Hey everyone, welcome to this lecture. How do you implement heijunka in your organization. By now you will know that hygiene card does not build products according to the actual flow of customer orders. This flow of customer orders can swing up and down wildly. heijunka takes the total volume of orders being made in a specific period and levels them out. So the same amount and mix are being made each day.

Let's look at an example and talk about it in detail in this example, and unleveled schedule of a smartphone manufacturing plant will be shown on the screen to add some personality to the discussion. Let's assume the smartphone manufacturer is Apple, and it is manufacturing iPhone 10. Of course, this is only an assumption and using this to make the hydrogen car concept easy to understand. Let's begin In this case, a production line makes three types of iPhone 10 models. The first variant is iPhone xR. The second is iPhone xs and the third is iPhone Xs max.

Now as per the schedule that you see on the screen, iPhone Xs is a big seller. So this variant of the phone is made early in the week, Monday through part of Wednesday. Then there is a several hour changeover of the line to make the smaller variant of iPhone xR. This variant is made the rest of the Wednesday through Friday morning. Finally, the large variant iPhone Xs Max is smallest in demand. It is made on Friday afternoon.

There are four things wrong with this unleveled schedule. customer buying pattern is unpredictable. There is a risk of unsold goods. The use of resources is unbalanced. For example, there are different labor requirements for different types of phone variants. So the plant would need labor who are skilled in producing iPhone xR in the first few days of the week.

Then another skill set of labor that have expertise in producing iPhone Xs in the next few days, and then another set of skilled labor at the end of the week to produce iPhone Xs Max, there is potentially a lot of muda and Mura placing an uneven demand on upstream processes. Since the plant is purchasing different parts for the three types of phone variants. It will be asking its suppliers to send certain parts Monday through Wednesday, and different parts for the rest of the week. Imagine a situation where the customer demand shifts Such as unexpected rush order of iPhone Xs Max, and the need to focus on making those for a whole week. The supplier will need to be prepared for the worst possible scenario, and will need to keep at least one week's worth of all parts for all three iPhone variants and something called the bullwhip effect.

We'll multiply this behavior backward through the supply chain. A small change in the schedule of the iPhone assembly plant will result in ever increasing inventory banks at each stage of the supply chain as you move backward from the end customer. This type of a production process is called as batch processing mode. a batch of iPhone xR is produced in the first few days, then the changeover of staff and equipment takes place. Then a batch of iPhone Xs is produced and With another change order the batch of iPhone Xs Max is produced. In this batch processing mode, the goal of any organization is to achieve economies of scale.

When a changeover takes place of staff and tools, the production stops and parts are not being produced. Thus, long durations of changeover is a non value adding activity. You also continue to pay your staff when the machines are being changed over. So it is obvious that any organization will build large batches of one product before changing over to another product. But this is not a suitable approach and does not allow heijunka. at Apple, the production experts did a careful analysis and discovered the long time to change over the line was due to different parts required for the different iPhone variants.

There are also different sizes instruments for assembling each phone variant. Employees are scaled differently for manufacturing different variants of the phone. As a solution, the workstation of the assembly plant was designed to easily accommodate the different parts required for the different phone variance. The workstation was also designed to accommodate the different sized instruments. Thus, if an employee is assembling iPhone Xs Max, and he now needs to assemble iPhone xR, he can easily switch employees were also cross skilled to manufacture the different variants of the phone. So there was no need of employees to move around.

When employee could manufacture all the three variants. Wow. These changes had a major impact to the time taken to change over the line. This in fact eliminated the equipment changeover completely allowing the plant to manage different variants of the phone in any order it wanted on a mixed model assembly line. It could then make a repeating sequence of all three phone variants, iPhone x or iPhone Xs, and iPhone Xs max. So it matched the mix of parts order by the customer.

This was the new schedule produced by the production experts. They would manufacture a few variants of all types of iPhone models, all days of production. There were several benefits of leveling the scheduling flexibility to make what the customer wants, when they want it. reduced risk of unsold goods, balanced use of labor and machines, smooth demand on upstream processes and the planks suppliers. An important point to note is that none of this was possible. If there please had not found a way to eliminate the setup time for changeover.

In a nutshell, you implement heijunka in your business process in three steps, and yes, each step has sub steps in it as follows. Step one, identify, identify the products that need to be produced. identify their monthly or seasonal production requirements. Identify the workstation setup requirements. Identify the requirements of instruments required for product variants. Identify the employees skill set requirement.

Step two, modify based on your observation in step one, make changes to the workstation setup. make changes to the placement of instruments cross skill employees by providing them required training. Create a mixed models scheduled for production Step three, implement Once the modifications are made, implement the pilot, seek feedback from the pilot team make necessary changes to the setup and schedule. Finally, implement the new level workload schedule. These steps may sound simple and structured. However, it will be important that you execute each of these with an absolute understanding of your process requirements.

This may require you to involve subject matter experts as well as individuals from different departments to help provide correct inputs. With that, we come to the end of this lecture. In the next lecture, you will understand the implementation of heijunka in service operations. Thank you for attending. See you in the next one.