Why LCA?

The highly automated manufacturing equipment of many enterprises often lacks the flexibility to react quickly and inexpensively to new needs of the market, though it may have been introduced for the sake of more flexibility.

As an index for this development we find continually sinking availabilities in firms which have fallen for the automation paradigm. In this respect values below 70%, according to the Japanese method of measurement OEE (overall equipment effectiveness), are no rarity.

Many enterprises react to the cost increase due to this situation by shifting production to lands with low wages, but this mostly turns out to be ineffective. Parts of production which are wasteful or contribute nothing to value are certainly less costly abroad but they are mostly taken along.

A further reason why LCA plays a key role in top Japanese enterprises is the effort made to get humans and machines to interact as efficiently as possible. For this sake workers are still given manual tasks. In western enterprises workers stay mostly at only one point or supervise processes, but those in Japanese firms have several functions and look after several processes.

Often they are involved in only simple activities like loading and unloading machines, assembling parts, attaching cables or screwing things in, but these manual activities are precisely what can be lessened by applying simple means and clever ideas. As a rule this is guided and furthered by the team-leader (hancho) with the aim of lessening the number of personnel. In Japanese this is known as shoshinga. The workers who are freed in this way are not sacked but mostly redeployed on other, more important tasks, thanks to which only the best are mostly taken out of the process.

Efforts of this kind lead to many small and simple automations. Mostly this happens within the framework of a wide-reaching campaign within all areas of an enterprise. Hence a few months ago we saw in a Japanese factory run by Denso (in the car industry) an LCA campaign with the aim of making all manual activities so simple that workers have only to load a utility then the fully processed part is tossed off automatically (chaku chaku principle). Another instance is the gear-maker Jatco Fuji, who is presently carrying out a ‘one motion campaign’. The campaign’s aim is to optimize all movements to such an extent that they call for only a touch and take no longer than 0.1 minutes.

A further element to be mentioned in connection with LCA is called jidoka or autonomation. This refers to a workshop without workers and to a process supervised by a machine on its own. If there are deviations from the normal production process, owing for instance to defects or a tool’s breaking or a lack of supplies, or if faults have to be avoided, the machine stops of its own accord and beckons a worker to intervene.

The underlying philosophy of production calls for lean or simple resources, and since these can seldom be supplied from outside, they are often made by the enterprise itself. Since this calls for planning engineers with notable experience in production within the enterprise, no one without this experience is ever called on by Japanese enterprises to take part in planning. Moreover planning and production are mostly brought to together in terms of space and organization.

In contrast to this, planning in the West is mostly based on specialist knowledge from technical colleges, and planning and production are spatially and functionally separate. This often leads to redundancy and to plants’ being oversized.

The introduction of LCA thus presupposes global thinking or a change of traditional notions of manufacturing.