The Origins of ONO Lean Logistics in the Footsteps of Taiichi Ohno

In one of the companies within the group, we needed to redesign processes, adopting a production system that was flexible towards demand, quick to react, and light in terms of inventory. The company's growth was rapid, often accompanied by changes in mechanical details, requests for rapid fulfillment, and cost reduction.

We chose to apply the principles of Lean Production or TPS (Toyota Production System) to optimize resources and improve material flows, reducing inventory and the movement of goods. In other words, we aimed to tackle all waste to achieve improvements in working conditions for operators and, above all, to enable them to "produce maximum efficiency for the end customer," the mantra of Sensei Taiichi Ohno, founder of the TPS in the last century.

The company adopted this system. The proliferation of numerous codes led to the installation of many shelves that occupied more surface area than the areas where value was added, namely, the assembly of machines.

The shelves were therefore a limitation, and the technology of the standalone vertical warehouse also presented obstacles in the application of the Lean (TPS) system. Materials would have been hidden in closed vertical cabinets, each with an access bay for operators, who would still have had to move between the various isolated modules to retrieve the necessary components.

The limitation of finite capacity and the obligatory access bay led us to rethink the dynamics of a production that could incorporate both the benefits of a flexible production system and the advantages of a storage system that could occupy the maximum volume with minimal surface occupation.

From here, thanks also to a challenge among mechatronics and IT professionals, we were able to brilliantly resolve the objections that some Lean Thinking gurus had presented to us.

Thanks to new principles of mechanical motion kinematics, modularity, and also thanks to information technologies, we can confidently say that ONO Lean Logistics Modular Systems are now a significant evolution.

ONO is an extremely effective tool to achieve the new step in production and logistics based on the reduction of the main waste identified by the creator of the Toyota Production System, namely:

WAITING




TRANSPORTATION




OVERPRODUCTION




INVENTORY




MOTION




DEFECTS/REWORK




PROCESS

Once all of this was achieved, it seemed natural to us to assign to this new business division the name of the engineer who inspired its creation, Sensei Taiichi Ohno.