Operations Execution & Continuous Improvement Flashcards

A manufacturer tracks OEE on a critical machine. Availability is 90%, Performance is 85%, and Quality is 95%. What is the OEE?

Answer: 72.7%

OEE = Availability × Performance × Quality = 0.90 × 0.85 × 0.95 ≈ 72.7%.

In a lean transformation, 'muda' specifically refers to:

Answer: Any activity that consumes resources without adding customer value

Muda is the Japanese term for waste — activities that use resources but create no value from the customer's perspective.

Which dispatch rule minimizes the average number of jobs waiting in a queue by always processing the job with the shortest expected processing time first?

Answer: Shortest processing time (SPT)

SPT minimizes mean flow time and average work-in-process queue length across a set of jobs.

A company adopts a policy of never building product ahead of a customer signal. This is the core principle of:

Answer: Pull production

Pull production authorizes production only in response to actual downstream demand or a customer signal.

A team performing a kaizen event on a packaging line identifies motion waste. Which of the following BEST describes this type of waste?

Answer: Unnecessary physical movement by operators that does not add value

Motion waste refers to unnecessary body movements by workers — reaching, bending, or searching — that add no value.

A plant uses a heijunka box to schedule production. The PRIMARY purpose of heijunka is to:

Answer: Level production volume and mix over a planning period

Heijunka (production leveling) smooths out volume and product-mix variation to reduce mura and enable flow.

Under a drum-buffer-rope (DBR) scheduling approach, the 'rope' component serves to:

Answer: Synchronize material release to the pace of the constraint

The rope ties material release at the gateway operation to the drum (constraint) pace, preventing overloading the system.