A new
fabrication/
manufacturing strategy that is slowly gaining
popularity in industries whose products are
custom-built in (relatively) small numbers.
The basic ideas are thus:
1) Thou shalt not
stockpile thine
components, but shall order them as thou needest them, even be it on a daily basis. Thusly shalt thou reduce the
overhead associated with warehouses and materials handlers.
2) Thou shalt make thine
workstations easily
swappable, and thine
fabrication areas shall be as
fluid as the stream. Thusly shalt thou easily
adapt to each new product thou must needs fabricate.
3) Thou shalt
streamline thy processes, so that each
product is produced with a minimum of
waste, in a minimum of time.
4) Thou shalt
accomplish all this by means of talking to thy workers, instead of hiring some monkey-suited efficiency specialist
asshole with a perm and an
MBA.
As
odd as it sounds to have a single unit of Widget QX-255 shipped to you every day instead of just ordering a
dozen of them, it actually seems to work fairly well, with some businesses reporting decreases in overhead as high as 60-70%.