Industrial improvement systems — strategies for making a business more profitable, more efficient, or better operated — rise and fall in popularity over time.
I work in this space, and I often see people try to group parts into “part families” and process them in some sort of bunched manner. The hard part with the whole premise is that tries to optimize high mix, low volume product but that product is too unstable in design or too low volume to see returns on process optimization.
If I run a machine shop and part A comes from customer A and part B comes from customer B, and the parts have a lot of similar operations that need to be completed, grouping them physically as they travel the shop floor requires 1) the upfront planning, 2) clear and similar production runway from customers A and B, and 3) that there’s something to be gained vs just running a bigger batch of each part. Also from a quality perspective, it would be a nightmare to try to actually mix product in a chemical bath or any specific step of a manufacturing process that you would be able to.
Now you could argue that it’s less about batching and more about factory layout, but then I think you get away from the core premise and you’re just back to making simple conclusions like “I should put my deburr station in between my milling and inspection stations.”
The place I think family building does provide a return is if customer A realizes that 10 of their parts are all pretty similar and they give all that work to one machine shop. That machine shop might not literally bunch them along the production process, but their expertise in developing the recipe for one part will extend to the rest and they’ll be able to offer better prices seeing the larger runway and work volume coming their way.
Work Simplification was pushed by the federal government during WWII and lasted a decade or two longer in government than in industry. The same is broadly true of group technology, which was called "layout studies" in the US jargon. It wasn't nearly as developed as in the USSR but nonetheless was definitely important.
The military applied it to arsenals and shipyards, but even the civilian agencies applied it to improving the flow of paperwork through an office. Here's a random brief illustration from a military manual (pg 27–30):
I've written quite a bit about where work simplification came from and what happened to it. Layout studies were part of the same story. In all cases, of course, these approaches drew upon the quite fleshed out approaches to manufacturing that factories had developed. Perhaps of interest:
Maybe the collapse of the Soviet Union and the very public exposure of soviet economic woes ruined the prestige of Group Technology. Business strategies are strongly subjected to cycles of hype and buzzword abuse so when the Soviet Union was rapidly industrializing it was a model worthy of emulating but after the fall of the Eastern Block the Toyota Way became more cool than the Chernobyl Way.
This is an interesting point, although it's my sense that Group Technology lost favor in the Soviet Union as early as the 1970s, and books on it often tend to downplay or omit entirely its Soviet history.
This reduces handling, tooling, and cycle times, optimizes equipment utilization, and reduces plant costs and size, achieving almost the benefits of mass production
Student-centered educators across the globe should rejoice with this post!!! We know that memorable learning IS a form of Group Technology. Thanks for the injection of rigor and curiosity sparking.
I work in this space, and I often see people try to group parts into “part families” and process them in some sort of bunched manner. The hard part with the whole premise is that tries to optimize high mix, low volume product but that product is too unstable in design or too low volume to see returns on process optimization.
If I run a machine shop and part A comes from customer A and part B comes from customer B, and the parts have a lot of similar operations that need to be completed, grouping them physically as they travel the shop floor requires 1) the upfront planning, 2) clear and similar production runway from customers A and B, and 3) that there’s something to be gained vs just running a bigger batch of each part. Also from a quality perspective, it would be a nightmare to try to actually mix product in a chemical bath or any specific step of a manufacturing process that you would be able to.
Now you could argue that it’s less about batching and more about factory layout, but then I think you get away from the core premise and you’re just back to making simple conclusions like “I should put my deburr station in between my milling and inspection stations.”
The place I think family building does provide a return is if customer A realizes that 10 of their parts are all pretty similar and they give all that work to one machine shop. That machine shop might not literally bunch them along the production process, but their expertise in developing the recipe for one part will extend to the rest and they’ll be able to offer better prices seeing the larger runway and work volume coming their way.
Work Simplification was pushed by the federal government during WWII and lasted a decade or two longer in government than in industry. The same is broadly true of group technology, which was called "layout studies" in the US jargon. It wasn't nearly as developed as in the USSR but nonetheless was definitely important.
The military applied it to arsenals and shipyards, but even the civilian agencies applied it to improving the flow of paperwork through an office. Here's a random brief illustration from a military manual (pg 27–30):
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Work_Simplification/NxQ02QmmywkC?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA27&printsec=frontcover
I've written quite a bit about where work simplification came from and what happened to it. Layout studies were part of the same story. In all cases, of course, these approaches drew upon the quite fleshed out approaches to manufacturing that factories had developed. Perhaps of interest:
https://www.statecapacitance.pub/p/how-the-feds-invented-lean-manufacturing
Maybe the collapse of the Soviet Union and the very public exposure of soviet economic woes ruined the prestige of Group Technology. Business strategies are strongly subjected to cycles of hype and buzzword abuse so when the Soviet Union was rapidly industrializing it was a model worthy of emulating but after the fall of the Eastern Block the Toyota Way became more cool than the Chernobyl Way.
This is an interesting point, although it's my sense that Group Technology lost favor in the Soviet Union as early as the 1970s, and books on it often tend to downplay or omit entirely its Soviet history.
This reduces handling, tooling, and cycle times, optimizes equipment utilization, and reduces plant costs and size, achieving almost the benefits of mass production
Student-centered educators across the globe should rejoice with this post!!! We know that memorable learning IS a form of Group Technology. Thanks for the injection of rigor and curiosity sparking.