What are the difference between Real Flow and Fake Flow?

I visited a garment factory last week and the unit owner said that he is following a Continuous Line System in the Stitching section, but we found out that It is a Fake Flow (not a Real Flow).

What is a Real Flow? 
1. Machines / operations are arranged according to the sequence of production

2. Line is Balanced (smooth flow with out WIP or Waiting) – Less variation in the cycle times of the operations

3. Small batch processing (less than 5 pieces per station – ideally 1 piece)

4. Operators and incharges know the takt time requirement – they know how to identify the bottleneck and balance the line

What is a Fake Flow?
1. It looks like an assembly line, but the operations are arranged according to the flow (people do not want to change the machine location / other constraints) – so single piece flow cannot be implemented. Materials have to be moved in batches

2. Cycle times of the operations are not balanced – WIP piling up inside the line; some operators are waiting – so they were given other work 

3. Batch size is very high (I saw 75 pieces as batch size for this line) – creates a very high WIP inside the line. Took 4 days for the first piece to come out of the line

4. Operators and incharges are not aware of takt time, do not know how to identify the bottlenecks and balance the line

So, even if there is an assembly line, there is no benefit of the Continuous Flow Production. 

How many of you have seen assembly line like this? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

You can also read this article in Linkedin here

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Cheers,


Ananth