Manufacturing thinking, translated for joinery.
Lean, flow, WIP, takt time, quality — the ideas from Toyota, Deming and Goldratt, applied to a mid-sized Australian joinery shop.
- Lean manufacturing for joinery — beyond the buzzwords
Which lean principles actually help a joinery shop, and which ones don't survive contact with a custom kitchen.
Lean 12 min read - Why WIP limits matter more than throughput
The counter-intuitive maths of work-in-progress, and how to know if your shop has too much.
Flow 8 min read - Can takt time work in custom joinery?
How to think about takt when no two jobs are the same — and where it breaks down.
Flow 9 min read - Quality at the source: catching defects at the bench
Why bench-level QA beats end-of-line QA for joinery — and how to make it stick.
Quality 10 min read - Theory of constraints in a 20-person shop
Finding, exploiting and elevating the bottleneck in a real joinery workflow.
Throughput 11 min read - 5S in a joinery shop — what actually sticks
The parts of 5S that pay back within a month, and the parts that quietly get abandoned.
Culture 7 min read
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The joinery software behind these ideas.
See how FactoryPilot puts these principles into practice on your factory floor.