Lean Manufacturing Guides

A Yamazumi chart stacks each station's work content against takt time — the clearest way to see imbalance and waste on a line. Building one that survives scrutiny takes more than drawing bars: the boundary has to be fixed, the elements measured rather than estimated, and every element classified before anything is rebalanced. Here is the full sequence, in the order experienced industrial engineers work through it.

A time study turns shop-floor observation into a reliable standard time. Here is the proven sequence — from planning to standard time — step by step.

SMED (Single-Minute Exchange of Dies) shortens the window in which a line is stopped between products. It runs in three phases — separate, convert, streamline — but the work that decides the outcome happens before any of them: measuring what the changeover actually consists of. Here is the full sequence, in the order it is done on the floor.

Line balancing levels work across stations so each one sits just under takt time — cutting idle time, removing bottlenecks and matching output to customer demand with the fewest operators. This guide walks through the full sequence, with the formulas and a worked numeric example, then shows how to keep the line balanced as demand changes.