Process Improvement, waste elimination Archives

How do you improve your process flow? How to reduce or eliminate process flow obstacles.

The goal of continuous improvement is to provide the customer, with the highest quality, at the lowest cost in a shorter time. For a shorter time, your processes need to flow without interruptions or obstacles. How do you achieve that? Yes, you guessed it, you have to identify and eliminate waste. These are the steps that you can use to improve the flow.

Start with your longer processes to assure biggest impact on the operation.
Define the value of the process from the customer lenses.
Go to see the process.
Breakdown the process in steps and ask what is the purpose, why it is necessary?
Can you combine or eliminate steps?
Can you rearrange steps to improve flow?
Can you reduce or eliminate waste?
Can you move equipment, machines or workstations closer together to minimize distance?
Is it possible to reduce work-in-process inventory?

When you go to see the process, walk through the entire flow, and observe where it stops. Waste is usually a symptom of obstacles to flow. Every time you see work-in-process inventory, defects or errors, people waiting, excessive motion, or longer than necessary transportation, you are looking at things that stop the flow.

When you improve the flow, you are reducing the process cycle time. That is how you will be able to deliver your product or service faster to your clients. Reducing or eliminating waste is also a way to reduce operating expenses in the form of inventories and defects reduction.

Process Improvement, waste elimination

What is knowledge waste? One of the 8 Wastes of Lean.

In my previous post, I mentioned that the heart of the lean system is people’s involvement, a highly motivated team continuously seeking the best way. I learn this idea from Pascal Dennis on his book Lean Production Simplified, which is one of my favorite lean books. It was in the same book, where for the first time, I learned about the nine wastes of knowledge.

Value-added activities add something, change, or transform material or information into what the customer is willing to pay for, everything else is non-value-added or waste. Although at the beginning was seven deadly wastes, now we include the waste of knowledge to have eight categories of waste.

Knowledge waste has different names, unused or non-utilized talent, non-utilized potential or skills, and neglect of human talent. Regardless of what name you use, this type of waste is one of the reasons why so many companies have huge turnover rates. In traditional management, leadership dictates orders expecting people to follow them without even questioning. Doing that is disrespectful, it is treating people like commodities, the same way machines are treated.

There is no surprise that for Toyota, respect is one of its core values. Self-esteem is one of Maslow’s psychological needs, the feeling of achieving things, confidence, and respect is important to have the right level of self-esteem. As leaders, we are responsible for actively listening, understand, motivate, teach, and influence our team. If we fail, we are stopping the flow of knowledge, ideas, and creativity. In other words, we are failing our team and creating a waste of knowledge.

The nine types of knowledge waste are the following.

Hand-off – a separation of knowledge, responsibility, action, and feedback.
Useless information – false or incorrect information
Discarded knowledge – acquired knowledge or information that no longer serves the original purpose
Wishful thinking – making decisions without adequate information
Waiting – for information, comments, authorization
Misalignment – disconnects in information or time, between departments, or within departments.
Communication barriers – culture, language and organizational culture
Inadequate checking – constant follow-up, check, and balances, lack of trust
Wrong tool – poor communication tools, narrow information channels

Many leaders still think that to be the boss, they need to have all the information, and hold it for themselves because the information is power. There is a lot of hidden talent in our organizations, and it is our responsibility to motivate, develop, teach, communicate, and influence our team. If we are not doing this, then we are guilty of creating a waste of knowledge.

Process Improvement, waste elimination

How can you identify the 7 types of waste?

how can you identify waste? — Waste can be deceiving, learn how to identify waste in Lean

Value-added means those activities that change raw material or information into value for the customer. Any step that does not serve the purpose of providing value for the customer is non-value-added or waste. This type of activity adds cost or time but does not add value. One way to identify what areas of your business need change is by identifying waste. How can you identify waste?

Use the back-door method to identify waste

For people with continuous improvement experience, it is easier to identify waste. They will see waste jumping out in front of them. For most people, finding waste is not an easy task. If you are one of those people, use the back-door method.

Waste is everywhere, and probably things that you see now as part of the process, are waste. With the back-door approach, you look for the opposite of waste, work. Work is the value-added activity in the area. When you cannot see waste, find the work, and everything else is waste!

How to identify waste

Follow the following five points or steps while focusing on one process.

Look at the three real things, the functional area, the facts, and work-in-process. Do not guess or let the emotions or company culture drive the way, use data-driven thinking. Be in the look-out for excess inventory.
Ask what the operation is about, what is the purpose of the process?
Ask why the operation is necessary? Is there a better way to accomplish that purpose?
Everything that is not Work is waste. Draw the process steps, and everything that does not execute the function is waste.
Ask why at least five times to find the root cause or reason for each step to exist. Ask how you can change the process. Create an improvement plan with the information gathered and execute it as soon as possible.

If you follow these steps every time, soon you will grasp the concept. It is important to understand the purpose of the area. Why the process exists and what is the value for the customer are important pieces of information for effective waste identification.

Process Improvement, waste elimination

Is your customer paying for your business inefficiencies?

As a customer, I am not willing to pay more than necessary. When I needed to paint the house, I compared service costs and customer reviews between service providers. Around 61% of internet users research a product online before making a purchase. These days is easier than ever to compare prices, which is why price strategy is so important. Most business owners use cost-plus pricing. This strategy sets the service price, adding a mark-up to the cost.

This formula implies that higher costs translate into higher prices. If your service price is higher than your competitors and the service is not much better, you are at risk of losing customers. There is a simple and effective solution to reduce operating expenses. What you need to do is to find waste and eliminate it.

Waste from the customer perspective

Waste is any activity that does not add value from the customer’s perspective. For example, Company A paints with brushes and rollers while Company B paints with paint sprayers. To finish the job on-time, Company A needs more painters because their process is slower. Are you willing to pay more because their process time is longer?

Waste in a house painting company

There are eight types of waste: transportation, inventory, motion, waiting, over-production, over-processing, defects, and underutilization of people. Our friends from Company A have quite some waste in their business. The following are examples of each type.

Transportation: moving paint cans in and out storage
Inventory: keep enough brushes and rollers for 6-month service
Motion: walking back and forth to the truck looking for the right size brush.
Waiting: Waiting for the materials truck or instructions
Over-production: Painting the fence when it wasn’t part of the request
Over-processing: Paint the same wall five times
Defects: Use the wrong color paint
Underutilization of people: the new guy is wasting paint because he does not have training

Identify waste and don’t make your customer pay for it

One way to identify what areas of your business need change is by identifying waste. You can highlight the waste on the process on your process map and use the information to design a new process.

Do not make your customers pay for your inefficiencies. If you want to improve profits by controlling costs, it is important to learn how to identify waste.

This article was originally posted by Jina Rivera in Organization and Efficiency Solutions.