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Component Manufacturing dverti$er
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Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
November 2017 #10220 Page #44
Skills Play a Vital Role in Lean Management Part 8 in our TIMWOODS Series Ben Hershey, CEO & Coach 4Ward Consulting Group, LLC
O
ur journey through the various waste topics in Lean brings us to the final letter in our series on TIMWOODS: Skills. Many companies, managers, and supervisors forget when improving their operations to look at their team and review how their skills are being used, or in this case wasted, while making continual improvements to their operations. Our friend, Tim Woods, has helped us focus on the wastes of Transportation, Inventory, Motion, Waiting, Over-Production, Over-Processing, and Defects. Skills, though, are often overlooked at Component and Millwork Manufacturers as well as Lumber Dealers and other building industry distributors. If you recall other articles I have written, I have talked about the importance of developing our associates, of mentoring and educating. This really is a long-term continual journey, thus why we see Skills wasted in our operations.
What is the Waste of Skills As defined by the Toyota Way Fieldbook, Skills represents underutilized capabilities, losing time, delegating tasks with inadequate training, ideas, improvements, and learning opportunities by not engaging or listening to your employees. Underutilized skills is generally driven by the skills required to achieve the action required. If those skills are doing a task that a lower-skilled associate could achieve with the same outcome, then process time is being wasted. It is important to understand that this should be considered in the sense of process time—thus the process is to understand where the burden of the higher-skilled associates can be reduced by the lower-skilled associates. For example, if an assembler is stacking material on a cart at the saw when they could be focused on production of a product, then it is wasteful of his limited resource.
How the Waste of Skill Occurs in the LBM/Component Industry Practically every area of our industry can show us a waste of skills. Many companies simply are not spending the time/resources to improve their teams. Some examples include: • Training your sales team on product knowledge, building science knowledge, etc. Owners/Managers should expect their sales team to know how to help their customers, have the ability to review building plans and provide value added suggestions, know the products they are working with, or even suggest an alternative product (wall panels, composite walls, panelization, etc.). If your sales team becomes the one stop key individual/vendor for your customer, you will see increased margins, and increased efficiency in the sales process. PHONE: 800-289-5627
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