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Every day we should go out to where the work is being done and show how much you care about the workers on that team.
The way we do this is to pick a theme, like productivity, and engage the team members, one at a time, with purposeful questions. For example: “ What are you doing at this work station? How do you know if you are doing a good job? What gets in your way of doing a good job? What can I do to help you?”
There are two points of view on what to do with labor that has been freed up by efficiency or work flow improvements. The first, short sighted, is to reduce the headcount. The second is to do something CONSTRUCTIVE with that headcount. Here are some options and we need you to add your comments and ideas in the conversation.
If you’re looking for ways to increase capacity of your operations without increasing the labor expense, here is how you can analyze and work towards reductions within your current operations.
Your team is trying to make a recommendation to solve a problem. Does someone in the group always seem to have a reason to kill it? Be on the alert for these phrases and ban them. How would you as a leader respond to each of these Killer Phrases?
Most managers struggle to change product changeovers or maintenance downtimes in less time. In fact, many managers try to avoid the delays associated with changeovers and so build up unnecessary buffer inventory. Why is it important to streamline – you lose capacity every minute the process or equipment is down for the changeover. You can use the following 4 steps to make changeovers faster and less stressful.
How can you use that fact to help you identify the deficiencies in our work systems? These are the work interrupters that hurt productivity, cycle time, quality, safety and costs.
The coaching enabled the 18 managers to effectively observe the process details on the floor. The group achieved a reduction of 50,000 annual hours of non-valuing adding work activity. This is equivalent to 25 headcount that could be “redeployed to where they were needed more” in the organization.
This week I will reach the milestone of 500 miles riding my bike back and forth to Dunkin Donuts at 10 miles per round trip. It takes me about 27 minutes each way and I take a 10-minute break for DD iced coffee and munchkins. These rides give me plenty of time to reflect on how riding my bike offers some interesting lean lessons.