Lean Dynamics LLC                                                                            

Cellular Flow applies whenever you have parallel equipment at several steps in your production process.  By aligning the equipment into virtual work cells (nothing has to be physically moved - the only change is that material flow must follow well-defined paths) and grouping products into families with similar attributes and processing requirements, changeovers can be shortener and simpler and throughput can improve.  The net result is that revenue will improve in oversold operations, overtime can be reduced in nearly oversold operations, and shift schedules can be reduced in less-than-oversold situations.

Many operations in the food & beverage, consumer products, and small chemical industries have an equipment footprint that looks something like this:





This layout is often necessary because the total throughput requirement is more than one piece of equipment can handle, so we find two or more in parallel at each step.  The good news is that it provides lots of flexibility.   The bad news is that flexibility comes with a price.  The layout depicted has 192 possible paths from step 1 through step 4, so flow becomes very difficult to manage.  Inventory tends to build up between steps, and any piece of equipment may see any part of the entire product portfolio, so the most complex changeover permutations are frequently seen. 

Cellular Flow creates virtual paths through the equipment, limiting the flexibility but also the extreme variability.  We’ve reduced the number of path combinations to only four so flow becomes much easier to manage, changeover complexity is significantly reduced, inventories generally go down but customer service levels rise.  Nothing has to be moved; you simply have to create and clearly mark the new virtual flow patterns.



A key part of this improvement process is the grouping products with very similar production requirements into families and then dedicating each family to a specific virtual cell.  That generally simplifies changeovers because changeovers within families are quicker and simpler that inter-family changeovers.  Our experience is that this will often improve throughput by 10% or more, with no capital investment.

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