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Before
the Industrial Revolution “Craft Production”
was the only known system – if a person wanted an article that they
could not personally make, a craftsman using hand tools, would make the
"one-off" item specifically for them.
With
the arrival of the Industrial Revolution the craftsman’s ability to
produce more product was enhanced by the introduction of machines.
Gradually a “Factory System”
evolved where tasks were segregated to experts who concentrated on making
specific parts of a product, which were then sent to an assembler.
The clock and watch making industry used this system. The first
attempt at using specialized machinery to produce “rough watch
movements” was made in France by Frederic Japy in 1799.
Although he used machines to make 40,000 movements per year, the
parts were not interchangeable and therefore effectively “one-offs”.
Later, in 1835 a Swiss worker named Pierre-Frederic Ingold thought
that machines could be developed to make interchangeable parts.
His venture was not successful but others were soon to follow.
By 1839 Vacheron and Constantin, Swiss watchmakers, had standardized
their movement designs to allow them to be placed in standard
sized cases which introduced a degree of inter-changeability.
Meanwhile in the USA, Henry and James Pitkin produced about 500
watches with interchangeable parts as early as 1837, but the real start in
the USA was in 1850 when a company “Dennison, Howard and Davis” was
set up. This company
experienced production start up problems but within four years they had
opened a new steam powered factory producing 30 – 40 watches per week,
employing 100 workers. The
idea of using specialized machines to make tight tolerance interchangeable
parts was taken up by many industries in the USA during the mid-nineteenth
century and lead to the dramatic economic growth of that country.
The use of interchangeable parts was a dramatic industrial
development that enabled products to be economically repaired and
maintained. The firearms
industry developed this “factory system” (called the “American
System”) with the encouragement of the US government who realized
that the repair of firearms was important.
“Mass
Production” pioneered by Henry Ford was a dramatic extension
of the “American System”.
It maintained the key elements of the previous system but added:
flow; economies of scale; product standardization and operational
efficiency, all of which lowered costs and prices.
The effect was that as costs and prices lowered, demand escalated
enabling companies to expand yet further and further lower costs.
The system also saw the introduction of professional managers and
production experts. To start
with, the system was very inflexible, producing enormous quantities of
standard parts, but it was extremely effective.
Machines were developed to fabricate parts at very high production
rates. To ensure that they
were run efficiently the machines were operated as fast and for as long as
they could. Large banks of
stock would be made, stored and then transferred to assembly lines where
the parts would be assembled in a given sequential flow.
As people working in these systems were given smaller and smaller
tasks to do each task became easier to automate.
Many of those people did not need the skill levels of the previous
system. The system relied
heavily on factories operating at maximum output.
In later years the “Mass Production”
system has struggled to cope with the need for variety within product
ranges.
In
1937 Taiichi Ohno heard that an American worker could produce about tens
times the amount of product a Japanese worker could make.
He wondered how the Americans could exert ten times more physical
effort. He concluded
that if they could eliminate waste, productivity would rise to the USA
level. These initial thoughts
later led to the birth of the revolutionary “Toyota
Production System” now called “Lean
Manufacturing”. Looking
back he saw that in “Craft Production”
the craftsman would make the whole product relatively quickly and was not burdened with a large stock of in process parts. There was little waste.
Unfortunately the craftsman could not compete with the
productivity of “Mass Production”.
Hence,
Ohno sought to combine the “Craft
Production” system advantages with the gross productivity of
“Mass Production” and created “Lean
Manufacturing”.
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