“During the process of implementing Lean and developing buy-in from the employees, the area went through massive changes. What was once a messy department became clean, organized, and the spawning ground for new ideas. The employees are extremely engaged and now have a vested interest in the department and the organization as a whole. We decreased our lead time from two weeks per order to 2-3 days. Altogether a very successful project.”
Tony Pauly, Vice President and General Manager
Ventana USA
Most organizations have untapped capacity. Rather than uncovering it, they purchase new equipment and hire additional people. We have another way. Toyota invented it, and we use it to help you achieve incredible levels of productivity improvement without adding people or buying equipment.
Traditional process improvement is based on what has been done in business since the Henry Ford era, which was a major improvement over earlier methods. Ford divided the manufacturing process into steps and tried to improve the efficiency of each step by batching product through. The larger the batch, the more efficient the step. Efficiency was defined by the throughput of each step. All businesses use this type of thinking. We batch machined parts in manufacturing, transactions in banking, and people in healthcare. We break everything down by department and separate each type of work in the name of efficiency. And while each department can be very efficient, the cross-departmental value stream that delivers the product or service to the customer is not.
Lean Transformation is based on what Toyota has done in all its operations since the late 1950s. Toyota couldn’t compete with the American Assembly Line using traditional methods, so they developed a very different way to think about doing work. Efficiency was defined in terms of a complete unit of work going through the entire value stream rather than the speed of an individual step in the process. Lean Transformation focuses on reducing the time between receiving a Customer order and getting paid for delivering it. It is completely counterintuitive and goes against common business and accounting practices.
But it works. Whether you are a bank, a machine shop, or an online education institution, it always works.
We can show you a whole new way to look at your business.
Call us if you would like an assessment of your operation.