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Do you find Joy in your work?

JoyIt’s a sad truth about the workplace: Just 30% of employees are actively committed to doing a good job.

According to Gallup’s 2013 State of the American Workplace report, 50% of employees merely put their time in, while the remaining 20% act out their discontent in counterproductive ways.  These employees are negatively influencing their coworkers, missing days on the job, and driving customers away through poor service. Gallup estimates that the 20% group alone costs the U.S. economy around half a trillion dollars each year.

What’s the reason for the widespread employee disengagement? According to Gallup, poor leadership is a key cause.

Richard Sheridan, Founder of Menlo Innovations, describes an antidote for this lack of enthusiasm.  He claims that “joy” is what is missing from the workplace.  In a recent interview, Sheridan spoke about some of the ways that he purposely designed joy into the way that people work.

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Think Quick! Can you work faster AND safer?

 “You can observe a lot just by watching”

Yogi Berra

faster and saferOne of the foundational Lean tools is QCO (quick changeover), which is also sometimes referred to as SMED (single minute exchange of die).  SMED includes a set of techniques that make it possible to perform equipment set-up and changeover operations in less than 10 minutes.  Not every changeover can be completed in this amount of time.  However, any operation would benefit from using this Lean tool if there is a requirement for:

  • a change in “lot” types
  • a process or set-up change

For this discussion, I will use the term QCO as being interchangeable with SMED. Most of the time, the opportunity for implementing QCO in a process is driven by the need for greater flexibility, quicker delivery, better quality, or higher productivity.  These are indeed significant benefits that are realized –  because this approach identifies and removes some of the eight sources of waste.  But there is an equally significant benefit to assessing a process and implementing QCO: the resulting process changes often make setups simpler & easier – and therefore faster and safer. The following case studies demonstrate how using QCO principles can lead to work which is not only completed in less time, but is also safer. Continue Reading

How to apply “Little’s Law” to improve lead time and drive lean improvements

Observing the queue of people being checked out at a large grocery or retail store can be fascinating.  You can see the shoppers deciding on which line to enter – based on the number of people, how many things are in their cart, how quickly the cashier is ringing up each sale, whether someone is assisting with bagging process, etc.  Although most people don’t realize it, they are making an estimate on how long it will take for them to get through the checkout line by using a theory called “Little’s Law”. 

This fundamental concept was developed over 50 years ago.  It enables us to predict a specific process behavior and is named after John Little, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

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