Reinvigorating Your Business

Reinvigorating Your Business

Top 3 things to Reinvigorate your Business

1. Ramp up your 5S

With those haunting memories of the end of year clean up still in the back of your mind, now is the time to taking steps towards not needing another one at the end of the year. Make sure every cell and department, including support and management functions, have their basics covered with 5S standards posted, kamishibai (Tee card) boards are current and the audits are being conducted weekly.

If the supervisors and cell leaders are the only one conducting the audits, it’s time to get the operators involved’ firstly be conducting the audit in paris with the cell leader, then once each cell member has had a turn, pair up operators to do the audit and report back to the team in the appropriate futon; wither the morning meeting or weekly continuous improvement review.

Remember that the whole purpose of the weekly audits is to find opportunities to improve. If we are not improving our work area, then we are slipping backwards. It’s also the perfect forum to involve everyone in our lean journey.

 2. Review Lean Projects

Start off be reviewing your lean project successes and challenges for last year; how many projects were completed? How many of those are still ongoing? How many people were involved?

The challenge is to really evaluate your progress over the last 12 months. Those numbers can be just numbers if you feel that your company culture is yet to really grasp the lean ideology of continuous improvement and eliminating waste.

Now – what’s the plan for this year? More projects? Bette focus? More detailed follow up? More trials? Getting more people involved?

Whatever your business goals are for 2013, aka sure you are using the tools to investigate, find solutions and create change. Being s stickler for filling in forms will just kill off the lean spirit.

 3. Bring in Reinforcements

We all have good intentions when it comes to lean, but just like eating healthily, saving money or quitting smoking, while we all know what we SHOULD be doing, we often need help to find the motivation to get started. All great athletes have coaches and they bring in experts as they need to hone their skills.

 Business is no different to elite sports.

Robert Chittenden

Author: Robert Chittenden

Robert Chittenden is a Senior Lean Consultant at TXM Lean Solutions