Beyond Lean

Há anos que escrevo aqui sobre o advento de Mongo e o consequente impacte na dança entre produção e consumo:

• mais tribos;
• mais nichos;
• séries mais pequenas;
• mais flexibilidade;
• mais rapidez; 
• mais variedade;
• mais diferenciação;

Em paralelo há anos que se lê com cada vez mais frequência sobre a automatização da produção.

Em Mongo, a produção é muito diferente da do paradigma do século XX com séries longas e planeamento da produção feito com muita antecedência. Em Mongo o planeamento da produção é feito cada vez mais em cima e é mais volátil. Como é que a automatização e as organizações-cidade lidam com Mongo?

"With improvements in living standards and a transformation in people’s ideas of consumption, much of the current electronics manufacturing industry is confronted with market demands characterized by variety and volume fluctuation. Manufacturing system flexibility is useful to address such fluctuated market demands.
...
Seru production has been called beyond lean in Japan and can be considered to be an ideal manufacturing mode to realize mass customization
...
seru production relies on low-cost automation and has little automation. When reconfiguring a conveyor assembly line into serus, expensive large automated equipment is substituted with simple-structure equipment with similar functions. The reconstructed equipment can be easily duplicated and modified at a low cost, so as to avoid equipment-sharing conflicts among multiple serus and reduce investment in equipment.
...
Factories that produce multiple electronics product types in small-lot batches tend to adopt seru production. Compared to mass production, which displays its superiority in the case of a narrow range of product types with high product volumes, seru production would be affected by low efficiency and high cost in such an environment.
...
Using highly automated production systems, mass production factories can attain high production efficiency. However, they usually achieve low production flexibility. As both the variety and volume fluctuations of market demands increase, mass production factories may need to reconfigure their traditional conveyor assembly lines for their survival and development.
...
Seru production is human-centered manufacturing. Multiskilled operators are important resources to implement seru production, more important than in mass production. The equipment used in seru production is simple and not automated. The effect and influence of equipment on the performance of seru production systems is less than that on mass production systems. Accordingly, a practical production planning system for seru production should consider multiskilled operators more than equipment. In a dynamically changing manufacturing environment, a dynamic production planning system is needed"

Anónimo da província mas muito à frente:

• Um mesmo processo automatizado é demasiado rígido para Mongo
• Mongo e a automatização... pois!
• "mas o essencial é que o mercado de massas desapareceu"

Cuidado com os media, desconfie sempre!

Trechos retirados de "An implementation framework for seru production" publicado por Intl. Trans. in Op. Res. 00 (2013) 1–19