As the new manager at the site, I was trying to be respectful about what I was seeing. I had learned long before that there was always a reason why things were the way they were. Perhaps not a great reason, but a reason that made sense at the time. Then I walked into the environmentally controlled pump production room. It had been recently installed and was touted as the latest in Lean Thinking. In reality, it was a “Frankenstein” process – a bunch of lean concepts stitched together.
It was single-piece flow, until you reached the rotating buffers of six pieces between each station. Yes, rotating in circles on turntables. It had no chairs, yet there was no machine time to allow the operators to move to another operation. They had to stand there all day as if they were standing guard outside of Buckingham Palace. The cell was U-shaped, yet it was hard to take advantage of this configuration – its only impact was to make material delivery a challenge. And so began the work of collecting motion data, machine data and other process information to reconfigure this well-intentioned attempt and turn it into something better.
Our recent book, The Power of Process, introduced the specific frames (6CON) for people to look through to properly design a new process while optimizing the value-creating resources. The framing is applicable to the creation of any process that involves people, technology, or equipment, whether the application is in manufacturing, healthcare, services, retail, or any other industry. This framework can result is 30-50% improvement in safety, first-time quality, customer lead-time, capital efficiency, labor productivity, floorspace, and more that could add up to millions of dollars per year and a 10x payback.
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