Building Better Businesses

Value stream design

At most organizations the greatest opportunities for improvement are to eliminate system-level waste through more effective integration of operations across the value stream. There is a strong need to ensure that all players in the work flow – including indirect operations, SG&A, and external suppliers – are effectively interfacing and working with common purpose to create highest value for your customers. We will help you design and implement creative operational systems that meet this goal. See this example.

Lean tools implementation

We will help you effectively implement all standard lean operational tools such as 5S, standardized work, visual control, rapid changeover, and andon, as required to support operational transformation. We can handle the most challenging tools applications such as total externalization of changeover on a progressive machining cell (for example, reducing downtime from 5 hours to zero) or standardized work playbooks that bring efficiency and control to high variety low volume operations.

Detailed Work Design

We work with your operations leaders to apply our special work design process. This process is highly effective in identifying and eliminating major wastes that constrain productivity. It identifies and implements low cost improvements that have high impacts, with 30-40% gains in parts-per-manhour typical. Our work designs are often creative. One example is the use of flex-work strategies that can achieve near full labor utilization on lines with large unit-to-unit work content variation, such as boat manufacturing. Another is the use of supercells where one operator runs multiple cells at their takt pace with special timers and visual controls that always keep them on the critical path task in order to maximize output.

Facility layout

Layout has a major bearing on waste and the effectiveness of supporting systems such as internal logistics and line supervision. We will help you improve your operations through layouts that function well in all respects. For example, consider this design for a new facility for machining large parts. The arrangement enables flexible deployment of labor allowing one operator to easily run from 1 to 4 machines and the right number of operators to be used to match the work content as a whole. This enables the work design to adjust so that high productivity is always maintained as parts, work content, and demand levels change over time.

Internal logistics and material flow

These systems can make or break an operation and are often a major source of waste. We design systems that streamline material flows, minimize deadheading, reduce the need for driver’s to scouting work, and employ milk run and train principles when practical. In many cases our pull approaches, level scheduling and pattern production systems dramatically simplify logistics operations. In high variety manufacturing, we have carefully designed kitting approaches to reduce setup and material handling waste as well as part selection errors.

Capacity Planning and Labor Allocation

Its one thing to have a highly efficient work design, it is another to realize full benefit from that design every day as you try to match production staffing levels to variable customer demand. So many companies fail in this effort and productivity benefits from improved work designs do not flow to the bottom line. We help you do these tasks effectively through the development of planning tools, labor allocation boards, work leveling, and other techniques.

Production Control, Scheduling, and Inventory Management

We understand how to achieve the full benefits of pull production control and apply it for many purposes. For example, in a recent installation, we use it to dispatch jobs into a complex department with variable product routings so that there is a steady, controlled queue of work behind each of four distinct finishing operations. This dramatically reduced production lead times and overcame capacity losses at the finishing areas.

We design effective scheduling systems and specialize in pattern production. This is a change in scheduling paradigm that enables full and level loading of staffing and bottleneck resources and realizes enormous efficiencies that can be only be realized when products are consistently run in designed sequences. It is particularly valuable in high variety manufacturing and in certain process industries.

Our systems are strongly complementary to effective inventory management because they enable high frequency stock replenishment. This allows us to significantly reduce your inventory levels. We have developed special stocking solutions for various clients. This includes a service parts stocking approach used in a pattern production environment where we ensure desired service rates targets are realized with low inventory. Another example is a special leveled plant production strategy that enables the operation to efficiently respond to pooled demand from a major customer’s 18 distribution center network that holds their stock on consignment.

Standardized Work and Job Training Systems

Improved work designs are most effective in a strong standardized work culture. We help our clients to build a custom work documentation process, one that clearly communicates standard processes and captures the knack and key points that differentiate novices from experts. We build fundamental skill training systems that capture the expertise required for the core repetitive tasks across the production floor. These systems enable trainees to rapidly learn and practice until they become highly proficient, having built the tacit skills that would otherwise only come from years on the job. We establish customized practices for systematic job instruction and help our clients deploy strategic cross training programs so that they have the flexibility they need to continuously run to standard as personnel and demands change.

Operations management

Lean systems should always be complemented with special daily management systems, and we help our clients to put them in place. We delineate an org structure that aligns management with value streams and establishes effective spans of control. We define everyone’s roles and responsibilities in the new system. We identify where rapid response systems are needed and build the needed processes and protocols. Operational metrics are defined that fit and drive proper behavior in your operation. Mechanisms, such as a structured system of daily management boards, are put in place to make problems visible and to drive their solution. We help you establish an effective standard process for problem solving and use it as a basis for maintaining performance targets and reaching stretch goals.

Team Building and Leadership Coaching

We help you to establish effective teamwork, ensuring effective team alignment, communication, collaboration, and conflict resolution. We help your leaders become more effective in their roles. This includes ensuring strong collaboration across the top functional layer in the organization (the direct reports to the CEO) to manage the significant change that comes with lean transformation.

Structured Problem Solving

Often nagging operational problems persist and drag down the performance of the business — items such as part rusting, inadequate seal integrity, excessive scrap, misclassification of inspected items, or low OEE on a bank of machines. They require special effort to resolve. ILS is highly skilled in six sigma problem solving techniques and will lead your organization in structured efforts to identify root causes and resolve them. This includes all of the statistical methods and tools such as ANOVA and experimental design. We also have successfully put in structured problem solving systems -such as quality gates and C4 processes – as part of our client’s management structure, and these systems have shown very high payback.

Tightly Link Operations With Financials

We strongly believe in setting targets for performance gains early in the transformation process and ensuring that these gains show up on the bottom line. We make sure that work release aligns with available hours, deployment of labor is controlled and labor tracking is accurate, projects are audited and adjustments are made if they are not achieving expected performance gains, and time standards are updated in a timely manner. We measure performance differences from the beginning to the end of each project to confirm that we have beat the goals that were set at the beginning.

Educate Key Personnel and Teams

We help you build the expertise you need internally in your organization to keep lean efforts going forward. We have exceptional curriculum on lean systems and operations management as well as all lean sigma tools. These educational programs are always run as a learn-by-doing effort with a curriculum that has been customized to your needs. The cohorts complete select structured projects that not only ensure strong learning but more than pay for the training effort. Excitement is created as they report out their accomplishments to top management and peers. Our clients often use these to develop special procedures and teams who will lead transformation efforts in the future. For example, one company developed a product launch team and a standard working process they will follow to design and implement all new work cells and improve them until they meet challenging performance targets that ensure high quality products and strong operating margins.

Hoshin Planning and Partnership

As operations have been restructured, people developed, and that initial performance leap is under the client’s belt, the time comes for our clients to think strategically on how to go forward. We help our them put hoshin planning in place as a means for goal setting, organizational alignment, and combining the collective wisdom of all employees to achieve demanding performance targets. As our learning about your business deepens and your trust of our ability strengthens, we typically step into a role of partnership and serve an ongoing role advising our clients. For example, one client has us do a new plant assessment at each of their facilities every year. We identify improvement opportunities, they build the projected gains into their operating budget, and the projects are implemented. We help them on some and they do others themselves. The financial gains from these efforts have not tailed off over 6 years of relationship. This company, despite belonging to a depressed economic sector, is highly profitable and now the clear leader in its industry.