Business Improvement Techniques

Beware!    It is is very easy to be misled that you must carry out a Kaizen Event or prepare a Value Stream Map before you start to implement changes to your business!

Different 'experts' will convince you that their philosophies for change are better than any other, but many of these philosophies contain the same tools which are emphasised in slightly different ways.

The key to implementing successful change is to consider your organisation as a complex system and to apply the improvements to the whole business.    At Manufacturing Awareness, we can help you to pick just the 'right' tools or techniques.

Some of the current philosophies are:

Lean - Lean Manufacturing or Lean Thinking - has been around for over 20 years.   Some organisations have achieved significant improvements to their profitability through implementing lean, but others have unfortunately failed to gain any benefits mainly because they have implemented changes in a piecemeal manner.   Based on the Toyota Production System, one of the major principles of implementing lean is to involve and empower people - a point often forgotten!

Theory of Constraints - TOC is a management philosophy aimed at improving the whole business, based on three measures.    Throughput is the rate at which money is generated by the system through sales;   Inventory is all the money the company invests in purchasing the things that it intends to sell; and Operating Expense is all the money the company spends turning Inventory in to Throughput.   TOC helps to indentify the constraint of the system - the area where we need to apply business improvement techniques.

Quick Response Manufacturing - a companywide philosophy aimed at shortening lead times through flowing components through the business, reducing inventory and increasing the amount of value added.

Agile Manufacturing - can be described as ‘responding to customer’s individual changing demands whilst maintaining mass production’.   Applied to an automotive assembly plant – every car off the assembly line is the same model, but has a different specification – colour, engine size, and accessories – mass customisation.

Six-Sigma - a whole company management strategy which indentifies and removes the causes of defects and variation.   Using total quality management and statistical methods, each six-sigma project follows a defined methodology and has quantified financial targets.   A six-sigma company aims to achieve less than 3.4 parts per million rejects.

 

Let's Get Back to Common Sense

 

Click on the link to read the article 'Let's Get Back to Common Sense'