Lean Experience of Frank

Next to that he experienced during several visits to Japan that with relatively simple equipment very advance displays can be assembled in single piece flow, giving a flexible production with fast feedback loops and excellent quality. What a difference with the complex CFT machines in Eindhoven with large batch sizes, lots of downtime and numerous quality problems! In Japan Frank became a Lean Believer. 

At JDS Uniphase the Lean program had high priority, and Frank was assigned as Lean Manufacturing Champion. In this role he facilitated the changeover from batch production of the lasers to Single Piece Flow, which resulted in a reduction up to 80% on stock levels and throughput times! Especially the Kaikaku events, special breakthrough Kaizens which defined and for a large part realized large changes within a week were memorable. 

After this period Frank became Senior Lean Consultant at Blom Consultancy, where he drove several programs for multinationals as Corus and ASML. At Blom he mainly learned about the importance of the people involvement part of Lean. Having employees see their own losses and providing them with the tools to solve thee issues in teams was the main learning point of Frank during his employment at Blom Consultancy. 

After founding Triodin with two colleagues in 2006, Frank mainly applied the Lean way of working to the high tech development processes he encountered in his interim assignments.

In the area of Lean Agrim is still cooperating with the ex-colleagues of Triodin