Author(s):
Nico Hanenkamp

Author Affiliation:
Vice President Operational Excellence Freudenberg NOK Sealing Technologies,
47690 East Anchor Court, 48170 Plymouth/Michigan/USA

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

During the early 1990s, the Toyota Production System (TPS) became widely accepted across the industrialized world. Companies from different industries gained in experience by applying lean principles as well as by developing and refining customized approaches to optimize products and processes. From a practical standpoint, the implementation of TPS-elements such as one-piece-flow, visual standards or U-shaped layouts, can easily be identified on the shop floor. Meanwhile, most of the underlying management processes and structures remain hidden to the outside observer. Closing this major gap is the objective of shop floor management. It provides and formalizes an integrated framework of processes with defined roles, responsibilities and competencies to sustain and improve efficiency. Its fundamental principles include a focus on prevention, frequent high decision making and empowered teams consisting of experts, managers and operators. The objective of this article is to define the scope of shop floor management, to sketch a generic structure in terms of an overall process reference model as well as to detail new and modified sub processes, roles and responsibilities to enhance its implementation.

KEYWORDS:
Continuous Improvement, Shopfloor Management, Lean Management, Toyota Production System.