4. Excess transport
Moving materials or goods between units that do not add value to the final product or service. This leads to both idle / waiting equipment, and unnecessary marriage.
Causes of occurrence – irrational use of production / office space, unnecessary intermediate storage areas, inconvenient equipment placement, non-optimized business processes.
Example: Location of the spare parts warehouse and production at a greater distance from each other.
5. Excessive displacement of people
Unnecessary staff movements or chaotic organization of workplaces. This loss is often combined with the previous, especially in the office. Therefore, here’s an example. The organization has an electronic workflow system, but people still need to print and archive every application manually. As a result, unnecessary movement of documents and people. If we are talking about production, then while a person is walking on the floor, he can damage other products.
The reasons for the emergence – irrational organization of the work space, lack of work standards, lack of visualization, violation of work discipline.
Example: search for the necessary tool for the operation of the entire site, the lack of knowledge of the staff of the areas of responsibility and walking, the determination of who should perform a particular operation, the lack of visual standards that facilitate the search for necessary tools and materials.
For example, a business process system, big data sensors and geolocation sensors for moving people within business processes will help.
6. Marriage
Marriage is dangerous because it is not only the disposal of raw materials and working time of machines and people in the junk, but also the reputation of customers.
The reasons for the appearance – lack of control at different stages of the production process, lack of built-in system «Protection against Fool» (Bye-yoke), lack of qualification of people or equipment problems.
Back to digitalization, the most common solution here is machine vision systems that analyze process and product.
7. Overservice
It means all those actions when we try to do better than the consumer needs.
The reasons for this are an unknown demand or a lack of incoming information.
If we go back to project and product management statistics, only 16% of the products are completely successful. Why?
One of the factors is the excessive number of possibilities in products. Only 20% of the built-in functionality is in demand regularly, 30% – occasionally, and 50% – almost never. To be even more visible, let’s remember modern applications, for example, banking. What do you really use? Additionally, did it become more convenient to use your banking application in comparison with what was five years ago? Personally, I do not. Micro-service solutions are becoming more functional, but less convenient and demanded. But their development costs money.
To simplify the example, remember the remote for the TV with a set of additional features that the consumer does not need.
8. Untapped human potential
The final loss type, according to Toyota, is unused or unrealized human potential. As the name suggests, this is the exclusion of the personal qualities, knowledge, skills and skills of the employee from the work performed by him. Unrealized human resource losses most often occur when the staff member is expected to perform exceptional routine operations, the manager does not listen to subordinates, and any activity is strictly regulated by internal standards, rules or duties.
Additionally, as practice shows, this is one of the most common phenomena. At the beginning of the book, I said that one of the limitations is the thinking of the manager, and top managers are usually bright and authoritarian entrepreneurs who love micromanagement and do not trust the regular staff, are not ready to hear different opinions. Although sometimes it is skilfully masked. In the end, we get this kind of loss. And if the head is also in a large company with a bureaucratic structure and culture, generally trouble.
The causes are an inefficient system of motivation, high competition among staff, excessive control by management, lack of motivation or even punishment for showing initiative.
It is also common for an employee to perform non-core tasks, work for himself, for a colleague and for Ivan.
All these losses are relevant for any working system, both production and office. Including when implementing digital tools. Additionally, digitalization automation is about reducing the amount of routine work that people do.
Also below is a table with examples of losses for production, office and IT.
Key tools
Kaizen
Kaizen is a Japanese philosophy that focuses on continuous process improvement in small steps. The point is, the people on the ground know best what can be done. This instrument was also in the USSR, but was called the system of rationalization proposals.
For this to work, it is necessary:
constantly collect feedback and implement changes, and if they are not applicable, you need to explain to the initiator what is wrong;
people need to be trained to direct not just desires, but rational sentences, plus this will not waste time on long conversations.
This not only improves processes but also motivates employees.
In my practice, the best initiatives (the least costly and most effective) came from ordinary employees.
Examples:
1. During the production, there may be a defect or not the entire order can be made (did not have time, the components did not arrive). As a result, the packers explain the details to the head of production, and he – the planning and sales department.
The solution from the packers – put the number of each part in the drawing itself. Implementation in 1C – a couple of days.
Outcome:
planners simply give a report and drawings
the planner immediately knows what to reload, and says when the missing item comes;
the sales department clearly understands when the order is ready.
2. Feedback from operators.
Having changed the location of consumables, it was possible to reduce the time for re-ordering between orders by 50%: it was just not necessary to go to the other end of the workshop, along the way and hitting other orders.
Do you think the combination of such an approach and digital tools will have more effect than buying expensive control systems, but with chaos in normal work?
For digitalization it is generally a «magic pill». Once people accept that they can change the workflow and acquire the necessary competencies, they themselves will begin to simplify their work, including automating and repartitioning processes. The main thing is not to «encourage» them even more routine.
Well, not all employees, but 10—15% of active innovators are able to turn everything around. It is them that should be highlighted and trained system approach.
If we look at the experience of Japanese companies, then in each production workshop there is a tablet where each employee can leave a proposal.
Kanban system
«Kanban» in Japanese means «sign», «signal» or «card». Initially it is a tool with cards to request raw materials in the production shop.
These are now IT solutions for the organization of work. Their essence is creation of «pulling system», when work is taken only after completion of the previous, as well as visualization of the work process, prevention of overloading of people or units, identification of problems at an early stage and improvement of the process. We will look at this tool in more detail in the chapter on project management, as it is one of the main ones in flexible approaches.
