Do not worry if you forget your studies in working life: everything is different at work. However, this age-old wisdom does not apply at my home: we follow strict Just-In-Time principles in everything. After all, I have a Master of Science in Production Management as my basic education.
Production plant location
One of the most long-term questions in business is the location of a production plant. When I was young and in love to get married, I pondered: distances to parents’ workplaces and children’s daycare, distances to school and hobbies, and of course to grocery stores and recreation. And then the center of gravity. Fortunately, I had defended my doctoral thesis on location models: using the weighted average of grocery store visits, we located ourselves above a local store.
Production plant design
Fixed costs are the nightmare of a production engineer. Residential space is expensive, and you shouldn’t tie up capital in them unnecessarily. You can forget about a seven-square-meter utility room, because the interest costs of an investment of 35,000 euros per year are almost a couple of tons, or even half of the annual costs of a cleaner. The same applies to a freezer. Its investment, electricity consumption and the cost of space for a couple of square meters is at best one thousand per year. Only if picking up 200 litres of berries every year, would be a freezer profitable investment.
Minimizing transportation costs
My real area of expertise is now transportation systems. I would probably be ashamed if there were transportation equipment standing in the yard with an occupancy rate of only around six percent, and the filling rate is usually only about twenty percent. Fortunately, a professional knows how to buy transportation. When needed, we use public transport or taxi, and save money. Distances are so short anyway (see first point).
Production process
No warehouses, no laundry baskets or piles of dry laundry. Production planning starts with the design: the whole family wears only black or white clothes (or coloured clothes that can be washed with black clothes). The size of the laundry basket is only 1.5 * the size of the washing machine, so according to the push principle, the machine starts as soon as the basket is full. We often also use the Kanban principle, so when the machine is half-full, I bravely invade the teenager’s room and use a stick to lift the pile of clothes from floors and put them directly into the machine. The washing line can only fit one washing machine, so before the machine can be emptied, the dry clothes are moved directly to the closet – there is no other place. Similarly, the dining table, dishwasher and filing cabinet are positioned so that you don’t have to take a single step to move the dishes from one place to another. Everyday exercise then has to be done somewhere else…
Inventory management
Food ingredients are divided into A, B and C products and the number of items is minimized. A-products (milk, margarine, cheese, muesli, bread, macaroni, fresh juice, ketchup, coffee, cucumber) should always be at home. Parents carry them home every day (the demand caused by three teenage boys approaches asymptotically infinite). B-products can vary little, and running out of a single item does not bring down the economy (minced meat, fish sticks, chicken strips, tomatoes, bananas and apples). C-products are only purchased in special cases: when grandma comes to visit, you also have to buy sugar and a bun. And because the trip to the store was minimized, replenishment can be done even in the middle of a meal if necessary. After all, there was no freezer.
Leveling production
Someone may already be starting to wonder what this production facility produces. It’s clear: young men. Raw materials and parts of the process vary at different stages of production: sometimes porridge is needed, sometimes homework help, sometimes support in hobbies and sometimes furnishing their rooms. An important part of process optimization is to even out the load by optimizing the time it takes to complete the products: only one diaper-age child, only one school-starter, only one adolescent at a time. This way, there is enough room for adjustment in each part of the process.
Finally
In our house, everything is optimized and runs like in Toyota factories. Nothing is wasted, and nothing is too little. So what does our production management system spend all the extra time and money on when expanding production is not really part of the strategy? Of course, on the traditional vices of corporate management: stimulants and new boats.
The article was published in the member magazine of the Finnish Production Management Association, Stoori, in December 2015.
Tales of Talsinki 