians. Usually, a Technologist is required to have a Bachelors Degree. Employers and Engineers incorrectly determine that Technologists are inferior graduates because their training in design issues is shorter than most engineering degrees. A technologist curriculum may focus on other specialized issues such as technical management, service, processes, or production improvements. In many cases a technologist maybe better suited to fill a position than a design engineer. Industrial Technology is considered to be a career path that is separate from engineering technology and equal in stature to an engineer. The Council for Higher Education (CHEA) acknowledges the different accreditations in technology and engineering as independent career paths which cannot be compared, just as psychology cannot be compared to engineering.
Technological development in industry
A major subject of study is technological development in industry. This has been defined as:
* the introduction of new tools and techniques for performing given tasks in production, distribution, data processing (etc.);
* the mechanization of the production process, or the achievement of a state of greater autonomy of technical production systems from human control, responsibility, or intervention;
* changes in the nature and level of integration of technical production systems, or enhanced interdependence;
* the development, utilization, and application of new scientific ideas, concepts, and information in production and other processes; and
* enhancement of technical performance capabilities, or increase in the efficiency of tools, equipment, and techniques in performing given tasks.
Studies in this area often employ a multi-disciplinary research methodology and shade off into the wider analysis of business and economic growth (development, performance). The studies are often based on a mixture of industrial field research and desk-based data analysis and aim to be of interest and use to practitioners in business management and investment (etc.) as well as academics. In engineering, construction, textiles, food and drugs, chemicals and petroleum, and other industries the focus has been not just on the nature and factors facilitating and hampering the introduction and utilization of new technologies but also on the impact of new technologies on the production organization (etc.) of firms and various social and other wider aspects of the technological development process.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Industrial engineering
Industrial engineering is a branch of engineering concerned with the development, improvement, implementation and evaluation of integrated systems of people, money, knowledge, information, equipment, energy, material and process. It also deals with designing new prototypes to help save money and make the prototype better. Industrial engineering draws upon the principles and methods of engineering analysis and synthesis, as well as mathematical, physical and social sciences together with the principles and methods of engineering analysis and design to specify, predict, and evaluate the results to be obtained from such systems. In lean manufacturing systems, industrial engineers work to eliminate wastes of time, money, materials, energy, and other resources.
Industrial engineering is also known as operations management, management science, systems engineering, or manufacturing engineering, usually depending on the viewpoint or motives of the user. Recruiters or educational establishments use the names to differentiate themselves from others. In healthcare, for example, industrial engineers are more commonly known as management engineers or health systems engineers.
The term "industrial" in industrial engineering can be misleading. While the term originally applied to manufacturing, it has grown to encompass virtually all other industries and services as well. The various topics of concern to industrial engineers include management science, financial engineering, engineering management, supply chain management, process engineering, operations research, systems engineering, ergonomics, value engineering and quality engineering.
Examples of where industrial engineering might be used include designing a new loan system for a bank, streamlining operation and emergency rooms in a hospital, distributing products worldwide (referred to as Supply Chain Management), and shortening lines (or queues) at a bank, hospital, or a theme park. Industrial engineers typically use computer simulation, especially discrete event simulation, for system analysis and evaluation.
Examples of famous Industrial Engineers include Susan Story, CEO of Gulf Power [1], American businessman Lee Iacocca and Mohammad Barghash,Asem Thayabt ,and Nasir Kawalet a Jordanian Industrial Engineers well known in the U.A.E and Jordan for their revolutionary business ideas and skills in Activity Based Costing and Supply chain management .
Universities
US News and World Report's article on "America's Best Colleges 2010" lists schools offering Undergraduate engineering specialties in Industrial or Manufacturing whose highest degree is a doctorate as Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Michigan, Purdue University, Pennsylvania State University-University Park, University of California at Berkeley, Virginia Tech, Texas A&M University, Stanford University, Northwestern University, Cornell University, Milwaukee School of Engineering, Arizona State University, Texas Tech University,Southern Polytechnic State University and the University of Wisconsin–Madison.[2]
Industrial Engineering faculties are well established at South African Universities and include the University of Pretoria, the University of Witwatersrand and Stellenbosch University. The largest Industrial Engineering faculty in South Africa is the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering based at the University of Pretoria.
History
Industrial engineering courses had been taught by multiple universities in the late 1800s along Europe, especially in developed countries such as Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Spain[3]. In the United States, the first department of industrial engineering was established in 1908 as the Harold and Inge Marcus Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering at Penn State.
The first doctoral degree in industrial engineering was awarded in the 1930s by Cornell University.
Postgraduate curriculum
The usual postgraduate degree earned is the Master of Science in Industrial Engineering/Industrial Engineering & Management/Industrial Engineering & Operations Research. The typical MS in IE/IE&M/IE & OR/Management Sciences curriculum includes:
* Operations research & Optimization techniques
* Engineering economics
* Supply chain management & Logistics
* Systems Simulation & Stochastic systems
* System Dynamics & Policy Planning
* System Analysis & Techniques
* Manufacturing systems/Manufacturing engineering
* Human factors engineering & Ergonomics
* Production planning and control
* Management Sciences
* Computer aided manufacturing
* Facilities design & Work space design
* Statistical process control or Quality control
* Time and motion study
* Operations management
* Corporate planning
* Productivity improvement
* Materials management
Demand Flow Technology
Demand Flow Technology is a mathematically based approach to manufacturing that positions a company to become demand driven[1]. It was created by John R. Costanza, an executive with operations management experience at Hewlett Packard and Johnson & Johnson[2]. Costanza founded the John Costanza Institute of Technology in Englewood, CO in 1984 to provide consulting and education services for manufacturers to implement the methodology.
Demand Flow Technology (DFT) uses applied mathematical methods to link raw and in-process materials with units of time and production resources in order to create a continuous flow in the factory. The objective is to link factory processes together in a flow and drive it towards customer demand.
Early adopters of DFT included American Standard Companies[3][4] [5] General Electric [6] and John Deere (Deere & Company).
In the early years, DFT was regarded as a method for "Just-in-time" (JIT), which advocated manufacturing processes driven to actual customer demand via Kanban. It was introduced as a way for American manufacturers to adopt Japanese production techniques, such as Toyota Production System (TPS), whilst avoiding some of the cultural conflicts in applying Japanese business methods in an American company. Later, it has come to be seen as a lean manufacturing method that allows factories to implement techniques such as one-piece flow, TAKT-based line design, Kanban material management and demand-driven production.
Demand Flow Technology is promoted as a method particularly suitable for high-mix, low-volume manufacturing. in 2001, Costanza was awarded a patent for this approach for mixed-model manufacturing
Demand Flow Technology (DFT) uses applied mathematical methods to link raw and in-process materials with units of time and production resources in order to create a continuous flow in the factory. The objective is to link factory processes together in a flow and drive it towards customer demand.
Early adopters of DFT included American Standard Companies[3][4] [5] General Electric [6] and John Deere (Deere & Company).
In the early years, DFT was regarded as a method for "Just-in-time" (JIT), which advocated manufacturing processes driven to actual customer demand via Kanban. It was introduced as a way for American manufacturers to adopt Japanese production techniques, such as Toyota Production System (TPS), whilst avoiding some of the cultural conflicts in applying Japanese business methods in an American company. Later, it has come to be seen as a lean manufacturing method that allows factories to implement techniques such as one-piece flow, TAKT-based line design, Kanban material management and demand-driven production.
Demand Flow Technology is promoted as a method particularly suitable for high-mix, low-volume manufacturing. in 2001, Costanza was awarded a patent for this approach for mixed-model manufacturing
Business process management
Business process management (BPM) is a management approach focused on aligning all aspects of an organization with the wants and needs of clients. It is a holistic management approach[1] that promotes business effectiveness and efficiency while striving for innovation, flexibility, and integration with technology. Business process management attempts to improve processes continuously. It could therefore be described as a "process optimization process." It is argued that BPM enables organizations to be more efficient, more effective and more capable of change than a functionally focused, traditional hierarchical management approach.
Overview
A business process is "a collection of related, structured activities that produce a service or product that meet the needs of a client."[citation needed] These processes are critical to any organization as they generate revenue and often represent a significant proportion of costs. As a managerial approach, (BPM) considers processes to be strategic assets of an organization that must be understood, managed, and improved to deliver value added products and services to clients. This foundation is very similar to other Total Quality Management or Continuous Improvement Process methodologies or approaches. BPM goes a step further by stating that this approach can be supported, or enabled, through technology to ensure the viability of the managerial approach in times of stress and change. In fact, BPM is an approach to integrate a "change capability" to an organization - both human and technological. As such, many BPM articles and pundits often discuss BPM from one of two viewpoints: people and/or technology.
Roughly speaking, the idea of (business) process is as traditional as concepts of tasks, department, production, outputs. The current management and improvement approach, with formal definitions and technical modeling, has been around since the early 1990s (see business process modeling). Note that in the IT community, the term 'business process' is often used as synonymous of management of middleware processes; or integrating application software tasks. This viewpoint may be overly restrictive. This should be kept in mind when reading software engineering papers that refer to 'business processes' or 'business process modeling.'
Although the initial focus of BPM was on the automation of mechanistic business processes, it has since been extended to integrate human-driven processes in which human interaction takes place in series or parallel with the mechanistic processes. For example (in workflow systems), when individual steps in the business process require human intuition or judgment to be performed, these steps are assigned to appropriate members within the organization.
More advanced forms such as human interaction management are in the complex interaction between human workers in performing a workgroup task. In this case, many people and systems interact in structured, ad-hoc, and sometimes completely dynamic ways to complete one to many transactions.
BPM can be used to understand organizations through expanded views that would not otherwise be available to organize and present. These views include the relationships of processes to each other which, when included in the process model, provide for advanced reporting and analysis that would not otherwise be available. BPM is regarded by some as the backbone of enterprise content management.
BPM is a critical part of ITSM - IT Service Management. Without driving good business process management your IT Service Management initiatives would fail. All disciplined IT Service Management implementations include well developed BPM processes.
Because BPM allows organizations to abstract business process from technology infrastructure, it goes far beyond automating business processes (software) or solving business problems (suite). BPM enables business to respond to changing consumer, market, and regulatory demands faster than competitors - creating competitive advantage.
Most recently, technology has allowed the coupling of BPM to other methodologies, such as Six Sigma. BPM tools now allow the user to:
Design - The process or the process improvement
Measure - Simulate the change to the process.
Analyze - Compare the various simulations to determine an optimal improvement
Improve - Select and implement the improvement
Control - Deploy this implementation and by use of User defined dashboards monitor the improvement in real time and feed the performance information back into the simulation model in preparation for the next improvement iteration.
This brings with it the benefit of being able to simulate changes to your business process based on real life data (not assumed knowledge) and also the coupling of BPM to industry methodologies allow the users to continually streamline and optimise the process to ensure it is tuned to its market need.
BPM life-cycle
Business process management activities can be grouped into five categories: design, modeling, execution, monitoring, and optimization
Design
Process Design encompasses both the identification of existing processes and the design of "to-be" processes. Areas of focus include representation of the process flow, the actors within it, alerts & notifications, escalations, Standard Operating Procedures, Service Level Agreements, and task hand-over mechanisms.
Good design reduces the number of problems over the lifetime of the process. Whether or not existing processes are considered, the aim of this step is to ensure that a correct and efficient theoretical design is prepared.
The proposed improvement could be in human-to-human, human-to-system, and system-to-system workflows, and might target regulatory, market, or competitive challenges faced by the businesses.
Modeling
Modeling takes the theoretical design and introduces combinations of variables (e.g., changes in rent or materials costs, which determine how the process might operate under different circumstances).
It also involves running "what-if analysis" on the processes: "What if I have 75% of resources to do the same task?" "What if I want to do the same job for 80% of the current cost?".
Execution
One of the ways to automate processes is to develop or purchase an application that executes the required steps of the process; however, in practice, these applications rarely execute all the steps of the process accurately or completely. Another approach is to use a combination of software and human intervention; however this approach is more complex, making the documentation process difficult.
As a response to these problems, software has been developed that enables the full business process (as developed in the process design activity) to be defined in a computer language which can be directly executed by the computer. The system will either use services in connected applications to perform business operations (e.g. calculating a repayment plan for a loan) or, when a step is too complex to automate, will ask for human input. Compared to either of the previous approaches, directly executing a process definition can be more straightforward and therefore easier to improve. However, automating a process definition requires flexible and comprehensive infrastructure, which typically rules out implementing these systems in a legacy IT environment.
Business rules have been used by systems to provide definitions for governing behaviour, and a business rule engine can be used to drive process execution and resolution.
Monitoring
Monitoring encompasses the tracking of individual processes, so that information on their state can be easily seen, and statistics on the performance of one or more processes can be provided. An example of the tracking is being able to determine the state of a customer order (e.g. ordered arrived, awaiting delivery, invoice paid) so that problems in its operation can be identified and corrected.
In addition, this information can be used to work with customers and suppliers to improve their connected processes. Examples of the statistics are the generation of measures on how quickly a customer order is processed or how many orders were processed in the last month. These measures tend to fit into three categories: cycle time, defect rate and productivity.
The degree of monitoring depends on what information the business wants to evaluate and analyze and how business wants it to be monitored, in real-time, near real-time or ad-hoc. Here, business activity monitoring (BAM) extends and expands the monitoring tools in generally provided by BPMS.
Process mining is a collection of methods and tools related to process monitoring. The aim of process mining is to analyze event logs extracted through process monitoring and to compare them with an a priori process model. Process mining allows process analysts to detect discrepancies between the actual process execution and the a priori model as well as to analyze bottlenecks.
Optimization
Process optimization includes retrieving process performance information from modeling or monitoring phase; identifying the potential or actual bottlenecks and the potential opportunities for cost savings or other improvements; and then, applying those enhancements in the design of the process. Overall, this creates greater business value.
Practice
Example of Business Process Management (BPM) Service Pattern: This pattern shows how business process management (BPM) tools can be used to implement business processes through the orchestration of activities between people and systems.[3]
Whilst the steps can be viewed as a cycle, economic or time constraints are likely to limit the process to only a few iterations. This is often the case when an organization uses the approach for short to medium term objectives rather than trying to transform the organizational culture. True iterations are only possible through the collaborative efforts of process participants. In a majority of organizations, complexity will require enabling technology (see below) to support the process participants in these daily process management challenges.
To date, many organizations often start a BPM project or program with the objective to optimize an area that has been identified as an area for improvement.
In financial sector, BPM is critical to make sure the system delivers a quality service while maintaining regulatory compliance.[4]
Currently, the international standards for the task have only limited to the application for IT sectors and ISO/IEC 15944 covers the operational aspects of the business. However, some corporations with the culture of best practices do use standard operating procedures to regulate their operational process.[5] Other standards are currently being worked upon to assist in BPM implementation (BPMN, Enterprise Architecture, Business Motivation Model).
Overview
A business process is "a collection of related, structured activities that produce a service or product that meet the needs of a client."[citation needed] These processes are critical to any organization as they generate revenue and often represent a significant proportion of costs. As a managerial approach, (BPM) considers processes to be strategic assets of an organization that must be understood, managed, and improved to deliver value added products and services to clients. This foundation is very similar to other Total Quality Management or Continuous Improvement Process methodologies or approaches. BPM goes a step further by stating that this approach can be supported, or enabled, through technology to ensure the viability of the managerial approach in times of stress and change. In fact, BPM is an approach to integrate a "change capability" to an organization - both human and technological. As such, many BPM articles and pundits often discuss BPM from one of two viewpoints: people and/or technology.
Roughly speaking, the idea of (business) process is as traditional as concepts of tasks, department, production, outputs. The current management and improvement approach, with formal definitions and technical modeling, has been around since the early 1990s (see business process modeling). Note that in the IT community, the term 'business process' is often used as synonymous of management of middleware processes; or integrating application software tasks. This viewpoint may be overly restrictive. This should be kept in mind when reading software engineering papers that refer to 'business processes' or 'business process modeling.'
Although the initial focus of BPM was on the automation of mechanistic business processes, it has since been extended to integrate human-driven processes in which human interaction takes place in series or parallel with the mechanistic processes. For example (in workflow systems), when individual steps in the business process require human intuition or judgment to be performed, these steps are assigned to appropriate members within the organization.
More advanced forms such as human interaction management are in the complex interaction between human workers in performing a workgroup task. In this case, many people and systems interact in structured, ad-hoc, and sometimes completely dynamic ways to complete one to many transactions.
BPM can be used to understand organizations through expanded views that would not otherwise be available to organize and present. These views include the relationships of processes to each other which, when included in the process model, provide for advanced reporting and analysis that would not otherwise be available. BPM is regarded by some as the backbone of enterprise content management.
BPM is a critical part of ITSM - IT Service Management. Without driving good business process management your IT Service Management initiatives would fail. All disciplined IT Service Management implementations include well developed BPM processes.
Because BPM allows organizations to abstract business process from technology infrastructure, it goes far beyond automating business processes (software) or solving business problems (suite). BPM enables business to respond to changing consumer, market, and regulatory demands faster than competitors - creating competitive advantage.
Most recently, technology has allowed the coupling of BPM to other methodologies, such as Six Sigma. BPM tools now allow the user to:
Design - The process or the process improvement
Measure - Simulate the change to the process.
Analyze - Compare the various simulations to determine an optimal improvement
Improve - Select and implement the improvement
Control - Deploy this implementation and by use of User defined dashboards monitor the improvement in real time and feed the performance information back into the simulation model in preparation for the next improvement iteration.
This brings with it the benefit of being able to simulate changes to your business process based on real life data (not assumed knowledge) and also the coupling of BPM to industry methodologies allow the users to continually streamline and optimise the process to ensure it is tuned to its market need.
BPM life-cycle
Business process management activities can be grouped into five categories: design, modeling, execution, monitoring, and optimization
Design
Process Design encompasses both the identification of existing processes and the design of "to-be" processes. Areas of focus include representation of the process flow, the actors within it, alerts & notifications, escalations, Standard Operating Procedures, Service Level Agreements, and task hand-over mechanisms.
Good design reduces the number of problems over the lifetime of the process. Whether or not existing processes are considered, the aim of this step is to ensure that a correct and efficient theoretical design is prepared.
The proposed improvement could be in human-to-human, human-to-system, and system-to-system workflows, and might target regulatory, market, or competitive challenges faced by the businesses.
Modeling
Modeling takes the theoretical design and introduces combinations of variables (e.g., changes in rent or materials costs, which determine how the process might operate under different circumstances).
It also involves running "what-if analysis" on the processes: "What if I have 75% of resources to do the same task?" "What if I want to do the same job for 80% of the current cost?".
Execution
One of the ways to automate processes is to develop or purchase an application that executes the required steps of the process; however, in practice, these applications rarely execute all the steps of the process accurately or completely. Another approach is to use a combination of software and human intervention; however this approach is more complex, making the documentation process difficult.
As a response to these problems, software has been developed that enables the full business process (as developed in the process design activity) to be defined in a computer language which can be directly executed by the computer. The system will either use services in connected applications to perform business operations (e.g. calculating a repayment plan for a loan) or, when a step is too complex to automate, will ask for human input. Compared to either of the previous approaches, directly executing a process definition can be more straightforward and therefore easier to improve. However, automating a process definition requires flexible and comprehensive infrastructure, which typically rules out implementing these systems in a legacy IT environment.
Business rules have been used by systems to provide definitions for governing behaviour, and a business rule engine can be used to drive process execution and resolution.
Monitoring
Monitoring encompasses the tracking of individual processes, so that information on their state can be easily seen, and statistics on the performance of one or more processes can be provided. An example of the tracking is being able to determine the state of a customer order (e.g. ordered arrived, awaiting delivery, invoice paid) so that problems in its operation can be identified and corrected.
In addition, this information can be used to work with customers and suppliers to improve their connected processes. Examples of the statistics are the generation of measures on how quickly a customer order is processed or how many orders were processed in the last month. These measures tend to fit into three categories: cycle time, defect rate and productivity.
The degree of monitoring depends on what information the business wants to evaluate and analyze and how business wants it to be monitored, in real-time, near real-time or ad-hoc. Here, business activity monitoring (BAM) extends and expands the monitoring tools in generally provided by BPMS.
Process mining is a collection of methods and tools related to process monitoring. The aim of process mining is to analyze event logs extracted through process monitoring and to compare them with an a priori process model. Process mining allows process analysts to detect discrepancies between the actual process execution and the a priori model as well as to analyze bottlenecks.
Optimization
Process optimization includes retrieving process performance information from modeling or monitoring phase; identifying the potential or actual bottlenecks and the potential opportunities for cost savings or other improvements; and then, applying those enhancements in the design of the process. Overall, this creates greater business value.
Practice
Example of Business Process Management (BPM) Service Pattern: This pattern shows how business process management (BPM) tools can be used to implement business processes through the orchestration of activities between people and systems.[3]
Whilst the steps can be viewed as a cycle, economic or time constraints are likely to limit the process to only a few iterations. This is often the case when an organization uses the approach for short to medium term objectives rather than trying to transform the organizational culture. True iterations are only possible through the collaborative efforts of process participants. In a majority of organizations, complexity will require enabling technology (see below) to support the process participants in these daily process management challenges.
To date, many organizations often start a BPM project or program with the objective to optimize an area that has been identified as an area for improvement.
In financial sector, BPM is critical to make sure the system delivers a quality service while maintaining regulatory compliance.[4]
Currently, the international standards for the task have only limited to the application for IT sectors and ISO/IEC 15944 covers the operational aspects of the business. However, some corporations with the culture of best practices do use standard operating procedures to regulate their operational process.[5] Other standards are currently being worked upon to assist in BPM implementation (BPMN, Enterprise Architecture, Business Motivation Model).
BPM technology
Some define the BPM System or Suite (BPMS) as "the whole of BPM." Others will relate the important concept of information moving between enterprise software packages and immediately think of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Still others limit the definition to "modeling... to create the ‘perfect’ process," (see Business modeling).
These are partial answers and the technological offerings continue to evolve. The BPMS term may not survive. Today it encompasses the concept of supporting the managerial approach through enabling technology. The BPMS should enable all stakeholders to have a firm understanding of an organization and its performance. The BPMS should facilitate business process change throughout the life cycle stated above. This will assist in the automation of activities, collaboration, integration with other systems, integrating partners through the value chain, etc. For instance, the size and complexity of daily tasks often requires the use of technology to model efficiently. These models facilitate automation and solutions to business problems. These models can also become executable to assist in monitoring and controlling business processes. As such, some people view BPM as "the bridge between Information Technology (IT) and Business."[citation needed]. In fact, an argument can be made that this "holistic approach" bridges organizational and technological silos.
There are four critical components of a BPM Suite:
* Process Engine – a robust platform for modeling and executing process-based applications, including business rules
* Business Analytics — enable managers to identify business issues, trends, and opportunities with reports and dashboards and react accordingly
* Content Management — provides a system for storing and securing electronic documents, images, and other files
* Collaboration Tools — remove intra- and interdepartmental communication barriers through discussion forums, dynamic workspaces, and message boards
BPM also addresses many of the critical IT issues underpinning these business drivers, including:
* Managing end-to-end, customer-facing processes
* Consolidating data and increasing visibility into and access to associated data and information
* Increasing the flexibility and functionality of current infrastructure and data
* Integrating with existing systems and leveraging emerging service oriented architecture (SOAs)
* Establishing a common language for business-IT alignment
Validation of BPMS is another technical issue that vendors and users need to be aware of, if regulatory compliance is mandatory.[6] The validation task could be performed either by an authenticated third party or by the users themselves. Either way, validation documentation will need to be generated. The validation document usually can either be published officially or retained by users
Toyota Production System
The Toyota Production System (TPS) is an integrated socio-technical system, developed by Toyota, that comprises its management philosophy and practices. The TPS organizes manufacturing and logistics for the automobile manufacturer, including interaction with suppliers and customers. The system is a major precursor of the more generic "Lean manufacturing." Taiichi Ohno, Shigeo Shingo and Eiji Toyoda developed the system between 1948 and 1975.[1]
Originally called "Just In Time Production," it builds on the approach created by the founder of Toyota, Sakichi Toyoda, his son Kiichiro Toyoda, and the engineer Taiichi Ohno. The founders of Toyota drew heavily on the work of W. Edwards Deming and the writings of Henry Ford. When these men came to the United States to observe the assembly line and mass production that had made Ford rich, they were unimpressed. While shopping in a supermarket they observed the simple idea of an automatic drink resupplier; when the customer wants a drink, he takes one, and another replaces it. The principles underlying the TPS are embodied in The Toyota Way.
Goals
The main objectives of the TPS are to design out overburden (muri) and inconsistency (mura), and to eliminate waste (muda). The most significant effects on process value delivery are achieved by designing a process capable of delivering the required results smoothly; by designing out "mura" (inconsistency). It is also crucial to ensure that the process is as flexible as necessary without stress or "muri" (overburden) since this generates "muda" (waste). Finally the tactical improvements of waste reduction or the elimination of muda are very valuable. There are seven kinds of muda that are addressed in the TPS:
1. over-production
2. motion (of operator or machine)
3. waiting (of operator or machine)
4. conveyance
5. processing itself
6. inventory (raw material)
7. correction (rework and scrap)
The elimination of muda has come to dominate the thinking of many when they look at the effects of the TPS because it is the most familiar of the three to implement. In the TPS many initiatives are triggered by mura or muri reduction which drives out muda without specific focus on its reduction...
Origins
This system, more than any other aspect of the company, is responsible for having made Toyota the company it is today. Toyota has long been recognized as a leader in the automotive manufacturing and production industry.
Toyota received their inspiration for the system, not from the American automotive industry (at that time the world's largest by far), but from visiting a supermarket. This occurred when a delegation from Toyota (led by Ohno) visited the United States in the 1950s. The delegation first visited several Ford Motor Company automotive plants in Michigan but, despite Ford being the industry leader at that time, found many of the methods in use to be not very effective. They were mainly appalled by the large amounts of inventory on site, by how the amount of work being performed in various departments within the factory was uneven on most days, and the large amount of rework at the end of the process.
However, on a subsequent visit to a Piggly Wiggly the delegation was inspired by how the supermarket only reordered and restocked goods once they had been bought by customers. Toyota applied the lesson from Piggly Wiggly by reducing the amount of inventory they would hold only to a level that its employees would need for a small period of time, and then subsequently reorder. This would become the precursor of the now-famous Just-in-Time (JIT) inventory system.
While low inventory levels are a key outcome of the Toyota Production System, an important element of the philosophy behind its system is to work intelligently and eliminate waste so that inventory is no longer needed. Many American businesses, having observed Toyota's factories, set out to attack high inventory levels directly without understanding what made these reductions possible. The act of imitating without understanding the underlying concept or motivation may have led to the failure of those projects.
Principles
The underlying principles, called the Toyota Way, have been outlined by Toyota as follows:
Continuous Improvement
* Challenge (We form a long-term vision, meeting challenges with courage and creativity to realize our dreams.)
* Kaizen (We improve our business operations continuously, always driving for innovation and evolution.)
* Genchi Genbutsu (Go to the source to find the facts to make correct decisions.)
Respect for People
* Respect (We respect others, make every effort to understand each other, take responsibility and do our best to build mutual trust.)
* Teamwork (We stimulate personal and professional growth, share the opportunities of development and maximize individual and team performance.)
External observers have summarized the principles of the Toyota Way as
Long-term philosophy
1. Base your management decisions on a long-term philosophy, even at the expense of short-term financial goals.
The right process will produce the right results
1. Create continuous process flow to bring problems to the surface
2. Use the "pull" system to avoid overproduction
3. Level out the workload (heijunka). (Work like the tortoise, not the hare.)
4. Build a culture of stopping to fix problems, to get quality right from the first
5. Standardized tasks are the foundation for continuous improvement and employee empowerment
6. Use visual control so no problems are hidden
7. Use only reliable, thoroughly tested technology that serves your people and processes.
Add value to the organization by developing your people and partners
1. Grow leaders who thoroughly understand the work, live the philosophy, and teach it to others.
2. Develop exceptional people and teams who follow your company's philosophy.
3. Respect your extended network of partners and suppliers by challenging them and helping them improve.
Continuously solving root problems drives organizational learning
1. Go and see for yourself to thoroughly understand the situation
2. Make decisions slowly by consensus, thoroughly considering all options implement decisions rapidly;
3. Become a learning organization through relentless reflection and continuous improvement
The Toyota production system has been compared to squeezing water from a dry towel. What this means is that it is a system for thorough waste elimination. Here, waste refers to anything which does not advance the process, everything that does not increase added value. Many people settle for eliminating the waste that everyone recognizes as waste. But much remains that simply has not yet been recognized as waste or that people are willing to tolerate.
People had resigned themselves to certain problems, had become hostage to routine and abandoned the practice of problem-solving. This going back to basics, exposing the real significance of problems and then making fundamental improvements, can be witnessed throughout the Toyota Production System.
Results
Toyota was able to greatly reduce leadtime and cost using the TPS, while improving quality. This enabled it to become one of the ten largest companies in the world. It is currently as profitable as all the other car companies combined and became the largest car manufacturer in 2007. It has been proposed[10] that the TPS is the most prominent example of the 'correlation', or middle, stage in a science, with material requirements planning and other data gathering systems representing the 'classification' or first stage. A science in this stage can see correlations between events and can propose some procedures that allow some predictions of the future. Due to the success of the production philosophy's predictions many of these methods have been copied by other manufacturing companies, although mostly unsuccessfully.
Also, many companies in different sectors of work (other than manufacturing) have attempted to adapt some or all of the principles of the Toyota Production System to their company. These sectors include construction and health care.
20th century
Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of scientific management, introduced what are now called standardization and best practice deployment. In his Principles of Scientific Management, (1911), Taylor said: "And whenever a workman proposes an improvement, it should be the policy of the management to make a careful analysis of the new method, and if necessary conduct a series of experiments to determine accurately the relative merit of the new suggestion and of the old standard. And whenever the new method is found to be markedly superior to the old, it should be adopted as the standard for the whole establishment."
Taylor also warned explicitly against cutting piece rates (or, by implication, cutting wages or discharging workers) when efficiency improvements reduce the need for raw labor: "…after a workman has had the price per piece of the work he is doing lowered two or three times as a result of his having worked harder and increased his output, he is likely entirely to lose sight of his employer's side of the case and become imbued with a grim determination to have no more cuts if soldiering [marking time, just doing what he is told] can prevent it."
Shigeo Shingo, the best-known exponent of single minute exchange of die (SMED) and error-proofing or poka-yoke, cites Principles of Scientific Management as his inspiration.[10]
American industrialists recognized the threat of cheap offshore labor to American workers during the 1910s, and explicitly stated the goal of what is now called lean manufacturing as a countermeasure. Henry Towne, past President of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, wrote in the Foreword to Frederick Winslow Taylor's Shop Management (1911), "We are justly proud of the high wage rates which prevail throughout our country, and jealous of any interference with them by the products of the cheaper labor of other countries. To maintain this condition, to strengthen our control of home markets, and, above all, to broaden our opportunities in foreign markets where we must compete with the products of other industrial nations, we should welcome and encourage every influence tending to increase the efficiency of our productive processes."
Taylor also warned explicitly against cutting piece rates (or, by implication, cutting wages or discharging workers) when efficiency improvements reduce the need for raw labor: "…after a workman has had the price per piece of the work he is doing lowered two or three times as a result of his having worked harder and increased his output, he is likely entirely to lose sight of his employer's side of the case and become imbued with a grim determination to have no more cuts if soldiering [marking time, just doing what he is told] can prevent it."
Shigeo Shingo, the best-known exponent of single minute exchange of die (SMED) and error-proofing or poka-yoke, cites Principles of Scientific Management as his inspiration.[10]
American industrialists recognized the threat of cheap offshore labor to American workers during the 1910s, and explicitly stated the goal of what is now called lean manufacturing as a countermeasure. Henry Towne, past President of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, wrote in the Foreword to Frederick Winslow Taylor's Shop Management (1911), "We are justly proud of the high wage rates which prevail throughout our country, and jealous of any interference with them by the products of the cheaper labor of other countries. To maintain this condition, to strengthen our control of home markets, and, above all, to broaden our opportunities in foreign markets where we must compete with the products of other industrial nations, we should welcome and encourage every influence tending to increase the efficiency of our productive processes."
Pre-20th century
Most of the basic goals of lean manufacturing are common sense, and documented examples can be seen as early as Benjamin Franklin. Poor Richard's Almanac says of wasted time, "He that idly loses 5s. worth of time, loses 5s., and might as prudently throw 5s. into the river." He added that avoiding unnecessary costs could be more profitable than increasing sales: "A penny saved is two pence clear. A pin a-day is a groat a-year. Save and have."
Again Franklin's The Way to Wealth says the following about carrying unnecessary inventory. "You call them goods; but, if you do not take care, they will prove evils to some of you. You expect they will be sold cheap, and, perhaps, they may [be bought] for less than they cost; but, if you have no occasion for them, they must be dear to you. Remember what Poor Richard says, 'Buy what thou hast no need of, and ere long thou shalt sell thy necessaries.' In another place he says, 'Many have been ruined by buying good penny worths'." Henry Ford cited Franklin as a major influence on his own business practices, which included Just-in-time manufacturing.
The concept of waste being built into jobs and then taken for granted was noticed by motion efficiency expert Frank Gilbreth, who saw that masons bent over to pick up bricks from the ground. The bricklayer was therefore lowering and raising his entire upper body to pick up a 2.3 kg (5 lb.) brick, and this inefficiency had been built into the job through long practice. Introduction of a non-stooping scaffold, which delivered the bricks at waist level, allowed masons to work about three times as quickly, and with less effort.
Again Franklin's The Way to Wealth says the following about carrying unnecessary inventory. "You call them goods; but, if you do not take care, they will prove evils to some of you. You expect they will be sold cheap, and, perhaps, they may [be bought] for less than they cost; but, if you have no occasion for them, they must be dear to you. Remember what Poor Richard says, 'Buy what thou hast no need of, and ere long thou shalt sell thy necessaries.' In another place he says, 'Many have been ruined by buying good penny worths'." Henry Ford cited Franklin as a major influence on his own business practices, which included Just-in-time manufacturing.
The concept of waste being built into jobs and then taken for granted was noticed by motion efficiency expert Frank Gilbreth, who saw that masons bent over to pick up bricks from the ground. The bricklayer was therefore lowering and raising his entire upper body to pick up a 2.3 kg (5 lb.) brick, and this inefficiency had been built into the job through long practice. Introduction of a non-stooping scaffold, which delivered the bricks at waist level, allowed masons to work about three times as quickly, and with less effort.
A brief history of waste reduction thinking
The avoidance and then lateral removal of waste has a long history, and as such this history forms much of the basis of the philosophy now known as "Lean". In fact many of the concepts now seen as key to lean have been discovered and rediscovered over the years by others in their search to reduce waste.
Origins
Also known as the flexible mass production, the TPS has two pillar concepts: Just-in-time (JIT) or "flow", and "autonomation" (smart automation).[7] Adherents of the Toyota approach would say that the smooth flowing delivery of value achieves all the other improvements as side-effects. If production flows perfectly then there is no inventory; if customer valued features are the only ones produced, then product design is simplified and effort is only expended on features the customer values. The other of the two TPS pillars is the very human aspect of autonomation, whereby automation is achieved with a human touch.[8] The "human touch" here meaning to automate so that the machines/systems are designed to aid humans in focusing on what the humans do best. This aims, for example, to give the machines enough intelligence to recognize when they are working abnormally and flag this for human attention. Thus, in this case, humans would not have to monitor normal production and only have to focus on abnormal, or fault, conditions.
Lean implementation is therefore focused on getting the right things to the right place at the right time in the right quantity to achieve perfect work flow, while minimizing waste and being flexible and able to change. These concepts of flexibility and change are principally required to allow production leveling, using tools like SMED, but have their analogues in other processes such as research and development (R&D). The flexibility and ability to change are within bounds and not open-ended, and therefore often not expensive capability requirements. More importantly, all of these concepts have to be understood, appreciated, and embraced by the actual employees who build the products and therefore own the processes that deliver the value. The cultural and managerial aspects of Lean are possibly more important than the actual tools or methodologies of production itself. There are many examples of Lean tool implementation without sustained benefit, and these are often blamed on weak understanding of Lean throughout the whole organization.
Lean aims to make the work simple enough to understand, do and manage. To achieve these three goals at once there is a belief held by some that Toyota's mentoring process (loosely called Senpai and Kohai), is one of the best ways to foster Lean Thinking up and down the organizational structure. This is the process undertaken by Toyota as it helps its suppliers improve their own production. The closest equivalent to Toyota's mentoring process is the concept of "Lean Sensei", which encourages companies, organizations, and teams to seek outside, third-party experts, who can provide unbiased advice and coaching, (see Womack et al., Lean Thinking, 1998).
There have been recent attempts to link Lean to Service Management, perhaps one of the most recent and spectacular of which was London Heathrow Airport's Terminal 5. This particular case provides a graphic example of how care should be taken in translating successful practices from one context (production) to another (services), expecting the same results. In this case the public perception is more of a spectacular failure, than a spectacular success, resulting in potentially an unfair tainting of the lean manufacturing philosophies
Lean implementation is therefore focused on getting the right things to the right place at the right time in the right quantity to achieve perfect work flow, while minimizing waste and being flexible and able to change. These concepts of flexibility and change are principally required to allow production leveling, using tools like SMED, but have their analogues in other processes such as research and development (R&D). The flexibility and ability to change are within bounds and not open-ended, and therefore often not expensive capability requirements. More importantly, all of these concepts have to be understood, appreciated, and embraced by the actual employees who build the products and therefore own the processes that deliver the value. The cultural and managerial aspects of Lean are possibly more important than the actual tools or methodologies of production itself. There are many examples of Lean tool implementation without sustained benefit, and these are often blamed on weak understanding of Lean throughout the whole organization.
Lean aims to make the work simple enough to understand, do and manage. To achieve these three goals at once there is a belief held by some that Toyota's mentoring process (loosely called Senpai and Kohai), is one of the best ways to foster Lean Thinking up and down the organizational structure. This is the process undertaken by Toyota as it helps its suppliers improve their own production. The closest equivalent to Toyota's mentoring process is the concept of "Lean Sensei", which encourages companies, organizations, and teams to seek outside, third-party experts, who can provide unbiased advice and coaching, (see Womack et al., Lean Thinking, 1998).
There have been recent attempts to link Lean to Service Management, perhaps one of the most recent and spectacular of which was London Heathrow Airport's Terminal 5. This particular case provides a graphic example of how care should be taken in translating successful practices from one context (production) to another (services), expecting the same results. In this case the public perception is more of a spectacular failure, than a spectacular success, resulting in potentially an unfair tainting of the lean manufacturing philosophies
Overview
Lean principles come from the Japanese manufacturing industry. The term was first coined by John Krafcik in a Fall 1988 article, "Triumph of the Lean Production System," published in the Sloan Management Review and based on his master's thesis at the MIT Sloan School of Management.[4] Krafcik had been a quality engineer in the Toyota-GM NUMMI joint venture in California before coming to MIT for MBA studies. Krafcik's research was continued by the International Motor Vehicle Program (IMVP) at MIT, which produced the international best-seller book co-authored by James Womack, Daniel Jones, and Daniel Roos called The Machine That Changed the World.[1] A complete historical account of the IMVP and how the term "lean" was coined is given by Holweg (2007) [5].
For many, Lean is the set of "tools" that assist in the identification and steady elimination of waste (muda). As waste is eliminated quality improves while production time and cost are reduced. Examples of such "tools" are Value Stream Mapping, Five S, Kanban (pull systems), and poka-yoke (error-proofing).
There is a second approach to Lean Manufacturing, which is promoted by Toyota, in which the focus is upon improving the "flow" or smoothness of work, thereby steadily eliminating mura ("unevenness") through the system and not upon 'waste reduction' per se. Techniques to improve flow include production leveling, "pull" production (by means of kanban) and the Heijunka box. This is a fundamentally different approach to most improvement methodologies which may partially account for its lack of popularity.
The difference between these two approaches is not the goal itself, but rather the prime approach to achieving it. The implementation of smooth flow exposes quality problems that already existed, and thus waste reduction naturally happens as a consequence. The advantage claimed for this approach is that it naturally takes a system-wide perspective, whereas a waste focus sometimes wrongly assumes this perspective.
Both Lean and TPS can be seen as a loosely connected set of potentially competing principles whose goal is cost reduction by the elimination of waste.[6] These principles include: Pull processing, Perfect first-time quality, Waste minimization, Continuous improvement, Flexibility, Building and maintaining a long term relationship with suppliers, Autonomation, Load leveling and Production flow and Visual control. The disconnected nature of some of these principles perhaps springs from the fact that the TPS has grown pragmatically since 1948 as it responded to the problems it saw within its own production facilities. Thus what one sees today is the result of a 'need' driven learning to improve where each step has built on previous ideas and not something based upon a theoretical framework.
Toyota's view is that the main method of Lean is not the tools, but the reduction of three types of waste: muda ("non-value-adding work"), muri ("overburden"), and mura ("unevenness"), to expose problems systematically and to use the tools where the ideal cannot be achieved. From this perspective, the tools are workarounds adapted to different situations, which explains any apparent incoherence of the principles above.
For many, Lean is the set of "tools" that assist in the identification and steady elimination of waste (muda). As waste is eliminated quality improves while production time and cost are reduced. Examples of such "tools" are Value Stream Mapping, Five S, Kanban (pull systems), and poka-yoke (error-proofing).
There is a second approach to Lean Manufacturing, which is promoted by Toyota, in which the focus is upon improving the "flow" or smoothness of work, thereby steadily eliminating mura ("unevenness") through the system and not upon 'waste reduction' per se. Techniques to improve flow include production leveling, "pull" production (by means of kanban) and the Heijunka box. This is a fundamentally different approach to most improvement methodologies which may partially account for its lack of popularity.
The difference between these two approaches is not the goal itself, but rather the prime approach to achieving it. The implementation of smooth flow exposes quality problems that already existed, and thus waste reduction naturally happens as a consequence. The advantage claimed for this approach is that it naturally takes a system-wide perspective, whereas a waste focus sometimes wrongly assumes this perspective.
Both Lean and TPS can be seen as a loosely connected set of potentially competing principles whose goal is cost reduction by the elimination of waste.[6] These principles include: Pull processing, Perfect first-time quality, Waste minimization, Continuous improvement, Flexibility, Building and maintaining a long term relationship with suppliers, Autonomation, Load leveling and Production flow and Visual control. The disconnected nature of some of these principles perhaps springs from the fact that the TPS has grown pragmatically since 1948 as it responded to the problems it saw within its own production facilities. Thus what one sees today is the result of a 'need' driven learning to improve where each step has built on previous ideas and not something based upon a theoretical framework.
Toyota's view is that the main method of Lean is not the tools, but the reduction of three types of waste: muda ("non-value-adding work"), muri ("overburden"), and mura ("unevenness"), to expose problems systematically and to use the tools where the ideal cannot be achieved. From this perspective, the tools are workarounds adapted to different situations, which explains any apparent incoherence of the principles above.
Lean manufacturing
Lean manufacturing or lean production, which is often known simply as "Lean", is a production practice that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful, and thus a target for elimination. Working from the perspective of the customer who consumes a product or service, "value" is defined as any action or process that a customer would be willing to pay for. Basically, lean is centered around preserving value with less work. Lean manufacturing is a generic process management philosophy derived mostly from the Toyota Production System (TPS) (hence the term Toyotism is also prevalent) and identified as "Lean" only in the 1990s.[1] [2] It is renowned for its focus on reduction of the original Toyota seven wastes to improve overall customer value, but there are varying perspectives on how this is best achieved. The steady growth of Toyota, from a small company to the world's largest automaker,[3] has focused attention on how it has achieved this.
Lean manufacturing is a variation on the theme of efficiency based on optimizing flow; it is a present-day instance of the recurring theme in human history toward increasing efficiency, decreasing waste, and using empirical methods to decide what matters, rather than uncritically accepting pre-existing ideas. As such, it is a chapter in the larger narrative that also includes such ideas as the folk wisdom of thrift, time and motion study, Taylorism, the Efficiency Movement, and Fordism. Lean manufacturing is often seen as a more refined version of earlier efficiency efforts, building upon the work of earlier leaders such as Taylor or Ford, and learning from their mistakes.
Lean manufacturing is a variation on the theme of efficiency based on optimizing flow; it is a present-day instance of the recurring theme in human history toward increasing efficiency, decreasing waste, and using empirical methods to decide what matters, rather than uncritically accepting pre-existing ideas. As such, it is a chapter in the larger narrative that also includes such ideas as the folk wisdom of thrift, time and motion study, Taylorism, the Efficiency Movement, and Fordism. Lean manufacturing is often seen as a more refined version of earlier efficiency efforts, building upon the work of earlier leaders such as Taylor or Ford, and learning from their mistakes.
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