Lean Manufacturing
When taking responsibility for a recently acquired business the housekeeping and safety of the manufacturing site was a key source of concern for the executive team. Brian's solution was to implement a continuous improvement program which involved a number of key steps which began with establishing a strategy to improve the culture and the performance of the business. This strategy involved a number of facets, consistent with broader continuous improvement principles but tailored for this specific business. This involved the:
- implementation of a 5S program commencing with a thorough sorting program ;
- implementation of a key performance measure program to understand the document the improvement in performance;
- the development of a culture of shop floor involvement by engaging team leaders and empowering them to make controlled changes to their work spaces based on their knowledge of the business;
- applied Theory of Constraints to the manufacturing platform to identify the bottlenecks and focus improvement activities and investment on removing those bottlenecks;
- coached the QA and Technical team to adopt statistical process control when making decision to recognise process variability and therefore optimise the manufacturing processes;
- led the sales team through an analysis of recent selling price movements to address declining volumes caused by sudden misunderstood changes in pricing policy.
The result was an elimination of a range of safety related issues, reduction in overtime costs through greater efficiency and a stabilisation of sales volumes.
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