ERFURT Broken Crown Die

[John Sabato]

Originally Posted by George Anderson

I believe that the "broken" crowns, like the Erfurt notched receivers appear sporadically simply due to a manufacturing practice called LI-FO. Last in, first out refers to the way in which components are pulled from their bin. Since the parts are all the same workers grab what's on top of the bin. Thus that which was most recently produced is grabbed before parts produced earlier.

A very good thought George, and a well known concept for manufacturing... it is called Kanban (看板) (literally signboard or billboard in Chinese and Japanese) is an inventory scheduling system for manufacturing. That would have escaped my thinking on this issue for a long time. Toyota developed kanban to improve manufacturing efficiency. Kanban is one method to achieve Just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing which reduces inventory on hand, and ties up less money on parts in storage.

In the factory where I was the Engineering Manager for a couple of years, certain parts used for assembly were manufactured in lots which varied in size based on last year's production.

For example, if we had an inventory history of using 100 parts in a month during last year, we would produce 100 parts plus a percentage based on what our sales were expected to be. When a Kanban inventory gets down the to reorder point, the next lot was produced and poured on top of the existing parts inventory so the parts at the bottom of the barrel might never get used for a very long time which would result in the practice you described.


Thanks for your input.