If you have succeeded at implementing Lean Manufacturing in your facility, Congratulations!
Your competitors, all those that have survived the big economic crisis that we are in the slow process of recovering from, are also working on their Lean transformation.
And the Winner is!
The winner will be the one that has the best sustainability plan in place.
How do you sustain your Lean success? In order to sustain the growth you must develop a new skill in each member of your team! That skill consists of growing, all the time, their intolerance to waste and poor performance. It is something that takes some basic training, years of daily persistence, and true support from everyone in the organization.
We can help prepare your team to get into gear of a true Lean Culture that will not deteriorate but instead grow by the day. We have developed many techniques, methods, and formulas, combining them in a System that will keep everybody not only active, but Motivated, in a vital performance mode.
It will be good to keep these questions handy and if possible ask them daily:
Is your Operation Lean?
Is it Lean Enough?
Can you go Beyond that level of Lean?
I have a customer who is also my friend. His business has grown exponentially for several years. He has surrounded himself with an excellent team. The processes have been constantly streamlined.
Still, once in a while we get together and plan some –out of the daily routine– activities to refresh the creativity and remind everybody that there is always room for improvement.
The first time I met him, the plant was chaotic at best, a few projects later the flow of product was surprising, the damage in process was drastically reduced more than 90%, the materials were timely delivered, and it was working like a clock.
Nevertheless in a recent review we found great opportunities for improvement. They wanted to keep a steady flow of not fewer than 150 units per day to satisfy the demand and deliver on time. Well, after a few balancing adjustments in the process, they have reached more than 400 in one day when needed.
In the Lean Manufacturing world, it is often overlooked the fact that we “get used” to "doing something" in “some way” and when we are comfortable, the inventive spirit stops and can lead to boredom.
Creativity is like a muscle, when it is not constantly motivated goes dormant. We need to establish a self-challenging system. Unfortunately we always have an excuse: “there is no time for that.”
Sure enough, time is a perishable resource, and if we have not assigned some for creativity, the progress can get stagnated in no time.
Can you tell of some of your processes that have been innovated in the last few weeks? If the sincere answer is “no,” for the good of your business we may need to talk as soon as possible.
