Do More With L.E.S.S—Achieve Operational Excellence in Your Company

(Lean, Ergonomics, Six Sigma and Systems Thinking)

ABSTRACT

These days, nearly every company is striving to 'do more with less', especially given the challenging economy of recent years and uncertain economic climate for future years.  Business executives and operations managers are constantly looking for ways to reduce operating costs without damaging customer satisfaction and quality.  Common measures include layoffs, consolidation, cease of certain operations, etc.  Unfortunately, some measures may even do more harm than good by eroding customer loyalty, employee morale, and market share through decreased customer service and poor work system execution.  In order for foundries to fully optimize their organization and processes there needs to be a new strategy and mindset that looks at processes and culture from many points of view simultaneously.  The way to accomplish that is to “Do More with L.E.S.S.”—Lean, Ergonomics, Six Sigma, Systems Thinking—an integrated and holistic strategy used throughout the foundry.  The four components complement each other nicely and the principles behind each are easy and straightforward to understand and apply from the bottom up and top down.  The core principles can be summed up in the following: 

• Optimize human performance (body, mind and organization)
• Strive to reduce non-value added processes
• Delight customers
• Continuously improvement system performance as a whole and at the single workstation level

The result will be effective and sustainable improvements in productivity, efficiency, customer service and employee morale and performance.  This is what every organization wants and needs to go beyond surviving to thriving and outperforming their competitors.

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By Jill Kelby, PT, CEA; President and Owner of Kelby Ergo Design.

If you’d like more information on our services in injury prevention, operational excellence, efficiency and productivity improvement or for assistance in determining what is best for your company, please contact usfor a free initial consultation.