One Piece Flow

by melonakos on April 15, 2011

in Education,Entrepreneurship

Update 4/20/11:  Google Video is shutting down soon, so this video will probably disappear.  Too bad.

Cool video about improving productivity in a counter-intuitive way.  I am totally a mass production kind of person.  Perhaps I should reconsider.

Do you agree with one piece flow now?  Or will you keep sticking with your old mass production ways?

Tagged as: productivity

  • http://profiles.google.com/sararae.r Sara Rands

    Can you explain this to someone not in business? I thought that the assembly line and mass production was a historical innovation that dramatically increased productivity. “One piece flow” sounds like the way people generally manufactured things before the development of the assembly line. What am I missing? How do “one piece flow” proponents explain history?

    Also, does it depend on the complexity of the steps? Piano players know that when you do something repeatedly, muscle memory takes over and you can complete that task more quickly without conscious effort. Muscle memory will help you more with the individual discrete tasks. With “one piece flow,” your conscious mind still has to remember each step, which makes it more prone to error (as this guy shows with the stamp he almost forgot).

  • Sara R

    Can you explain this to someone not in business? I thought that the assembly line and mass production was a historical innovation that dramatically increased productivity. “One piece flow” sounds like the way people generally manufactured things before the development of the assembly line. What am I missing? How do “one piece flow” proponents explain history?

    Also, does it depend on the complexity of the steps? Piano players know that when you do something repeatedly, muscle memory takes over and you can complete that task more quickly without conscious effort. Muscle memory will help you more with the individual discrete tasks. With “one piece flow,” your conscious mind still has to remember each step, which makes it more prone to error (as this guy shows with the stamp he almost forgot).

  • Anonymous

    Yeah, I think Henry Ford might take issue with this concept. But, I can see that for some problems, the “one piece flow” may make more sense than mass production.

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