Both entrepreneurs and Fortune companies are forced to improve. For the last 50 years the world’s largest, most successful companies have utilized Six Sigma and Lean techniques. Process improvement strategies such as Lean and Six Sigma have become a mainstay in every department of every business. The unfortunate thing is this advanced knowledge typically requires a major daytime commitment. Our online training provides an opportunity for a top-notched, learning centered approach to learning these techniques at your own pace.
Lean Six Sigma training facilitates a systematic approach to identifying opportunities to monitor, intentionally improve, and execute cost savings. Most for-profit and non-profit entities put more energy to generating revenue, often overlooking the importance of knowing how and why defects and errors take place. This business practice stifles competitiveness, innovation, and growth. Lean and Six Sigma will give your workforce the skills necessary to solve problems and immediately improve the bottom-line.
Our courses advance careers and business efficiencies allowing students to learn at their own pace ensuring true understanding is developed. During learning modules additional training is available if necessary. After reading the required sections, proficiency tests allow students to privately measure their progress.
Grow Your Business… Not Your Expenses
If your business has been forced to do more with less, or has recently considered adding resources (person, place or thing); grow your business through maximizing your existing resources instead of increasing your expenses. Collect some simple tools and methods to improve process flow, turnaround time, and quality.
Are you tired of folks complaining about poor communication, mistakes, and missed opportunities at work? Has “communication problems” been the standard excuse for mess-ups for too long? Are you sick of “communicating” in endless meetings where nothing is resolved? If you answered ‘Yes’… Good! That means you’re ready to go with the flow, to create flow throughout your organization, and turn that communication channel to sweet music.
Flow. Imagine if every process step and every hand-off in your business systems flowed effortlessly all the way from the mailroom to the boardroom. Imagine work that never got stuck, reworked, escalated, or fell through the cracks. Imagine a workforce that moves work flawlessly and knows what to work on next without supervisory intervention. Wow! A work place like that wouldn’t have communication problems, would it?
It’s all made possible by flow. An effective process with smooth hand-offs and visual indicators will eliminate the crossed signals and excuses that always end up in poor customer service. Flow is a main tenant of having a lean and sustainable business. Consider how a lean business transformation could save thousands of dollars in mistakes and missed opportunities for your small business.
So, can you fix your communication problems with flow? Find easy ways to create flow in your workplace here.
Tags: communication, flow, smooth hand-offs, visual indicators
Got Waste?
Less waste is better for our environment, our society, and for our businesses. Waste reduction and elimination is especially important for our businesses if we want to create sustainable jobs and opportunities for Americans. In order to create lean, healthy, and growing businesses, try these tips for everyday ‘waste busting’ at work.
Defects or Errors – Rework and scrap caused by errors or defects is devastating to the bottom line because you not only lost materials (that now have to be replaced, reordered, or reworked), but you also lost the time (and money) that had already been invested in that product or service. Work to prevent errors and defects by standardizing a visual ‘one right way’ to perform a work process.
Inventory or Excess Materials – Excess inventory or materials is any materials more than what you need to use this month (or this week, if you can get it easily), all else is YOUR CASH sitting around, taking up space, and soaking up your air conditioning, overhead, and insurance. That discount you got for buying a year’s supply won’t help you if orders dry up, but the cash you spent on that excess inventory would.
Processing – Raise a Red Flag when you hear the phrase: “That’s the way we’ve always done it”. Times change and so should work processes. Help your workforce eliminate wasted process steps, inspections, approvals, etc. by making sure everything they do adds value for the customer or the business. Find ways to improve work processes using Value Stream Mapping, or prevent defects and rework using Mistake Proofing.
Waiting – Whenever customers, documents, orders, or parts wait at a desk or workstation to be next; or when one worker waits on another worker to finish their input; that time is wasted. It doesn’t matter whether the customer is internal or external, waiting adds no value, and is waste. Eliminate waiting by cross-training your workforce to be able to handle absent staff or changes in customer demand rates, then work to create a smooth handoff or flow from one process or step to the next one.
Motion – Wasted motion consists of human movement such as walking, fetching, hunting, stretching, or reaching. Wasted motion is reduced when the tools I need to do my job are within a hands-reach, depending on how often I use them. If I use something every day, it should be on my desktop or workstation. If I use it weekly, it should be nearby and easy to locate. If it is gathering dust, maybe I don’t need it and it can be stored out of the way or sent away.
Transportation – Moving a part, or document, or customer from one place to another does not add value, has not made it more complete, and is therefore waste. However, the worst part about Transportation waste is that the part most likely needed a ‘ride’ from a human to get to its destination (see Motion waste above). Transportation waste can easily be seen on a ‘Spaghetti Diagram’. Use a paper layout of your work area and put a pencil down at the place the product enters the process, then trace the path the part follows through the work area. If the paper now looks like spaghetti, there’s lots of room for improvement. Prevent unnecessary transportation by putting connecting processes close to each other.
Doing Work Not Requested – We all dislike ‘busy work’, but we really hate having our time wasted. Help your workforce eliminate these wastes by making sure everything they do adds value for the customer or the business – right now. Cross-train workers to minimize the impact of changes in customer demand levels or a critical worker’s absence. Times change and so should work processes, so use that time expended on ‘looking busy’ to document or improve a work process.
Backlogs or Overproduction – Backlogs are created if your business is behind on orders; they make your customers wait, and they stress your staff. Overproduction happens when you keep producing even when you’re ahead of orders; spending time and money on sales that don’t (or may never) exist. Eliminate your backlogs by removing bottlenecks, and create better flow between work processes by improving employee flexibility and communication.
Wasted Solutions, Thoughts, or Ideas – If you believe that you work with at least one caring, conscientious, thoughtful person, then take advantage of the fact that they want your business to be successful, and give them the opportunity to make a difference. No one knows your business, your customers, your requirements, your goals, or their processes better than the people who work for your organization. ‘A mind is a terrible thing to waste’, so help your workforce learn to identify and eliminate these process wastes, provide a forum for them to make changes, and trade your ‘Nine Wastes’ for productivity and profitability.
Waste Busters UNITE!!!
If you want to create an unfair competitive advantage and increase your market share; continued process improvement (Kaizen) can sharpen your competitive edge, and quickly move you to the top of your market.
Kaizen is the business art of ‘change for the better’, and is the proven tool of choice for continually finding better and more innovative ways to deliver customer value in a shorter time span with unbeatable quality.
If you’re not using Kaizen in your business, chances are your competition is…
Find more tools for beating your competition at Kaizen Kaye, LLC
There are nine wastes in your business processes that are destroying your productivity every day. Lean, in its simplest definition, is the endless pursuit of the elimination of waste. To be lean in business means to eliminate waste, cut fat, and streamline your business processes to improve flow, customer service, and profit.
The key to having a productive day every day is to recognize and work to eliminate the nine time wasters that exist in every business. They are:
- Defects or errors = lost time, materials, and labor
- Inventory or excess materials = cash money sitting around taking up space and resources
- Processing = “We’ve always done it that way”… times change, so should work processes
- Waiting = lost time for the customer and the workforce
- Motion = does not add value or make it more complete for the customer
- Transportation = moving it does not make it more complete, and it needed a ride from a person
- Doing work not requested (or needed right now) = ‘busy work’
- Backlogs or overproduction = producing behind or ahead of customer orders, try to produce at customer demand rate instead
- Wasted solutions, thoughts or ideas = solutions that were never tried
Immediately improve your cash flow and profitability when you recognize and eliminate the waste in your business processes.
Collect more profit and sustainability tools at www.senseikaye.com
Anybody care to share their ‘waste buster’ ideas?
Sensei C. Kaye Woodard
Check out our new “Lean Times Call for Lean Measures” webinar for FREE until April 13, 2011!
In these lean times, only the healthiest and leanest businesses will thrive and be well-positioned for growth. Learn how to measure your business’ vital signs so you can work to improve the health of your business. Click here to go to the FREE webinar.
You’ve heard the term “Work smarter, not harder”. It’s easy to say, but not so easy to do. In most work processes, less than 10% of the steps taken actually add value to the customer, the worker, or the business; which means that over 90% of our work is wasted actions and steps. (Don’t believe it? Click here to learn how to measure your process.)
Whoa! Don’t look at this as bull$#&@ or bad news; look at it as an opportunity, because you can reduce your wasteful steps today and begin to get ahead tomorrow. The secret to success at work is called Kaizen (pronounced Ki-zen), which means ‘change for the better’, and it’s not hard to do. All you have to do is identify the Nine Wastes in your business processes and work to eliminate them.
Begin by reviewing every step of a work process and ask: Does this step add value? Is this step making it more complete for the customer? If a step is not adding value (non-value-added) find a way to eliminate it, move it, or combine it with another value-adding step. This is the key to working less and making more.
Some of the easier-to-identify-and-eliminate wastes are Motion and Transportation. Wasted motion consists of human movement such as walking, reaching, hunting, fetching, or stretching. Wasted motion is reduced when the tools I need to do my job are within a hands-reach, depending on how often I use them. If I use something every day, it should be on my desktop or workstation. If I use it weekly, it should be nearby and easy to locate. If it is gathering dust, maybe I don’t need it, and it can be stored out of the way or sent away. (See 5S).
Transportation is the movement of a piece, part, or paper. Although moving things gets them to their destination, transporting something does not make it more complete or add value to it; however, the worst part about Transportation waste is that the part most likely needed a ‘ride’ from a human to get to its destination (see Motion waste above). Transportation waste can easily be seen on a ‘Spaghetti Diagram’. Use a paper layout of your work area and put a pencil down at the place the product enters the process, then trace the path the part travels through the work area. If the paper now looks like spaghetti, there’s lots of room for improvement.
An efficient and effective layout is the most effective tool against Motion and Transportation wastes. Rearrange the workplace to create flow, have a place for everything that is needed, and put connecting processes closer to each other.
There is so much more than can be done to ‘work smarter, not harder’. Click here to find out what you can do today to make your life easier tomorrow.
Tags: 5S, efficient, Kaizen, motion, transportation, waste, work smarter
Being lean in business is no longer a fashion statement, being lean is a business must in this ‘tighter-than-skinny-jeans’ economy. Most wasteful businesses have already succumbed to slow cash flow, over-stocked inventories, unproductive workers, or tight-fisted banks. What will happen to the ones that have managed to survive? Will they continue to survive? Will they thrive?
Their survival depends on their ability to change and keep up with the times. No business can continue to do the same things and expect to get better results. Change is HARD, but it’s not impossible. Fortunately, trail-blazers of the past have left a fairly easy path for success in today’s business world: it’s called Lean.
Lean is defined as the endless pursuit of the elimination of waste, and is the culmination of the best process improvement tools and methods available today. Lean got its start in the early 1900’s when Ford pioneered mass production, and has grown from there to be Toyota’s flagship of profitability. The US Department of Commerce touts Lean as the ‘Path to Excellence Tools’, and over 70% of Fortune 1000 companies use these same tools and methods to discover problems and improve their business results.
Waste kills profits, innovations, market shares, jobs, and dreams. Lean kills waste. No matter what the market looks like, if your competition can survive and thrive, so can you. The only question is: Are you leaner than your competition? Learn how to measure your process efficiency here.
Tags: change, culmination, Lean, profitability, trail-blazer, waste
When you’re shopping, which tag gets your attention when you flip an item over? Are you looking for the price tag or the ‘Made in America’ tag? Do we really pay attention to the high cost of buying cheaper, lower-labor-cost products when we’re shopping?
According to a recent series on ABC News with Diane Sawyer, if every American spent 1% more on American made products, we could instantly create 200,000 jobs. Jobs are America’s number one issue, and we need to put more people back to work.
Most American manufacturing jobs have gone overseas for cheaper labor, not better quality or faster delivery. So if we better utilize our talents, abilities, and educational opportunities, we can compete and win in current and future industries. By eliminating waste, utilizing teamwork, and engaging employees to innovate new products, processes and services, we can keep the follow-on jobs here in America.
We teach the tools that will help your business make the best of what you have, where you are, and where you’re headed. The Kaizen Kaye, LLC business process improvement system will allow your business to:
- Increase market share through smart growth
- Improve productivity and quality
- Reduce mistakes
- Engage employees
- Slash expenses, inventory, and floor space
- Keep and share organizational knowledge
- Give your staff the chance to be part of the solution
- Work less and make more
The market is ready for the next generation light bulb, television, or personal service, and Lean, Six Sigma and Kaizen Kaye, LLC are the right tools for making it ‘Made in America’.
Tags: 'Made in America', compete, economy, Eliminate Waste, engage, innovate, jobs, market share, outsourcing, Productivity, quality, smart growth, solutions
Whether your business goals for 2011 are to create better profits or to reduce your carbon footprint, going lean is the one easy answer. We have to rise to the occasion of the economy we’re in and look at waste in different ways and in different places. Waste, in its many different forms, is rampant in business and probably takes up over half of your business processes. Here’s an easy way to measure the waste in your business.
Divide the amount of time it takes to ‘hands-on’ complete a customer’s request (Process Time), by the amount of time that elapses from the customer’s request to your delivery of their correct and complete order (Lead Time). Turn that number into a percent (multiply by 100); this is your Process Cycle Efficiency (PCE) and shows how efficient the business process is.
PCE = Process Time/Lead Time X 100
If your answer is lower than you expected, don’t be surprised; there’s waste in that process, and that waste uses unnecessary resources, absorbs your employees’ time, depletes your profitability, and makes room for your competition. Do the same calculation for your last McDonald’s visit and compare. World Class is over 25%, so if your PCE score is less, there’s always room for improvement, always room to be leaner, more efficient, and ultimately, greener.
Whether your business is servicing, building, or administrating (‘paper pushing’), being a lean business means that you continuously work to eliminate waste and only add value in all that you do. So whether your 2011 conservation effort is for Mother Earth or for your business, Leaner always equals Greener!
Tags: conservation, green, Lean, process improvement, Teamwork and Efficiency, time, waste