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92 SMT Magazine • April 2015 Lean factory, the pull system replaces the static production plan, enabling the factory to more easily make what is needed with reduced waste. As the factory moves toward increased flexibility, however, inevitable bottlenecks are exposed. The solutions are likely to be different across different manufacturing operations in different sectors. The way to find solutions may not be as difficult as you might think. At the post office counter, the queue is there as a buffer to bring people to the counters in an orderly fashion, priori - tizing requests for processing in a simple "first come, first served" way. When standing in a long line at the post of- fice, many people will think that they should simply open another window. This would certainly help to reduce the queue until it went back down to a reasonable level. In our SMT factory, ad - ditional materials operators could be allocated to react to pull signal requests for materi- als. However, people and their roles in production need to be more flexible so that there can be dy- namic assignment to different roles as required, in the same way as the manager at the post office counter could open a window himself during busy periods. The same applies where machine processes are the bottleneck—automation needs to be flexible and as easy to change over as a hu- man process. Looking around a hospital, a post office, or an SMT operation in the factory, it is surprising that the major cause of lost opportunity and pro- ductivity is people. People themselves are not the problem; it is the constraints placed on them by the old-fashioned approach to roles to which they are assigned. The key elements in our SMT factory, even the SMT machines themselves, have evolved to become extremely flexible. With the right pro - cess preparation software, production jobs can be allocated from line to line with ease. Common loading of feeders ensures that SMT machines can perform continuously, making a high mix of products as if they were high volume lines. Dynamic planning software can optimize short- term demand fluctuations so that these can be kept at optimum efficiency as new products come along and old ones reach end-of-life. These issues have already been discussed over the last six months or so. Having applied all of that, though, we are left with the fundamental human challenge. The way in which Lean is applied going forward certainly needs to be expanded. It is no longer about the consideration of a process dedicated to mak - ing a part of a product while eliminating all of the waste in that process alone. The scope of the process definition needs to be expanded, not just to take in a single product on a single line or even a set of products sharing a common material setup, but to take into account the SMT operation as a whole—all products over all lines and supporting resources. How much better would the ex - perience be going to the post office counter with short queues, as the post of- fice business took responsibility for the waste of time that they caused their customers? Manufacturing in the future, faced with un- predictable and changing demands, may well start to resemble triage more than the near stat- ic factory models of today. The science of queu- ing, together with the application of Lean prin- ciples, is going to be significantly challenged. What has been regarded as the most flexible re- source of all is the one that now needs to really be flexible, ensuring that essential pull system resources do not become the bottlenecks. SMT Michael ford is senior market- ing development manager with Mentor graphics corporation valor division. To read past columns, or to contact the author, click here. looking around a hospital, a post office, or an smt operation in the factory, it is surprising that the major cause of lost opportunity and productivity is people. People themselves are not the problem; it is the constraints placed on them by the old-fashioned approach to roles to which they are assigned. " " the essentiAl Pioneer's surViVAl Guide TO BE lEaN iS TO BE HuMaN continues