One of the biggest barriers to standardization is fluctuating short-term demand. Long term changes in demand can be managed by hiring staff or by attrition, but when there is significant variation day to day or even hour to hour, it just isn’t practical to hire new people for the handful Read more…
Most people understand that if there is no standard process, it is hard for other individuals to come in and help out when things go wrong. What is less commonly understood is that simply establishing consistent methods is not enough to support teamwork. The process must be configured in a Read more…
Once again, I had the pleasure of hosting an interview with Karen Martin. She recently co-authored a book with Mike Osterling. It’s titled Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation. (If you are interested in buying the book, it is available at Amazon.com.)
How should we track employee errors to improve quality? This is a sensitive question that I get asked frequently. Leaders ask me the best way to track employee errors. In response, I generally ask why they want to do this. The most common answer is that they want to improve quality. Read more…
One of the key elements of any process is the workstation. Simply put, a workstation is the area that contains the work surfaces, fixtures, tools, and materials needed to perform a job. Classic thinking promotes the use of standard workstations. These off-the-shelf setups can be interchangeable, and often can be Read more…
Value stream analysis is one of the steps in the value stream mapping process. The first step is to create a current state value stream map. This is simply a snapshot in time of the current conditions of an organization. Once the map is complete, however, you must decide what Read more…
Shojinka is a form of flexible manufacturing, where the number of workers vary to match demand requirements. This is obviously superior to a static system that staffs work areas without consideration for fluctuations in production requirements. Being able to reassign people to exactly where they are needed will help keep Read more…
Setup time is the time it takes to reconfigure a machine to run a different part. Setup consists of two basic categories. Internal setup time. This type of setup time requires that a machine be shut down to do the tasks required to get ready for a different product. This Read more…
Hansei is a Japanese term that loosely translates to self-reflection. In practice, though, it is much more than that. Hansei requires several things. A person must recognize that there is a problem in personal performance. Hansei is not a run-of-the-mill assessment tool. It looks at personal failings rather than system Read more…
While continuous improvement is a great and wonderful thing, it has one glaring weakness. You have to be right when you define what improvement actually is. If you missed the mark, you’ll just get more effective at doing the wrong thing.
One trick that you can use to make sure that your definition of improvement is correct is to look at yourself through the eyes of your competitor. Imagine that you are a marketing manager for the business you most frequently go head-to-head against. What weaknesses would you try to exploit? Which of your own strengths would you try to emphasize? What are your advantages from the customer perspective?
Try as we might, we are not always successful at separating work from our home life. Whether it is after hours emails, or simply being unable to clear your mind from job stressors, work can creep into everything you do. When work is challenging, as it might be during a big change, that overlap can cause problems.
As budget constraints and sequestration put the squeeze on fire departments, there is a substantial risk that response times will creep up. In many cases, that can lead to more serious injuries, complications, or even death.
So how do you go about getting the response time down when there are some very real constraints? Well, in Israel, a group called United Hatzalah (meaning ‘rescue’ in Hebrew) cut the time for a first responder to arrive on scene from 12-15 minutes down to about 3. That’s a 75-80% reduction.