10 Tips and Tricks to Fix Inefficient Operations Without Touching Your Cap Ex Budget (Blog)

It can be expensive go grow sales but it’s very, very easy to cut costs by eliminating waste, especially if one is new on their Lean journey. Estimates put the productivity of manufacturing frontline staff at only about 10 to 30 per cent. In a Lean organization, value added activities add up to 50 per cent. That initial gap represents tens of thousands of dollars for organizations who are ready to take the first steps on their Lean journeys.

Time is a competitive weapon. When considering the time from the placement of an initial order to the moment it leaves the factory to be shipped to the final customer, most North American manufacturers have products that spend 90 per cent of their time waiting for the next step in the production process. Less than 10 per cent of the process is spent actually manufacturing a product. By contrast, for the best in the word, it’s 50 per cent. This is a huge difference and translates to a significant competitive edge for companies that have the tools, systems and people to drive time from their process. Manufacturers must be data driven: start with an assessment, have a plan and focus on the easy wins first. On the surface this sounds very straight forward; however, most companies fail early on when they do nothing or they try to do too much.

2-Second Lean popularized the concept of thinking in continuous improvement minutes, every day. Companies early in their Lean journey can benefit from short increments of daily improvement time. Other companies that have already driven much of the non-value added waste may schedule their improvement time monthly (as is the case at Toyota). But all Lean companies include it as part of their standard work. A second approach involves Kaizen (literally meaning change for good) events. These structured blitzes (rapid improvement processes) allow you to bring a focused effort to reduce lead times, improve processes, and drive other KPIs in a short time with big results. As an added bonus, the structure of these blitzes involves generating data, which can be presented to senior management. This “proof positive” can be helpful to give you more runway as you ramp up your Lean efforts and helps make the business case to the boss for bigger change.

Change agents who can see beyond their immediate job function are needed in all organizations to drive improvements. CME’s Greenbelt program grads leave the program with the ability to enhance and develop problem solving skills within the organization, effectively lead continuous improvement activities, deliver Lean training and facilitate rapid improvement projects within your own organization. Greenbelt grads see a big picture – the system as a whole.Manufacturers employ dedicated subject matter experts in virtually all other areas of expertise (engineers, marketers, buyers), it seems short-sighted to leave out continuous improvement.

Many manufacturers struggle by trying to do too few, or too many priorities. Best-in-class manufacturers carefully select a few priorities and do them very well. It can be helpful to structure your operational planning around an annual assessment, which lends itself to a data-driven approach built around your value proposition.

Lean is often likened to a total fitness program for your business. Keeping your business healthy requires an ongoing commitment to continuous improvement. Many times, organizations benefit from encouragement to “stay the course,” outside eyes to identify opportunities and assistance to find solutions as well as the opportunity to benchmark against best in class competitors. Lean consortiums can provide all of that and more. Whether it’s an ongoing peer group commitment throughout the year or a once every few years conference like Embracing Excellence, CME facilities shared learning, collaboration and trains members on new Lean and manufacturing best practices relevant to the consortiums learning goals.

There’s power in a Kaizen blitz. Once a team member participates, their problem solving skills improve significantly. When choosing your blitz team, don’t forget about the power of outside eyes. Bringing in stakeholders who are close to the process, but not in it, can create valuable new perspectives to see problems or opportunities in new lights. Every time you solve a problem, you close a gap and become a Leaner organization. The goal is to create an army of problem solvers, like at Toyota, who’s unofficial motto is ‘at Toyota, we don’t make cars, we make people.’ Over time, you want to make sure that every single person on your staff, from the shop floor up, is a process engineer.

Straight out of Lean Blackbelt playbook, mapping a process all the way from inquiry through to solution and identifying the constraints – what’s stopping us from quickly fulfilling a solution – is key to providing leaders with the big picture they need. This means mastering the dual challenge of focusing tactically but thinking strategically. To do this, you’ll need the right tools to map the flow and to implement change, and the change agents to do it.

The Lean Management System is the missing piece of the puzzle for many organizations, especially those who are further along on their Lean journey but are experiencing plateaus, or even a backslide. For more mature organizations who have already driven out waste; a less reactive, more proactive management system is the necessary next step. The right Lean system will pull management into the day to day operations of the organization, ensuring that leaders are no longer firefighting and creating standard work for senior leaders that includes tiered huddles, Gemba walks and other layers of structure and accountability.

Going Lean while going green can help with the bottom and the top line. CME’s Lean and Green program is designed to help organizations realize cost savings, increase revenues, mitigate risk, enhance engagement and strengthen overall competitiveness. By focusing on improving environmental performance, CME’s coaching program supports and accelerates the implementation of opportunities among the seven key environmental wastes, among which water, waste and energy are the big three.