The 7 MUDAS - Definition and competitiveness gains with optimized planning and scheduling using Oplit
24/06/2024
Reading time: 9 minutes
In the complex world of industrial production, the constant pursuit of operational efficiency is essential to maintaining competitiveness in the global market. To achieve this goal, many companies turn to the principles of Lean Manufacturing, of which the 7 Mudas play a crucial role. These 7 Mudas, or wastes, represent the most common obstacles to efficiency in production processes. In this perspective, Oplit, an innovative company in the field of optimizing industrial processes, integrates these principles to revolutionize scheduling and operations planning.
The Mudas: basic tools of Lean
In the context of production management, Lean Manufacturing is an approach focused on eliminating waste to maximize value for the customer while minimizing costs and delays. At the heart of this philosophy are the 7 Mudas, also known as the "Seven Wastes," which represent the most common sources of inefficiency loss in industrial processes.
Overproduction: Overproduction occurs when the company produces more than what the customer demands or earlier than necessary. This often leads to surplus inventory, unnecessary labor costs, and overburdened production capacities. Adjusting production according to the actual demand from the customer is essential to avoid this waste. To do this, it is recommended to use tools like workload versus capacity charts to plan and adjust production accordingly.
Waiting: Waiting times between process steps are often a major waste. This occurs when information, materials, or resources are not ready when needed. These waits lead to delays and inefficient use of resources. To reduce this waste, it is essential to eliminate interruptions in flow and balance tasks to avoid unnecessary waiting times.
Unnecessary Transportation: Movement of materials or products that does not add value to the final product is considered waste. This can include excessive movement of raw materials, semi-finished products, or finished products. To reduce this waste, it is recommended to bring workstations closer together and shorten transportation routes to minimize unnecessary movements.
Overprocessing: Overprocessing occurs when efforts are expended on activities that do not create value for the customer. This can include repetitive manual operations or complex processes that are not necessary. To reduce this waste, it is important to eliminate or reduce non-essential activities and optimize working times to maximize added value.
Excess Inventory: Too much inventory, whether in the form of raw materials, semi-finished products, or finished products, can lead to high storage costs, product obsolescence, and poor inventory management. To avoid this waste, it is essential to eliminate excess inventory and optimize inventory levels to meet the actual demand from the customer.
Unnecessary Motion: Unnecessary movements by workers or machines can also lead to significant waste. This can include repetitive gestures or non-essential movements that do not add value to the final product. To reduce this waste, it is important to conserve gestures at workstations and minimize unnecessary movements to maximize operational efficiency.
Defects: Finally, defects or production errors can incur additional costs, delays, and customer dissatisfaction. Instead of simply correcting errors afterward, it is essential to eliminate the root causes of defects to prevent their occurrence.
In summary, the 7 Mudas of Lean Manufacturing represent the most common obstacles to efficiency in industrial processes. By identifying and eliminating these wastes, companies can maximize customer value, reduce costs, and improve their competitiveness in the global market.
Oplit: an innovative approach to reduce waste
Oplit is a solution that allows for better planning of industrial production as well as optimization of scheduling. It is an ideal solution for reducing waste and thus lowering associated costs and optimizing production processes.
Regarding overproduction, Oplit offers a planning module that allows you to visualize, in the form of a graph, the workload relative to the factory's capacity, and thus make production planning assumptions to achieve the best possible load/capacity balance. This solution also highlights the bottleneck positions in industries, which allows you to have visibility on what is happening at these bottleneck positions. As a result, you can anticipate production to meet your resource needs and avoid any overproduction.
The Oplit solution enables planning and coordinating resources so that the production load is well distributed among the different load positions. Consequently, this reduces unnecessary delays, waiting times at the load positions, and interruptions in production processes.
Furthermore, excess stocks, which are a considerable barrier to optimizing production processes, can be managed thanks to the solution provided by Oplit. Indeed, this solution allows for visibility into production in progress and also has a feature aimed at managing the stocks of your company.
Oplit allows you to assign operators to workstations, thus enabling you to manage the flow of operators and reduce unnecessary movements between workstations.
The solution provided by Oplit can finally help companies detect defects throughout the production process. It allows for real-time monitoring and sets up alerts to identify potential problems and take immediate corrective actions.
The advantages of Oplit for industries with many Mudas
In conclusion, the integration of Lean Manufacturing principles, particularly the 7 Mudas, into the scheduling and production planning solutions offered by Oplit paves the way for increased operational efficiency for industrial companies. By balancing load and capacity, reducing wait times, and optimizing production processes, Oplit contributes to waste reduction and improved profitability. Through inventory and work-in-progress management and effective production planning, companies can also benefit from better product quality and a reduction in costs associated with rework. By adopting this efficiency-focused and process-optimization approach, Oplit helps its clients remain competitive in a constantly evolving industrial environment.
