History
It was created by John R. Costanza, an executive with operations management experience at Hewlett Packard and Johnson & Johnson. Costanza founded the John Costanza Institute of Technology in Englewood, CO in 1984 to provide consulting and education services for manufacturers to implement the methodology.
DFT uses applied mathematical methods to link raw and in-process materials with units of time and production resources in order to create a continuous flow in the factory. The objective is to link factory processes together in a flow and drive it towards customer demand.
Early adopters of DFT included American Standard Companies General Electric and John Deere (Deere & Company).
In the early years, DFT was regarded as a method for "just-in-time" (JIT), which advocated manufacturing processes driven to actual customer demand via Kanban. It was introduced as a way for American manufacturers to adopt Japanese production techniques, such as Toyota Production System (TPS), whilst avoiding some of the cultural conflicts in applying Japanese business methods in an American company. Later, it has come to be seen as a lean manufacturing method that allows factories to implement techniques such as one-piece flow, TAKT-based line design, Kanban material management and demand-driven production.
Demand Flow Technology is promoted as a method particularly suitable for high-mix, low-volume manufacturing. in 2001, Costanza was awarded a patent for this approach for mixed-model manufacturing.
Read more about this topic: Demand Flow Technology
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a “will to renewal.” This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of “crises”Mof rupture, repudiation and resistance.... When there is no “crisis,” there is stagnation, petrification and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“The history of medicine is the history of the unusual.”
—Robert M. Fresco, and Jack Arnold. Prof. Gerald Deemer (Leo G. Carroll)
“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
—William James (1842–1910)