Becoming More Streamlined In The Workplace

The greatest loss of capital in any plant or factory is in the labor used to make the parts. You don't want to get rid of labor altogether and you don't necessarily want to have less people doing the job, but you want them to be as efficient as possible. You want them to be as productive as they can and that means working lean and efficiently together and individually. That means looking at every element of what each person is doing and how they get their jobs completed.

Every department and every individual affects the way every other department and every other individual in the factory either directly or indirectly. A hold up on one side of the factory or in one department can have negative consequences in another part of the plant with a ripple effect that can slow almost everything down to a crawl.

Every department and every individual must know how they have an effect on the others and must know what and how their work can impact the others. A slowdown in the paint room can mean that a couple of days later shipping can't get caught up because they have been held up in getting their products to ship. The fault really might not be on the paint room, it could have been that purchasing did not send a purchase order to the supplier with enough lead time.

Now the paint isn't here and the painters can't get the order out, meanwhile, shipping has nothing to ship and production on the parts came to a halt because now they have too many parts waiting to be painted. It not that purchasing held on to the order for too long and forgot to send it, but the request was delayed because it had to get a signature from a manager that was out sick with the flu. The request sat in his inbox for five days before anybody noticed what was going on.

So you see, it doesn't take much to stop everything in its tracks, just a little flu bug and no back-up plan. Meanwhile, customers canceled the orders that were four days late because their customer decided to go with some other brand that happened to have excess inventory and cut them a great deal. The point is that each department needs to work together and have open and clear communication on what is going on, and maybe unnecessary steps could be eliminated and streamlined.