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Penny Wise Pound Foolish

14 November, 2016 by James Lawther 3 Comments

Penny wise, pound foolish

Economies of scale For a while I worked in an organisation that obsessed about costs.  Everybody had a target to cut the costs that they managed.  If everybody reduced their costs then the total cost would go down.  Or so the logic went. The cost of printing There was a man who owned the stationary budget: paper, […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: bottleneck, capital investment, cost saving, economies of scale, efficiency versus effectiveness, point optimisation

The Rules of the Workplace

27 September, 2015 by James Lawther 3 Comments

The 20 rules: Prioritise the work Don’t make your customers wait There is always more work than people Study the work Understand how the work works Standardise the work If the work is important write it down Train your staff Make the work easy Build systems Stream line the work Find the bottleneck Clean the […]

Filed Under: Blog, Tools & Techniques, Wild Cards Tagged With: bottleneck, communication, customer focus, effective meetings, error proofing, five s, gemba, lean thinking, learning, process mapping, service improvement, SlideShare, standardisation, systems thinking, visual management

Rule 12: Find the Bottleneck

25 July, 2015 by James Lawther 3 Comments

The job of an Ops Manager Is to manage three things: Time: how long does it take you to deliver something? Cost: how much money did you spend getting it there? Quality: how good was it when it arrived? We get hung up on cost “Make it cheaper, hit the budget”. Making things cheaper is easy, you […]

Filed Under: Blog, Operations Analysis Tagged With: bottleneck, gemba

Innovation Constraints and Lateral Thinking

29 September, 2012 by James Lawther 3 Comments

Innovation Constraints

In the third world, 4 million children die every year within a month of birth. It’s an avoidable tragedy If half of those children were simply kept warm and clean they would survive. In the developed world we have incubators that do exactly that.  I spent the first week of my life in one.  And […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: bitching and moaning, bottleneck, constraints, innovation, Toyota

There is Always a Bottleneck

8 September, 2012 by James Lawther 3 Comments

Airport Check In

All processes have a bottle neck, a rate limiting step.  Something that holds them back.  There is always a bottleneck. Maybe it’s the neck of the bottle: Maybe it’s the speed of the pump: Maybe it’s the width of the falls: Maybe it’s even the lack of rain: But there is always a bottleneck or […]

Filed Under: Blog, Operations Analysis, Tools & Techniques Tagged With: backlog, bottleneck, queue, waiting

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