In any business one of the most expensive and common problems is related to efficiency and waste.  Lean manufacturing is documented as being the process of minimising waste which in turn should maximise productivity.

What is Lean Methodology anyway?

Simply put, Lean operates on two important principles:

1. Always striving for improvement : This should be part of the culture and expectations and sought out by everyone every day.
2. Maintaining respect for people : Each worker is unique and should be treated with respect and helped to fulfil their capabilities.  Communicating with everyone the company goals, plans and results makes sure everyone is on the same page.

For companies to succeed with the Lean approach, they must ensure their business model prioritizes those principle.

Our company core values and monthly team meetings already covered the second principle however we needed training and guidance to help us identify tools to enable us to make a ‘continuous improvement’ approach natural to our team.

During 2020 Adcutech decided to start working with SWMAS Ltd looking into how we could adopt a ‘lean’ approach and soon realised that waste it is not just related to scrap parts.

There are in fact 8 wastes.

There is the obvious one already mentioned, scrap parts, but also waiting and delays – as parts move from section to section are there bottlenecks or hold ups, movement of people – how far does each individual have to walk to get tools, to clock on to the next job, to find material for the job they are working on?

These are all things that were taken for granted as part of our day-to-day role, until they were highlighted as potential issues and in turn areas of improvement that could help with efficiency and the limitation of waste.

Focusing on the 8 Wastes our team has started to make small but beneficial changes to the way we work.

The Adcutech management decided that improvements should be driven by our team on the shopfloor.  They are the staff that work in the production environment and therefore have hands on experience of niggles & gripes or areas that could be improved to make their working day more efficient and in turn improve productivity.

We have a Lean ‘champion’ that rallies the team together to discuss ideas, generate suggestions and plan the implementation of changes.

Starting small and looking at the most obvious, easy to change frustrations the team have already completed three projects and are discussing adaptations to develop one of them even further.

Initially calculations are suggesting that these small changes will save 47 hours a year.  That is more that 1 week of production time, by making some quite simple changes to the layout of our shopfloor.

Discussing and celebrating our successes at our monthly team meetings seems to be energising our team to think bigger and the list of projects they want to tackle is growing.

We plan to adopt this approach in every area of the business.

We still have work to do with SWMAS with more training planned and more tools to learn, when the COVID restrictions are lifted, but we have started 2021 with a positive approach and a common goal to improve efficiency across the business.   Our team understand ‘it’s not about working hard, but about working smarter’.