Mittwoch, 17. September 2008

Process Improvement - feeding in the rear end:-(



Nowadays, Lean Production, Process Improvement, Zero-Defect-Quality, and alike are common wispers around factory floors. Everybody is eager to decrease the costs for making products/services in order to compete with a global market. Toyota is the obvious hero on the horizon and yet things don't work out as they should.

What is going on?

Obviously while sensing quality problems your process improvement effort will kick into action and will finally lead to higher production quality (isn't that what we truely wanted?).

What are the effects of an improvement effort? Sometimes, you just get more throughput with holding the number of workers on the same level, or you decrease the number of workers in that specific area (after a while) do the same throughut as before, slowly sensing that more could be done as customers are buying your -now cheaper- products that have higher quality. And -somehow a bit out of the blue- suddenly your production quality drops again.

Because of delayed removing of people (either from just the department or the organization) one has less people to do rework (if necessary) in order to obtain the desired production quality.

How to solve that mystery?

Hasn't that question stepped on your mind also not too long ago?

Best regards,

Ralf