One-piece flow

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One-Piece-Flow or “employee-bound work flow ” (MAF) is more an Anglicism in German than in English in connection with the Toyota production system or “ Lean Production ”.

This refers to a production that is logistically Although a continuous production line or even an assembly line basis in their work organization but semi-autonomous group work or at least job rotation is used. In contrast to a conventional assembly line, the employees do not remain in their place while one part after the other is brought up for processing, but they accompany the workpiece on the entire path, which leads without interruption from one work system to the next, until it is completed.

The concept of the one-piece flow makes it easier to change the product variant from piece to piece and to dispense with batch production . Since the employees know from the start which variant they are currently building, they can concentrate on it and do not need to find out more about it at every work system. Confusions caused by monotony are significantly reduced. For the employees, the larger, perhaps complete work content results in increased work motivation (see work structuring ). The quality can be tracked better, delivery times are shortened.

In its pure form, one-piece flow means that all employees in a production process master all of the work involved in this, also perform them and are therefore responsible for the overall process and the resulting product.

Most of the time, this ideal is only approximated.

Islands

In practice, the workplaces of the production process are arranged in sections in so-called (production) islands (based on the established English terminology, also called “cells”); the accompaniment of the product is thus reduced to the drainage sections in the island. This is to prevent the scope of tasks from becoming too large for the individual employees and losing routine and practice and thus working speed and quality. On the other hand, the individual employees no longer develop the entire product.

The employee starts at the first workstation on the island and runs through the entire area, moving with the product from workstation to workstation until the last associated workstation is reached. There, the product is usually checked and passed on to other responsibilities.

The employee goes back to the first work system and starts his process again. The start and end point of such an island should therefore be as close together as possible. For this reason, U-shaped or even omega lines are used. Such lines, also known as Chaku-Chaku , are increasingly being used as far as the factory buildings allow. The major advantages of this method over conventional flow production are:

  • high flexibility in terms of variants,
  • high (personnel) flexibility in the event of fluctuations in production quantities, since not all workstations have to be filled,
  • reduced delivery times, as there is no need to wait until a lot has been collected for a variant,
  • reduced stocks and thus reduced space and capital requirements due to lot size 1,
  • better controlled quality as well
  • better conditions for mass customizing and versatile production systems .

However, higher qualification requirements are placed on the employees and their wages are likely to rise.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Arzet, Harry: Basics of One Piece Flow. Berlin: Rhombos, 2005 - ISBN 3-937231-97-8 . P. 7.

literature