It’s Grand Final season and our eyes will be on the scoreboard during the game, keeping track of the timing clock and watching the scores. So what can we learn from within the Grand Final this year? When you return to work, is your team ready to head out like they are playing on the hallowed grounds of the MGC or Stadium Australia?
The practice of providing a safe workplace and implementing Lean production systems have been kept separate in most manufacturing sites. It is not uncommon to find these two essential functions being slightly out of alignment due to their seemingly opposite objectives. There are three excellent lean tools that you can implement into processes to create a safer and incident-free workplace
Office process design starts with using the lean principles to understand the current situation then develop a future state, along with a implementation plan to close the gap between the two situations. Here we will look at how to develop an office process and determining WHAT tasks are needed, then look at how we determine WHO we get to do these tasks. Developing a robust implementation plan, including the checking and auditing, will help us be successful in implementing our change and meet our goal.
How do we approach Waste elimination in a manufacturing environment? Start by developing a structured process that is simple and centred on reducing the waste, no matter how small, as this will add up over time to build team skills and improvement performance. It is better to do something small rather than not addressing the wastes at all. In any manufacturing processes the wastes are not easily seen at a first glance, and the task of identifying then requires a structured approach to eliminate wastes.
The 7 Wastes is a way to help us look for the lost time between cycle times and lead times in manufacturing and eliminate it.