Improvement Insights Blog

There’s a service side to manufacturing. Are you optimizing it?

“I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” and QI Macros [software].

“Most of American Society for Quality (‘Control’, originally…) was focused on manufacturing from after the war and ongoing. However, I want you to think about this: In most manufacturing plants, there’s not a lot of people on the floor anymore, and the floor has been pretty well optimized or you’re not in business, right? But there’s this huge sort of backroom service function: sales, marketing, invoicing, scheduling, all that kind of stuff. That’s all service.

“You can use the tools of Quality to optimize that as well: simplify, streamline, optimize. Use Lean to reduce the delays between things happening so it gets done faster. I’ve worked with people on things like reducing turnaround time for a request for quotes for an airplane part. We went from 40 months down to 40 days just by getting rid of all the delays in there and recognizing that most parts are like other parts you’ve already done. You can just borrow that understanding and then deploy that with a new one and get an answer out in a timely fashion.

“So don’t just look at your manufacturing plant floor, look at all the stuff behind it. How can you simplify, streamline, optimize that? 5S, Value Stream Map, use some control charts to monitor things and Pareto charts to define where things are going wrong and fix those.

“That’s my Improvement Insight. Let’s go out and improve something this week.”