Productivity Improvement
What can Caprica Consulting do for you ?
• Initial assessment – review your existing operations for opportunities where lean principles could be applied, and the kinds of benefits that could be achieved
• Planning – working with your team to develop goals, and the strategy and tactics to achieve them. One key part of the process is educating senior management of what to expect, how to lead the changes, and how to avoid common behaviours that lead to failure
• Training – the first step in leading change is to teach the organization a new and better way of doing things. This is delivered just-in-time and within your schedule using hands-on, interactive workshops, and backed by years of teaching experience
• Coaching – as the teams learn to apply their new skills, regular visits are made to ensure everyone is learning and applying the principles correctly, and to help maintain the momentum needed to promote the new ways. The management team is also coached to ensure the right messages are being sent throughout the organization
• Ergonomics – significant productivity gains can be made by designing the work so that it is easy and comfortable to perform. We can analyze jobs and work with your employees to develop better and safer ways of doing them
• Engineering – although significant improvements are often made with very little capital investment, there are times when equipment or facility changes are needed to realize large benefits. With an APEGGA permit to practice and years of industrial experience, we can provide engineering design services from simple hand tools to facilities and automated machinery
Where can lean thinking be applied?
We have experience applying lean with many types of organizations:
• Labour - intensive manufacturing - machine shops, metal fabrication, manual and automatic assembly, materials handling; the types of operations where the lean techniques were first developed
• Capital - intensive manufacturing - foods, plastics, chemicals, and materials made by batch or continuous methods. Sometimes, lean methods can be directly applied, but more often we need to apply the fundamental principles in different ways
• Administration - sales, accounting, engineering, and service organizations, where information is the “product” being processed
Lean Manufacturing:
what is lean all about ?
A lean organization begins with its customer’s definition of value. Value is defined by your customer, and typically includes delivery of a product or service:
• Quickly, and at a precise time
• In the exact quantity needed
• At the lowest cost
• and with perfect quality
Once you know what your customer wants, we study your existing systems to see what you actually do. All the things you do that do not contribute to our customer’s definition of value are wasteful; once identified, most can be reduced or eliminated.
Any organization can learn to identify and eliminate waste, but a lean organization engages everyone in a culture of continuous improvement that is always seeking and driving out waste. Using the tools is easy; sustained improvement through culture change is a long, challenging, and very rewarding process.