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With jidoka we had fewer defects and a happier customer. But the line was still too slow to meet demand — we had stations in different "departments" with travel time between them, and we were losing time and clarity. Eventually we couldn't sustain profit and went bust. The waste wasn't just defects; it was distance and fragmentation.
In Lean we organise by flow — the path the product takes — not by department silos. When stations are scattered by department, travel and handoffs add time and hide problems. So we rearrange the layout into flow: put stations next to each other in the order of the value stream and remove the artificial splits that were by "department" rather than by the actual work sequence. We also set travel between adjacent stations to zero in the sim so we can see the effect of flow alone. The change: switch to flow layout and eliminate travel between adjacent stations. Less travel, clearer flow, and we can see how much faster we can serve the customer when the line is physically and logically one stream.
Run simulation to see Profit & Loss