Exposing Hidden Capacity | Operational Excellence Quick Hits

Speaker 1: (00:05)
So, what are contributors to lost productivity? One, lack of sufficient problem-solving skills. People aren’t good problem solvers, so they put bandaid solutions in place, and add extra steps in the process.

Speaker 1: (00:18)
Reactive decision-making. So, we’re having problems all day long, and we’re reacting to those problems and making decisions based on our gut-feel.

Speaker 1: (00:26)
Constant daily interruptions. So, we’re getting interrupted all throughout the day that’s super unproductive.

Speaker 1: (00:34)
Incapable and unstable processes. Poorly written or lack of standard operating procedures. So, one of the first things that we try to do is get repeatable processes. It doesn’t matter if it’s right or wrong, we need to do it consistently. So, if we can get people doing things consistently, we get immediate impact just from doing that. I’m working with a construction company right now. And they said, “Oh, every project we do is different.” Yes, I agree. But the process on how we conduct the project needs to be the same.

Speaker 1: (01:07)
So, they have three people that do framing. Of course, everybody does it different. So, we have three guys that frame and they all frame differently. Well, if they’re framing differently, how can I predict either materials or output? I can’t. And so, when I go to the three guys and say, “Well, who’s processes best?” “Of course, mine is. Well, the other two don’t know what they’re doing.” So, we have that issue of people think that what they’re doing is the best. So, I said to the owner, I said, “The first thing we need to do is agree on the criteria that we’re going to evaluate each activity against. If we agree on the criteria that we’re gonna evaluate the process against, then we can have a way to evaluate the process subjectively, and understand which one is best practice.”

Speaker 1: (02:01)
Lack, or ineffective training. Of course, if we got three different processes that we’re doing to achieve the same goal, which one do we train the people on? Operator one’s training, we’re going to train to his process. If operator two’s training, we’re going to train to his process. And we don’t agree on which one’s the best, so now we’d have all this variation in the process.

Speaker 1: (02:21)
Next is bad multi-tasking. So, bad multi-tasking, we talked about that is doing a task, and getting interrupted, and going and doing something else before we finish that task. Just taking out the bad multi-tasking, 25% improvement in productivity as a minimum.

Speaker 1: (02:38)
Next, it’s ineffective or too many meetings. Too many times, people go into meetings and they spend hours in meetings and nothing ever gets decided. And then, there’s no action items that come up. This one company I went into, they said, “Oh, it’s like, why don’t you come to our production meeting?” So, we go into production meeting with 12 people, spend an hour and a half in the meeting, nothing gets accomplished.

Speaker 1: (03:02)
And I come out of the meeting and the president says, “Oh, what’d you think of that meeting?” I go, “That was painful. Nothing got accomplished. All you did was discuss the current jobs. And nobody talked about what, what jobs were in trouble. So, I want to change the meeting to, we only report by exception. And I want to cut the meeting down. So, we change the meeting from an hour and a half to 15 minutes. And we only talk about exceptions. We don’t talk about every job. We only talk about jobs that are in trouble and what are action items to get those jobs back on schedule.” Just that, an hour and 15 minutes, times 12 people, I freed up 15 hours of management attention a day.

Speaker 1: (03:49)
Next, is creating data reports that aren’t utilized. So, we talked about this. It’s like all of this information that’s being generated, we got ton of reports, but no information I can see. So, I call it the sea of data. Where we’ve got a sea of data, but no data that we can see because the data isn’t relevant for making decisions. We need to get the data more relevant instead of a lot of data that’s irrelevant. Okay so, we want to focus on getting the right data to make the right decisions.