MDC Consulting

MCD (Methods Design Concept): Redesigning working methods to increase productivity and profitability

Improving productivity more than 200% without investment, with creative/ innovative approach.

The Current and Future Challenges:

Profitability and productivity are and will remain the core challenges of any company. In this context, some questions arise:

What methodology can be used to design a working method at the shop floor level?
How to set a goal for designing the future work method?
What is the role of industrial engineering?
How do people really get involved in getting an effective and efficient design of the future work method?

In this context, companies often need:

to know how much they can improve their productivity and how they can do without investment;
to know if staff are appropriately allocated to each process and how to reduce labor costs;
to know the real performance of people in order to sustain the current and future change of the organization by continuous development of skills and knowledge of employees.

The MDC Consulting Program was designed with the direct guidance of Dr. Shigeyasu Sakamoto, who developed and published the concept.

Dr. Shigeyasu Sakamoto Concept

Step by step progression of phases is important for success from the perspective of company performance.

There are three possible phases. To reach a higher level of productivity improvement, there are two keys to success:

to separate productivity contents into M, P and U with dependence on an industrial engineering techniques point of view;
to adopt new approaches to each dimension or function of productivity.

Those three dimensions multiply productivity results.

The M dimension contributes effectiveness and the P dimension contributes efficiency. The U dimension cannot provide clear results without these two dimensions. Synergy of the three dimensions for improvement is ultimately the most effective goal.

Main Goals of MDC:

Increasing bottleneck machine/ facility capacity
Products design contents: redesign for easy assembly work
Reducing change over/ set-up time
Reducing office work manning
Reducing shop floors’ manning.

Main MDC Consulting Steps:

1) Feasibility Study of Productivity Improvement;

2) Sensitivity Analysis (SA) of Profitability;

3) Designing Systems for Success;

4) Four Levels of Manufacturing Strategy;

5) MDC processes:

- Setting a Model of Working Methods
- Defining Functions of All Work Contents
- Setting Design Target as Improvement Value – KAIZENSHIRO
- Searching/Creating Improving Ideas
- Modifying and Summarizing Ideas as a Concrete New Method and
- Implementing New Methods as a New Model

6) White-collar Productivity;

7) Monitoring Productivity and Profitability

Expected Results: Beyond World-Class Productivity

According to companies who adopted MDC for their productivity improvement, for 300 ~ 500% improvement is required small amount of money which means not capital investment; this means the improvements do not rely on large scale of hardware change such as capital investment. This leads to ROI improvement as well.

An example of a successful MDC application is presented in a synthetic way in the figure below:

For example, HB Co. marked 732% of ROI, return on investment and 510% on labor productivity. The improvement results are due to successful MDC activity in three years. The cost items share improved 18 to 4% on labor cost, 19% to 52% on profit.

MDC has been successfully implemented by Dr. Shigeyasu Sakamoto in various companies across the globe. Dr. Shigeyasu Sakamoto has more than 50 years of management consultant experience and he has very good feedback from his clients – top management – especially regarding the direct contribution to corporate performance with his own developed methodology of MDC, method design concept and work measurement rather than introducing a lot of fashionable topics.

Companies that have successfully applied MDC come from: