Back to Lean Management

Once again, we are back to practicing lean management!  We would guess that your business already has a program in line to use for lean management but perhaps it would be a good idea to try a different approach and incorporate something a little different. Lean manufacturing optimizes processes and eliminates waste.  This helps cut costs and taking a few hours to inspect a situation more closely can also enhance safety of an operation.

People are constantly trying to make sense of the world the live in.  They form opinions about every interaction and situation they experience.  It is only logical to find that when two people stand in different locations they see things differently and though each has a point of view no two are ever quite the same.
 
We at GHC use the Takt Time formula: available production time / customer demand per day.  The variables can easily be modified and we admit that we quickly learned that activities that do not contribute need to be eliminated as these non-value added steps are a waste.  

Large facilities will prefer to use something that is more sophisticated such as the Six Sigma program.  Six Sigma is a set of techniques developed by Motorola in 1985.  Motorola determined that processes vary over time but the company had years of data that they had collected.  The formula for Six Sigma is:
     Defects Per Million Opportunities (DPMO) = ((Total Defects) / (Total Opportunities)) per million
     Defects (%) = ((Total Defect) / (Total Opportunities)) per 100
     Yield (%) = 100 - (Defect Percentage)
     process Sigma = NORMSINV (1-((Total Defects) / (Total Opportunities))) +1.5

Six Sigma works great when long term information is available to work with but GHC is small and doesn't mass produce anything.

The whole idea of Lean Management is simple and can be applied to any situation.  First, identify the waste. Second, analyze the waste and find the cause of the problem.  Third, correct the cause problem.  Repeat each month or every ten working days.

Both techniques mentioned above are proven solutions for fixing waste within an organization.  Benefits of a company's effort include increase in productivity, reduced space requirements, and improvements in quality.
Visit our This Matters page and find more ideas.