As a small business, reducing your waste and increasing your productivity helps to optimize performance in the workplace. At the Glendale Community College Professional Development Center, we offer a program titled, “Lean Principles For Teams.” The goal of lean operations are to increase your productivity while reducing your operating costs. Our lean program includes three main topics, which are getting ready for lean, the elements of lean, and the implementation strategies. Today we would like to discuss the different areas each topic covers:
Preparing for Lean
The first step in lean preparation is to engage your employees and coworkers to get involved in the process and to help implement change. Activating a high performance workplace requires team work for the most efficient results possible. In order to understand why we do things the way we do, we examine the history of manufacturing to gain valuable insight. Lean preparation also involves cooperative problem solving skills, which we go over in the preparation stage. We’ve found the most effective way for teams to work together is to avoid and discourage the common habit of blaming one another. As far as teamwork goes in lean preparation, it’s important to keep your team motivated and involved in the process. Our program breaks down the process of problem solving and teamwork in a method that is easy to understand and to execute. We examine quality control and its importance so that you can run your business more efficiently.
The Elements Of Lean
Once we reach this stage of this program, we examine the seven major areas of waste to gain a better understanding of lean. We also feature a program that specifically goes over the best strategies to organize the workplace. Next, our program covers process analysis, which breaks down the inputs, outputs, and operations during a process. Process analysis helps to determine areas in the process that need improvement. Another lean element we examine is batch processing, which refers to the processing of data or materials in larger quantities. In short, batch processing can be helpful in accomplishing projects in a more timely manner. The workplace layout is examined to determine how effectively the work environment is set up. Lastly, we study cellular operations to optimize high performance in the workplace.
Implementation Strategies
The last part of our program focuses on implementation strategies used to create a high performance workplace. The first topic studied is value stream analysis, which includes all of the activities necessary to create and to deliver a product or service. TAKT time is also studied so that we gain an understanding of the maximum amount of time it takes to produce a good or service to satisfy customer demand. By gaining an understanding of scheduling, we learn how to efficiently produce quality work. Reduction techniques are also examined as well as the setup of a KANBAN system. We also learn how to plan and execute KAIZEN events, which are short-term projects. The final part of our program covers how to set up a total productive maintenance program.
Are you interested in the continuous improvement of your small business in order to create a high performance workplace? Our lean principles improve upon your team skills, leadership skills, and manufacturing process to make your workplace as efficient as possible. Contact the Professional Development Center today to learn more.