Category: Uncategorized

Timp pierdut ascuns( TPA). Există așa ceva?

\"\"
Source: Internet

După cum știm cu toții, în multe discipline sportive (alergare, înot, schi), scopul este să ajungi cel mai repede la linia de sosire. Diferența de timp (dintre timpul câștigătorului și timpul de cursă al celorlalți participanți) poate fi numită  TPA (Timp Pierdut Ascuns ).

În comparație cu scorul câștigătorului, timpul fiecăruia dintre participantii la competitie este mai lung, astfel că se pierde ceva timp pe parcurs. Urmărind cursele, este vizibilă lupta pentru performanță, de aceea se spune că timpul pierdut pe parcurs este ascuns.

Într-un proces de producție se întâmplă ceva similar:

Angajatul  cel mai performant,  in conditii optime , produce o piesă în cel mai scurt timp, iar aceasta se numește BDP (Best Demonstrated Performance). În comparație cu acest timp, toate celelalte sunt mai lungi pentru valoarea TPA.

Ceea ce contează si face diferenta  este cantitatea totală de TPA intr- un proces de producție. Într-un timp de lucru de 440 de minute, 10 persoane produc cele  4400 de bucăți vizate (440 de bucăți fiecare, în timp ce BDP = 0,9 minute). Timpul total necesar pentru producție (la BDP) ar fi: 4400*0,9 = 3960 min. Timpul total petrecut pentru producție (de 4400 de bucăți) = 10*440 = 4400 min.  TPA = Timp total petrecut – Timp total necesar = 4400 – 3960 = 440 min.

Calculând TPA ne descoperim resursele  interioare ale companiei! Primul pas este constientizarea lor si monitorizarea  constanta a rezultatelor si a resurselor de timp.

Abonează-te la blogul robertburu.com și rămâi informat, suntem gata să lansăm gratuit o resursă valoroasă:  Calculatorul TPA .

Acest instrument  te  va ajuta să:

– Cuantifici TPA  într-o tură

– Compari  cantitatea de TPA  la diferite produse

– Să ai o imagine de ansamblu

– Să  imbunatatesti  in mod real productia

În lipsa unui calculator TPA , de obicei:

– Există o oportunitate care rămâne nefolosită mereu și mereu în fiecare zi

– Costul de producție este mai mare decât cel optim

– Produsul  companiei  este mai puțin competitiv pe piață

Vremuri  productive sa ai si zile cu cat mai mic TPA!

How to be more profitable with LEAN?

  1. LEAN: Deliver more value to a Customer with minimum spent resources
  2. Watch the pie chart: VALUE CREATION TIME – GREEN, OTHER TIME – RED
\"\"
  1. To increase green area, you can do it only on a behalf of red!    =>  Decrease the  LOST TIME !!!
  2. Obvious Down TIME (ODT): Machine stopped (Lunch Break, Briefing, Cleaning, Failure, Lack of…)
  3. Hidden Down Time (HDT): Short stops, lower than nominal speed
  4. Create Down Time Report (DTR) and DTR Summary
  5. Follow for a while ODT, HDT
  6. Choose a relevant reason and decrease it
  7. Produce more, enjoy your success!!!

NOPON Productivity &more is here to support and motivate you!

Euro area real GDP under the mild, medium and severe scenarios
Source:ECB calculations; https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/economic-bulletin/focus/2020/html/ecb.ebbox202003_01~767f86ae95.en.html

For the 2020 is forecasted an average GDP slump of -7,4% for European Union (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1102546/coronavirus-european-gdp-growth/). These global figures predict revenue decrease, what will be followed by profit fall back. In this moment we can choose a way of passing this period.

  1. Following news, informing ourselves how the situation is evolving, hoping our niche on the market will remain.
  2. Analyze our status in relation to productivity goals, determine current trend of figures, found options to approach goals and take the most suitable one and go for realization!   

We are here for those ones, who are choosing the second way. Even in lockdown we:

  • Measure work load in home office
  • Downsize /resize the department
  • Motivate your colleges
  • Offer training and coaching online or onsite

Don’t give up on your goals, call us for ideas and solutions!

CONTACT: robertburu@gmail.com; WhatsApp: +40 753 057 303,

6 Shocking workplace stats and a single solution

Rarely real, scientifically proven data could be found about situation in companies, article of David Sturt and Todd Norstrom published in Forbes *is an exception. Reading them you see the answer on the emerging question: why top managers of good name multinational companies are burned out and loosing motivation to do their each day job.

  1. Employee Engagement is in constant decreasing. The Gallup institute proves that nearly 70% of employees are actively disengaged!

(Disengaged employees are characterized by lost enthusiasm for their day-by-day work, dramatically decreasing achievements of company.)

2. A recent study by CareerBuilder.com shows that 58% of managers said they didn’t received any manager training.

So the most of the managers never learned how to motivate people, how to lead them to accomplish their task, achieve personal and company targets and it’s normal, because most probably they become managers being  good at what they did.

3. Leigh Branham, author of “The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave” revealed that 89% of bosses believe employees quit because they want more money.

However any boss would love this data, it’s not true: only 12% of employees actually leave for more money.

4. A Harvard Business Review survey reveals 58% of people say they trust strangers more than their own boss.  This level of distrust in leadership should make us worry, and put on road to examine: how to change it?

5. Global studies reveal that 79% of people who quit their jobs cite “lack of appreciation” as their reason for leaving. It means: people don’t leave companies. They leave bosses.

6. American workers forfeited nearly 50% of their paid vacation in 2017. And, nearly 10% take no vacation at all. According to Glassdoor, the fear of falling behind is the number one reason people aren’t using their vacation time.

Above shocking figures should put us to think! Might be is a moment to take action in our own company: measure and analyze our figures, look for ways to promote changes, and if it is a case, build practices, policies and procedures that inspire change! As leaders, this is our job – to inspire “the best” in people!

*The full article in Forbes could be found at link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidsturt/2018/03/08/10-shocking-workplace-stats-you-need-to-know/

**Source of the image: pexels.com

QCD – The Iron Triangle

The concept of Quality, Cost, Delivery is a management approach developed to help manufacturers within British Car industry around 1950. Later this method become a tool for effective project management, but for me is important the clear message what it is unchanged until today!

In a wood processing workshop 20 people is working at different machines producing elements for chairs which are packed together in a carton box to become the final product. In 8 hours shift using available machines operators are supposed to produce 600 sets of chairs. The customer prescribed precise quality requirements (no nodes, wood color, smoothness of surface), and offered a price for a product.

Above business represents a QCD System:

Quality of final product is described by Customer, quality of raw material (wood) by a manufacturer. Cost of production, raw material and profit are covered by the price of finished product.

Delivery is specified by pieces made in 8 hour shift in specified workshop by given machines assuring daily income what is covering items from “Cost”.

Until above QCD balance is untouched, business is functioning well!

But… What is nowadays untouchable?!

Challenge 1

World around us is changing, and prices of resources are increasing. (Cost of 1m3 of wood, cost of 1kWh, salary (minimum) increases, auxiliary materials (paint, enamel) etc. as well.) Exist lucky cases when proven cost increase is acknowledged by customer and the price is renegotiated. Even in this rare situation where regular price adjustment happens, there is a time delay between cost increase and price correction, where profitability suffers.

Challenge 2

Working with remarkable companies, general experience is customers demand after permanent quality increase. New desire for no nodes, less color tone variation, smoother surface are examples what makes life of manufacturer from above example hard. There are to ways to respond to new demand: better quality of raw material (what is more expensive) or additional operations in production process – as well resulting cost increase.

Challenge 3

In a time the niche on market of products becomes narrower (market saturation, more producers), and in order to maintain sales volume, manufacturers offers the same product in more variations (color, size, version). What this mean for production? More changes in production process, more type of raw materials, shorter production series, more changeovers, more down time, more cost!

Solution

There is an obvious solution to all 3 challenges: the price increase! Cases when product cost can be increased (to cover raw material price and production cost increase) in reality exists, however are rare! In majority of situations market does not allow price increase not even for a penny, because there are other factories, who applied a better solution: constant improvement of product and production process! This possibility is always on disposal and doesn’t depend nor on providers, nor on the market, but only of our own organization. The development process at each company is different, while follows the same steps:

  1. Define – describe the process
  2. Implement possibilities to measure output and efficiency
  3. Improve process at the bottleneck position
  4. Redefine the process
  5. Repeat steps 1 – 4!

Above 5 steps approach could be called KAIZEN (the tool from LEAN Methodology to develop product and process), but the name is irrelevant, matters the improvement and profitability what brings! Only what you need is a decision to do it, and a good production team under guidance of a productivity specialist! Good luck!

Six Problem Solving Mindsets For Uncertain Times

“Great problem solvers are made, not born” tells us Charles Conn and Robert McLean in their article. They found “six mutually reinforcing approaches” making leaders great problem solvers. Using their method if do not solve each problem, definitely can achieve better outcome that we have so far!

  1. Be curious

When facing uncertainty, remember behavior of the four years old child, asking never ending “Why?” Our brain is imposing patterns what in a past represented a solution to us or other people, but the current one is a different and unique situation. As we ask questions, answers describe here and now making possible to formulate better and more creative solution to the current problem.

2. Tolerate Ambiguity

The real world is highly uncertain. The reality unfolds as the complex product of stochastic processes and human reactions. The best problem solvers can’t appear as a brilliant engineer giving targeted, precise solution to each situation. Instead we form hypotheses, translate it to data, analyze and refine it, formulate a solution, refine it, finalize it – or drop it down to pick up and try another one. This requires embracing of imperfection, accepting the ambiguity of the situation and form the solution which can be odd rather than certain.

3. Take a dragonfly eye-view

Dragonflies have large, compound eyes, with thousands of lenses and photoreceptors sensitive to different wavelengths of light.  We don’t know exact how the brain of this insects forms a picture to them, the analogy is important for us: describe situation from multiple points of view, using different tools and systems for analysis and accept the complex picture (might be contradictory in details) as the reality. This is the point from where can start searching of solution.

4. Pursue occurrent behavior

Occurrent behavior is what actually happens in a time and place, not what was potential or predicted behavior. Complex problems don’t give up their secrets easily, they do not follow a pattern or a recipe – but that shouldn’t deter problem solvers from exploring. The mindset requires to be a restless experimenter – this allows us to generate our own data, which aren’t available to competitors and gives us insights that others don’t have.

5. Tap into collective intelligence and the wisdom of the crowd

The experience shows: it’s a mistake to believe about our team that the smartest people are all in the room. They aren’t there. And it’s not a problem, if you can access their intelligence via another means. Crowdsourcing invites the best people to work with you. Conn and McLean describe an experiment where organizers were searching for an algorithm for recognizing size and specie of fishes. They offered a prize and 2293 teams were attracted to work on solution.  The result is an unique algorithm, the best on the earth!

6. Show and tell to drive action

Although usually not associated to problem solving, this mindset is critical: it connects audience with a problem, picking up their interest, than combination of logic and persuasion drives to action. Conn and McLean tells how activists brought 17 bucket of water in a meeting room when asking support for restoration of oyster reefs , declaring this amount of water is filtered by one shell in a day. Decision makers were curious what represents buckets, and need for conservation become touchable through its physical dimension – led program to be approved.

The mindset of problem solvers is just an important as the method they apply. Creative application of mindsets from above list creates new possibilities in our unpredictable world!

Charles Conn and Robert McLean (both alumnus of McKinsey’s Sydney office) are authors of article “Six problem-solving mindsets for very uncertain times” (published 15-th September 2020 by McKinsey. Complete article you found here https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/six-problem-solving-mindsets-for-very-uncertain-times#)

There are no secrets!

While offering cooperation to managers, the first reaction I recognize is a doubt. To improve productivity is really possible? Why it would happen this time on a Project (and not last week/month)? What is that what makes the Project different?  

Well, it’s hard to give a specific answer. General task is to found a principle, a habit what acts as an obstacle in material (information) flow and implement a change to alleviate its power. The obstacle (bottleneck) appears in each company in a different shape, as well the corrective action, just like in following examples: 

  1. Tiles production (Hungary)

There is a tile producer in Hungary (capacity: 6 million m2), coating what gives the smoothness and shine (glaze) is produced in small unit of it. In a moment management realized: the import glaze cost 18 EUR/kg, from own production 22, so seemed more profitable to close the unit and outsource the production.

Productivity project focused on implementation and evaluation of KPI’s and in 6 month succeed to decrease the own cost below 16 EUR/m2. Changes are possible!

2. Wood processing (Romania)

In a wood processing company dryer of veneer is a bottleneck. During project observed: conveyor loaded under nominal capacity from the fear of stack, what would result in a 20 minute of downtime.

Productivity project focusing on KPI values included maintenance team in daily evaluation, and regular maintenance made possible sheets didn’t stack anymore! This implementation led to 16% average volume increase of bottleneck position!

3. Metal air tank production, Hungary

Productivity analysis discovered bottleneck at semi-automatic turner machines. Shift (8 hours) production was 1800 pieces for long years, however machines had capacity for 2500 pieces.

During 26 weeks project implemented additional cleaning step into operation instructions, what resulted shift production to increase to 2250 piece.

4. Silicone products for mum and baby

 A well conducted company in West-Hungary faced stagnation in produced volume, despite implemented and evaluated KPI system and obviously existing room for improvement.

Productivity audit discovered GEF (GE Factor) in calculation method, what has role to correct values in case of disturbing events (down time, decreased number of operators). This method is OK, when calculating and following personal productivity, and led to mistake while used to calculate machine productivity. A simple correction made disturbances and effects visible!

5. Cluttered office, untidy production

Multinational plastic mold injection company in Romania facing long changeover times, oil spots, high scrap rate and lack of space at shop floor.

Visiting offices, discovered desk covered with descriptions, orders, spare parts, office needs 30 cm high! Manager, who can’t keep order in his office, is unable to do that in production either.

Implementation of 5S in offices and production changed situation dramatically. Room and task for improvement became visible immediately!

6. Productivity project is a teamwork led by specialist!

Productivity project at a wood processing company in Romania included direct manager trainings, where supervisors learned to give feedback upon value of daily production KPI’s.

Motivated by desire for positive evaluation they proposed a machine layout change in order to decrease transportation time. Cumulated result of changes contributed to decrease 22,18 (worked man hour per 1 m3 of product) to 16,55. 

Resume:

Above experiences tells me: there are no secrets, each outcome has its own reason and 99% of them are measurable and improvable. One important question remains to be answered: are you going to ask for better results, or you just let the status as it is?