JobshopLean: A Different Lean Manufacturing Strategy for High-Variety Low-Volume Forging Suppliers in Defense Supply Chains

A significant number of forges (and foundries) that are DOD suppliers are high-variety low-volume (HVLV) manufacturers.  While these manufacturers have reported significant benefits by adopting some of the tried-and-tested universal Lean best practices, like Visual Workplace (5S), Setup Reduction, Total Productive Maintenance, Quality At Source, Workforce Empowerment, etc., they also acknowledge getting frustrated when they begin tackling tackling the “jobshop aspects of their operations”, such as high variety of product routings, equipment monuments and  batch-type processes that cannot be co-located in one-piece flow cells, scheduling using their legacy MRP systems, etc. 

Inspired by this reality that many of Toyota’s methods are inappropriate for HVLV jobshop-type manufacturers, the Forging Defense Manufacturing Consortium invested in the development of a new manufacturing strategy, JobshopLean, the Nation’s only research, academic education, workforce training and industry outreach program that is specialized for small-to-medium HVLV manufacturers.  This strategy was developed and deployed in forging supply chains as part of a project nested within the PRO-FAST and FAST programs funded by the Defense Logistics Agency.   Over the last 10+ years, our projects have enriched and expanded the existing Lean Manufacturing programs already in place at custom forge shops (and foundries) that produce forgings and castings to sustain aging DOD weapon systems. 

This presentation will summarize the spectrum of projects (facility layout, setup reduction, Office Lean, cellular manufacturing despite the existence of monuments that prevented co-location of all equipment into cells, tool and die flow management, shopfloor scheduling) that were done in a variety of forges and the tangible results that were delivered to each of those forges.