Blog - Page 10 of 25

When being more productive doesn’t make you more productive

November 21, 2016

There are a number of functions in an organization where it’s tough to move the productivity meter. You might actually produce more but the base costs don’t change so the true productivity measured from a financial perspective doesn’t change.

How to Determine When to Use Push or Pull Production Scheduling

October 24, 2016

To fulfill customer demand in the most efficient, cost-effective way, companies can use push- or pull-scheduling or something in between. Which one works best? That depends on the characteristics of your product and market.

5 Ways to Increase Your Plant’s Production Efficiency

January 11, 2016

Production efficiency is not easy and studies show most companies are squandering 50% of their key resources—labor and equipment. Based on 250,000 hours of observation of businesses in a variety of industries,

Out of Alignment: How Organizational Alignment Issues are Hurting Your Productivity

December 11, 2015

At a consumer goods packaging plant employees gathered every morning and waited for the Production Manager’s signal to begin their shift. This wasn’t a matter of overly earnest workers arriving early to Read More

Scheduling: The Key Driver of Process Innovation and Sustainable Improvement

December 03, 2015

In your search for process innovation that will drive sustainable performance improvement, scheduling your business may not be the first thing to come to mind — but it should be. Done right,

Translating Organizational Alignment Into Consistent Execution

November 19, 2015

Costly alignment issues tend to reveal themselves at the point of execution, but the root causes can often be traced back to poor planning. Here’s an example of how this plays out Read More

Enabling Cultural Change Through Organizational Alignment

November 04, 2015

A myriad of research studies and our own observation has demonstrated that culture is critical to corporate performance. Understanding the importance of culture to performance is certainly not a recent area of Read More

What are we actually trying to improve?

August 18, 2015

“Boiling the ocean” is one of those phrases that can be quite accurate but is still slightly irritating to use or hear. It refers to analyzing something to death or tackling a

Why happy customers aren’t enough

July 07, 2015

Over the years we’ve done a number of studies to try to help our clients find out what their customers think of them. These types of studies are often packaged under the

Green and red time opportunity

April 14, 2015

Opportunity #2 When we look for opportunity, we categorize time into green and red components. Green time is the current productive part of a process, while red time is the non-productive waste.