Tackling The Causes Of Waste

Do you know what is causing your organization to have a great deal of waste? What is behind the issue with waste at your facility and what can you do in order to keep wastes under control and to find out how you can prevent them from the future? Many manufacturing plants will look toward different processes and things that reduce or completely eliminate waste. How about looking at using Six Sigma or lean manufacturing to help you in the identification and elimination of waste? This is a great way to keep your wastes to a minimum as you will be able to not only prevent them but you will find a way to organize the company in an effective manner so you can accomplish tasks on time or ahead of time.

Trying to keep your company ahead of your competition may be a big challenge. This is often why you do have so many companies looking for different options like Six Sigma as you want to eliminate waste so you can stay in business. You need to be able to find out how the program can effectively control waste for you but also help you in being able to create future products as well. How about reducing your inventory load with bundle products? What options do you have for inventory that is obsolete? Can you get rid of it this way and reduce the wasted money, space, and time it is taking up? Using a quality program such as Six Sigma you will track the wastes and to create solutions to get rid of them altogether.

Why do you have waste? It shows up in many different forms. In some companies waste is caused when you end up forecasting sales that are never going to occur. This causes you to order excessive raw materials and to produce too many products that will sit on the shelves with the "hope" of being sold. You need to use accurate forecasting and set inventory checkpoints to try and prevent you from dealing with excessive inventory waste.

Lead times are also a waste. When you have excessive lead times, you have people waiting and equipment waiting. You also have confusion going on as you may end up with people dealing with products that need to be assembled but they are still missing components that are not yet produced so they are behind schedule and causing you to have a hang-up.

Quality is another big problem you will face. Do you have products that are quality? Do you have products that are not satisfying the customers? If you have a lot of returns, it is likely that you have defects going on. Your customers are unhappy with the company or the products for many different reasons and you must be able to determine what it is that is causing them to be quite frustrated. Make it a policy to find out what is causing the waste to occur each time you do see a product return occur. You have to be able to stop this before it does become a common thing and you have a bad reputation as your products are not considered reliable.

Using lean tools you will be able to find out where your wastes are. These tools can be broken down into many steps and used at a number of organizations that will allow you to be able to find ways to reduce wastes but allow you to find out how to make your company more successful and profitable through proper implementation of the tools. It also helps you to cut costs and to improve your relationships with employees as they are able to contribute to the bottom line and can easily find a way to feel important by volunteering to become members of control groups and other things.