Hello and welcome to Quality Management that Sticks. In an industry often seen as dominated by men, the virtues of femininity can take an unfortunate back seat. The thesis of this blog is that the manufacturing industry can benefit from a woman’s unique perspective. More and more female quality managers are stepping up the plate and leaving their imprint in a positive way. This blog will try to understand what it all means while examining the industry as a whole from a woman’s point of view.
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When is Organizational Change Required by Lean Manufacturing?
Lean manufacturing has actually become a popular and extensively embraced economic and business management approach. Business worldwide are beginning to rely on it amidst political and financial situations even in the most progressive all countries. Yes, the tough times have actually extended from the third world countries to the totally established or first world nations. It is since economies are now led and influenced by volatility including oil producers and companies. Since all markets are almost run and powered by energy, business seem to not escape the troubles hounding the energy sector.
For virtually more than a year now, firms all over the world have actually been experiencing crunches produced by the enhancing and rising costs of oil on the planet market. A great deal of companies have actually fallen and have actually weakened due to the rising oil prices. There are an increasing number of business now applying for bankruptcy protection not since their management messed up or some executives defrauded them, but because of the external environment posed by volatile oil prices. That is why, lean production is getting an increasing number of attention, and more and more business are deciding to lastly execute the concepts of the approach.
Lean production
What specifically is lean production? The popular Web website Wikipedia specifies lean manufacturing as a philosophy in management that focuses and looks carefully at the reduction and removal of the 7 wastes. The seven wastes are the usual jobs, equipment and practices discovered in the modern work area. The 7 wastes are determined as factors that hinder productivity or significantly weakens it.
The 7 wastes lean manufacturing attempts to junk are the following:
- Over manufacturing– specialists think that over manufacturing is an overall waste of energy, efforts and capital. That is since overproduction offsets over supply and piling up of stocks, which in turn will lower or bring down prices for the produced items.
- Over production also drains capital from companies, with the majority of the excess items either put into the wastebasket or reaching expiration dates.
- Over processing– Over processing is generally comparable to over production, only that over processing commands extra and unnecessary processes.
- Transport and activity– Lean producing objectives to decrease unnecessary costs for transport. Movement is the rate of action within the work areas. If the work stations are too compressed and little, employees will not be able to move freely, affecting their efficiency.
- Inventory and waiting– As mentioned earlier, lean production eliminates accumulated inventories. Waiting time in all aspects is eliminated because of the structured structure and because productivity is increased.
- Scrap and flaws– Mostly, lean manufacturing aims to combat the manufacturing of commodities and merchandise with scrap and flaws.
- Item and outputs with scraps and defects are undervalued in the market. Exactly what is worse is that the integrity and image of the business producing them are tainted, resulting in poor sales, poor income, then ultimately to loss, and further, to bankruptcy and company closure.
Organizational modification
Not due to the fact that lean manufacturing is a technique that at first and mainly targets the structure of companies is lean manufacturing constantly commanding and demanding for organizational change. Yes, lean production intends to rationalize, streamline and increase corporate operations. But its does not imply organizational modifications follow. The organization is essentially not modified or changed upon implementation of lean manufacturing principles. Lean producing never ever targets organizational change, but instead hits modifications in the organizations’ environment design and work practices.
Organizational changes, however, are suggested and carried out in addition to lean production just when the desired outcomes and outcome from lean manufacturing practices are not achieved. Failure of lean production is always discovered to be associated with the effectiveness and adherence to the genuine principles in the application of lean production principles and approaches. That is the only time when organizational change along with lean manufacturing is executed. The results and gains from the implementation will offset all the difficulties and costs incurred, so why be reluctant anyway?
While organization change is something that you may consider given your desire for increasing efficiency and eliminating waste, one consideration is whether you should have an outside opinion such as a gap analysis performed by a qualified consulting services company such as AQM who offers a completely free comprehensive on site analysis. I would consider this the risk free route regardless of my budget.
Solutions for Better Quality Management
Any company in the world can definitely benefit from good old fashioned quality management. Whether you are producing assless chaps or if you are producing origami instructional guides, is there really any question that they need to be the best they can be? As your business gets bigger and bigger, you will discover that it simply becomes way more challenging to manage quality management compared the the good old start up days. Because it is so crucial, though, you have to discover a method to make certain it is dead on. Ain’t that the truth?
What solutions are out there? I mean there has to be something right? Of course there is!!
You understand that you need quality management however discovering the most efficient means to obtain it might seem like a rubix cube level puzzle degree of difficulty. The great news is that there are a large number of choices that can assist you so yay you have options, honey!
From organizations that specialize in quality management to software programs that you can utilize. You can invest in having your personnel and managerial levels of workers trained more efficiently to produce the desired results. There are alternatives out there to help simply about any company get the quality management that they require.
What good will it do other than make you look and sound like the smartest and most handsome fella in the entire board room?
Do you ever get the feeling that you are investing dollar after dollar into your company whether it is through advertising or improving efficiency and somehow you still need something more? All that money spend and it still feels like a faucet that you can’t find the handle to turn it off… ugh! A drippy slippery mess!! The lady doesn’t approve, no she don’t. It could be that your product is not the very same inside and out. They will know that they can depend on you and they’ll keep coming back if you provide to your consumer 100% the exact same item time and time once again. It takes some time, yes. It takes cash, cold hard cash. However, quality management is an advantage to you many times over.
Purchasing quality management in one form or another is an excellent method to obtain the products and services that you produce to the customers in a manner in which they will be delighted about. It will offer you with the aid that you have to take your company to the second level also. Considerations in quality management should be made. You understand that you require quality management but finding the most efficient method to get it could seem tough. There are options out there to assist simply about any company get the quality management that they require.
Quality management is a benefit to you many times over. You are guaranteed to love it or your money back, figuratively speaking of course…
Investing in quality management in one kind or another is an exceptional way to get the items and services that you produce to the customers in a manner in which they will be delighted about.
So now you are pent up and getting you some quality and you have no one but yourself to turn to. For shame…
My best piece of advice is to hire some outside assistance. Get a fresh perspective of your organization and bring in some qualified QMS consulting and training. There are people out there that do nothing but look at this stuff all day long. That’s right, they specialize in quality. It can’t hurt any to bring in an auditor and let them find things you could never even imagine existed. True there’s a certain level of cost, but for what they normally find, it’s easily worth the investment.
Get to Know Your Wastes
Understanding exactly what lean manufacturing is does not take rocket science, nor does it take a conference of 10 experts to bear down to the standard principles. Merely put, lean production is the accomplishment of the best efficiency and success for a company by removing the wasteful techniques and activities that are commonly present in business routines.
At an initial glance, it almost seems like some companies are in love with the idea of embracing lean manufacturing because the wording just sounds so appealing. Ask any girl what she thinks about getting “lean” and we all know the honest truth about it. However, in actual reality, it’s really simpler than seems. Exactly what you just need to have is the dedication and the discipline to see certain things in your production line or supply chain and then make the necessary modifications happen. Pretty much a combination of awareness and willpower.
First off, let’s mention what the leading seven wastes business identified as the reasons for things such as production delays, unwanted costs, and eventually, bankruptcy filings and hostile takeovers. We don’t want none of that. So you got to know your wastes
- Overproduction – you made too many widgets. Whoops. Now you have to store them… and you also paid the manufacturing cost of those extra widgets that no one needs. And you are thinking about having a firesale to recoup your losses. Bad idea to overproduce.
- Transportation – or better yet logistics. Shipping costs are one thing, but when your items have to travel too far from one warehouse to the next, that there friend is what we refer to as waste.
- Movement (procedures that do not need to be conducted) – think of it as doing things out of order. You have an assembly station on one side of your facility and then inspections and packaging are clear on the other side. Someone has to use a forklift to move that pile of uninspected boxes of widgets to the opposite side of your site. Maybe you should move that part of your process closer to eliminate that waste of going station to station.
- Inventory- zero inventory is sort of the holy grail of lean, but you want to move production directly to the market as quickly as possible. Having inventory that sits on a shelf doesn’t help with this one bit.
- Processing – what if not every process were required? You need to look at your whole operation and reduce process as much as possible to get the most streamlined version. Eliminate as much as you can so that you can get products out quickly.
- Waiting time – movement is critical to lean. Your process has to be efficient in a sense of station to station. If one part of your process is a weak link that slows down everything else, then you need to identify that process and get it up to speed so other aspects of production don’t sit around stuck because of one person or piece of equipment can’t keep up.
- Flaws – defective products mean you have to deal with the headaches of returns and replacements. Allocating resources to handle dissatisfied customers takes away from production while replacing their orders means producing the same unit twice and only capitalizing on one unit. That’s a quick way to go under.
These are the essential reasons why most firms typically fail. For instance, with defects, rather of concentrating on attaining the finest quality output at the shortest time frame, some companies waste effort and energy into taking a look at and fixing equipment and technique problems and issues. If the kinks had been addressed in the first area and the trouble nipped at the bud, such an unnecessary activity would be removed.