Week one with a new employer and no time was lost in parachuting me in to take over a new Lean Program from the boss.
A medium sized family business, they were coming in for week three of a sizeable traineeship program and had worked through the 5S elements: Sort & Set in Order over the preceding fortnight. Training and project progress review, next concept teaching and action assignment all occurred neatly in a one hour per week functional team session.
The third group in were the machinists – jovial bunch, happy to make a coffee and get stuck back into it their project.
They had decided a shadow board for tooling adjacent the main production line was a sensible action; save time, save money, because time is money … right everyone?
Around the room, consensus was a 20 minute saving, not having to search for tools. Photos were produced and we made plans to go and view the area shortly. Savings were significant; twice a day except when night shift wasn’t running, then only once.
Numbers flew: shifts, wage rates, employee on-costs … all to the sound of buttons clicking on a calculator. The sum declared was in the vicinity of $15k…. Multiplied by three production lines of course and shazam, well done lads, a $45k saving to the company. The team were chuffed, smiles and a couple of hi fives, and they settled in to learn about Shine – the art of continuous cleaning, ensuring anything stored away was good to go when required next.
As mentioned, it was week one of a new contract. I wasn’t planning to walk in and contradict anyone and made a ‘note to self’ to follow up at next weeks session.
A week later, I checked in on how their use of that time was going. Had they been able to schedule extra work; use the time to set up the next shift … or did it simply go into a longer lunch. They laughed. No, the production office wasn’t scheduling more work. Yes, they had agreed to the big savings figure because it seemed like the other guy wanted to hear it.
It was not the first time I’d seen it, have seen it since, and likely will again.
If we cannot tie our improvement to a critical element of the value chain, then time is often simply just time. If we do make linkage to the critical driver of value, then we need to follow it through with results analysis. This is where Lean & Six Sigma merge together…
Lean delivers time to produce a product or reduces cycle time. Six Sigma provides the statistical hypothesis to determine if result B, versus baseline data A is in fact ‘Different’ or just more of the ‘Same’. Contact Growth Improvements for assistance.
Key Takeaway:
Production teams always know more than they let on … open and factual conversations will do you far better than grabbing at headlines.