I work in a factory. We make aerospace products.
That sounds exciting and possibly dangerous. Does your factory contain heavy equipment used for producing things in an assembly line?
It does. I'm normally a product development engineer, but for the last few weeks I've been directly working on a few of the assembly lines.
That sounds challenging. I'm so grateful for the assembly line, it's allowed factories to produce products that can be assembled faster and with less labor than traditional assembly.
We certainly make use of the concept. The current trend in manufacturing is to move to "single piece flow" through the assembly line. Ever heard of it?
No I have not heard of such a concept, perhaps you could explain it to me? Can it be applied to assembly of other complex items like automobiles and electronic goods?
It sure can be a applied there. The idea is to move away from batches of products to building one piece at a time. The idea is to maximize the "First in, first out" speed to get the first item out of the line as quickly as possible. This makes the factory agile to fluctuations in demand.
That makes a lot of sense, and seems like it would greatly increase productivity, which is the ratio of output to input in the production of goods as you may know.