Creating continuous flow cells and lines

Continuous flow (aka one-piece flow) refers to the situation in which a product or part is processed and moved between process steps one at a time, without waiting or accumulating inventory between workstations. In ideal state a product should flow through entire value stream, from raw materials to the hands of customer. Achieving this state can be too difficult at the beginning. It is good to focus first on the process or segment of value stream in which a product takes a final shape as expected by customer ? this part of a value stream is called pacemaker. It is the most important part of every value stream, because the way a pacemaker operates influences both how good you are in fulfilling customer demand and what demand do you create for upstream processes.

The training will be focused on equipping participants with the ability to see and feel the flow. Manually operated cells and lines will be analyzed as they are widespread in industry, and ? in the world of geographically scattered customers and short product life cycles ? it is important to be able to design and manage simple, inexpensive, flexible and reliable processes operated manually by people. We will present methods and approaches based on best practices, which will be applicable in almost every place you want to create continuous flow.