Are You Making Progress With Your Lean Efforts?

When you are on the Lean transformation journey keeping a close eye on the rate and pace of progress and knowing when to employ timely counter-measures is absolutely essential.

How do you know that you are improving? Learning? Do you have a plan for getting to the next-level?

Productivity Inc. has a series of audit services that may be just what you are looking for (click the links below for more information).

• Workplace Scan

  • This workplace scan is the least formal of all our audit services, but often times this approach is all that is needed to identify opportunities and “next steps”. A Productivity Inc. consultant will accompany you on a walk-about of your facility to discuss your company’s improvement strategy, tactics, and activities and provide some insight on things such as: visual workplace, creating flow, constraint management, equipment reliability, and standard work. The Gemba Walk will conclude with a verbal sharing of performance enhancement perspectives and next step improvement alternatives.
  • Duration: four hours for a single facility. Target facility size and breadth of products and services may alter approach and duration.

• Assessment of Production Operations

  • The focus of this assessment is to identify waste, by degree of severity, impeding the company from achieving its current state improvement goals. The scope of the assessment will include production processes and methods, machine effectiveness, quality, scheduling, and replenishment systems. The assessment will consider such things as: value stream lead times, product and information flow, delivery performance, inventory levels, and standard work practices. The assessment will conclude with a verbal report of performance perspectives, next step improvement alternatives, and a sequence of implementation.
  • Duration: 2 days for a single facility. With additional collection and application of diagnostic software, a mathematical based assessment of the company’s replenishment system can be performed pointing-to the effectiveness of current procurement methodologies and improvement options. Add an additional day for a total of 3 days for a single facility. Note: target facility size and breadth of products and services may alter approach and duration.

• Operational Assessment

  • This assessment offers an established uniform methodology for assessing your operation to determine the full-range of benefits that can be brought to bear by implementing a systemic Lean Improvement Program. This analysis has a top-down approach. It begins with senior management to learn your goals and perspectives and ends in the office and on the plant floor with first-hand observation of processes. Throughout the assessment, inefficiencies, impediments, inconsistencies, and all forms of waste are sought-out and then matched to the specific tool/technique/alternative that can remedy the situation. Remedies are then translated into deliverables and deliverables translated into cost/benefit. Collaboration with operations personnel is an absolute as collaboration breeds assessment ownership and pride in becoming part of the prescribed outcome. The assessment will conclude with a written report summarizing the findings, suggested next steps and cost/benefit.
  • Duration: scope of assessment varies based on your needs and will be determined in a collaborative effort. A rule of thumb for a single facility is 10 to 21 calendar days from official lift-off to final report submission.

• Equipment Reliability Assessment

  • This assessment focuses on your equipment and the necessary social structure to ensure its readiness. The eight pillars of Total Productive Maintenance provide the base-line criteria for this first-hand assessment process. In collaboration with your site facilities management team, Productivity Inc. consultants will lead this intensive and well orchestrated process of assessing and documenting your equipment reliability, flexibility, and overall capabilities, both technical and social, to meet customer demands.
  • Duration: scope of assessment varies and will be determined in a collaborative effort. Target facility size and breadth of processes with accompanying equipment may alter approach and duration. A rule of thumb for a single facility: 2 to 5 calendar days from official lift-off to final report submission.

• Corporate Diagnosis

  • Productivity’s corporate diagnosis uses a proven methodology to gain understanding of your organization’s current state of learning and to identify the gaps within its core capabilities. Using progress tables that present the characteristics observed in top performing companies and a diagnostic questionnaire addressing organizational strategy, structure, and strength, Productivity’s consultants will facilitate your management team through the diagnosis process to provide a documented framework that will allow your company to analyze its strategic position, define high impact business process improvement initiatives, and identify the practices needed to improve the capabilities required to meet future demands.
  • Duration: scope of the diagnosis varies based on client needs and will be determined in a collaborative effort. A rule of thumb: 2 to 5 calendar days.

• Lean Readiness, Culture, & Capabilities Assessment

  • Most often when Lean implementations fail, the root cause is usually the organization’s inability to sustain the gains. This failure points to issues of leadership and culture. This “soft side” assessment tests your organization’s readiness and willingness to support and take ownership of a lean transformation process. Through a variety of intervention questionnaires and checklists we’ll identify the positive attributes of the organizations leadership and governing polices, key infrastructure enablers and road-blocks, match the organizations skills and capability characteristics to that of top performers, search-out definition and current state of employee involvement, team effectiveness, approach to problem solving and project management, and numerous other social and culturally driven workplace practices. This analysis is top down and begins with senior management to learn of their goals and perspectives regarding the current and future state of the organization socially, technically, and in the context of business process innovation.
  • Duration: scope of assessment will vary and will be determined in a collaborative effort. Target facility size, employee population, and breadth of processes may alter approach and duration. A rule of thumb for a single facility: 2 to 5 calendar days from official lift-off to final report submission.

• Lean and Green Audit

  • How can your company benefit from improved lean and environmental collaboration? What are your company’s Green Targets-To-Improve? Asking the right questions can help identify Lean-Environmental opportunities and increase the chances you will find improvement opportunities that “boost” environmental performance and operational performance concurrently. We can provide you and your EHS representative with:
  • a 6S inspection and audit questionnaire for eliminating environment waste and risk
  • key questions for identifying Lean-Environmental opportunities
  • a Lean & Green Kaizen event checklist
  • rules of thumb for estimating energy cost saving
  • plus many other tips and ideas for setting and achieving environmental and energy savings goals

Understanding how your improvement program is progressing is the key to sustained success. For further details on any of these programs or to schedule an assessment or audit at your facility please contact us at 1-800-966-5423, or click here.