In Lean Manufacturing, these two concepts are inextricably linked if you are to have sustainable long term gains from lean manufacturing. We have the skills in lean manufacturing to develop and implement effective improvements to your operations, but these improvements will slowly evaporate if your people are not successfully imparted the skills to operate and sustain lean manufacturing systems. We specialise in coaching and mentoring managers and team leaders to sustain and grow the improvements we develop and to create a culture of continuous improvement.  

“Tell me and I’ll forget

Show me and I may not remember

Involve me and I’ll understand”Native American

Proverb

Building your success, building your people.

Safety

“Safety is the number one priority”

Safety is at the first priority in all our actions. Each physical change we make is preceded by a safety risk assessment and followed by a safety risk assessment to insure that safety has not been compromised. During each improvement activity we look for opportunities to improve safety and we check our risk assessment scores before and after to make sure safety has not been compromised.

Quality

“No part costs as much as a faulty part delivered to your customer”

We will work with you to build a culture of stopping to fix problems to get quality right first time, every time. It is important to be aware that quality does not only apply to shop floor processes, it also applies to quality of drawing, quality of information flows and quality of communications  We will show your organisation how to:

Build a culture of stopping to fix problems, to get quality right the first time.

Implement Standardised tasks and processeswhich will reduce variation in quality

Solve problems systematically so they stay fixed

Implement quality improvements

Delivery

“It can take years to gain a customer and one late delivery to lose one”

Late delivery is the most frequent single cause of customer dissatisfaction; no product is more critically inspected than the part which was delivered late.

The consistent delivery of quality product, on time, to the shortest possible lead time and at the lowest total cost, gives a huge business advantage to those businesses who can achieve this goal and lean manufacturing is the surest way of achieving it.

Within the delivery category, we include both the delivery of your product to your customer and also the delivery of raw materials and parts to your business and the inventory which you have to support your delivery to your customers.

By introducing level production we can achieve 100% on time delivery and with that stability we can reduce inventory and lead times with will lead to operational excellence.

Team

“The soft bit is the hard bit”

The most difficult, and the most important, task in implementing Lean Manufacturing is sustaining the improvements gained and building upon the foundation which they provide.

We develop and deliver training for all levels from senior management to shop floor team members. Our courses range from 2 hour single point lessons in specific topic to 13 week lean manufacturing development programs for key managers

We provide coaching to managers and team leaders in how to apply lean manufacturing techniques and how to manage lean manufacturing workplaces.

We mentor the development of lean manufacturing skills for senior managers, delivering discreet advice and guidance

We use the Hoshin Kanri policy deployment tool to set clear objectives for you team so there is clarity of purpose within your organisation.

We won’t just build your success; we’ll build your people.

Cost

If it doesn’t help the bottom line, it’s not worth the time

We start with waste elimination and move on to 5S, visual management and level production. From there we go on to developing operation excellence.

The cost savings can come from unexpected quarters as well as the obvious ones of unit labour cost and inventory reductions. We have experienced significant cost and profit improvements from

-immediate capacity improvement without capital investment

-Reduction in reject parts

learing floor space to insource work which was previously bought in

-reduction in materials handling vehicles

-Just levelling production reducing labour costs by 11%

The biggest cost savings are from reduction in inventory and reduction in labour unit cost but they are not the only opportunities. We have not yet encountered a work location which cannot be profitably improved but, if we do, we’ll copy it.