How to Manage Local Optima Problem
Scott Williams2022-10-25T09:21:50+10:00
By
Scott Williams
D11 Business Workflow
Blue Belt, Cost Cutting, Inventory Management and Work in Progress, Inventory Performance Monitoring, Project Management System, Repetitive Work Efficiency
0 Comments
It is a very widely held belief in business that each station in a production line should be working as hard as it can in order to maximise its efficiency. This might be a car assembly line or an accountant’s office processing tax returns using several different stages in the accounting process. In other words, each stage is working at its Local Optimum. Generations of Cost Accountants have encouraged this and spend endless amounts of time trying to split, for example, the cost of electricity over each work stage in the production cycle. This is probably seriously flawed thinking. Blue Belt
Do you hate to see staff within a workflow standing around doing nothing?
Actually, they might be doing you a favour.
Running each and every stage of a workflow to its maximum ability is a recipe for damaging your profitability:
- If you aim to run every stage of your workflow at its maximum productivity, you are optimising each of these separate stages independently to produce as much as possible at each stage.
- Intuition suggests that this must be efficient because we are maximising the use of the staff and equipment resources at every point in the workflow.
- Many businesses measure operator efficiency to be sure that the operators are as productive as possible.
- Managers and supervisors can get into trouble if operator efficiency statistics drop.
- The raw materials used, electricity and other similar inputs, labour.
- It consumes cash (usually a scarce resource) well before being turned into a saleable product.
- This might come as a shock to them as it reverses longstanding practice.
- Good workers will feel uncomfortable standing around.
- There is a name for this:
- Parkinson’s Law states that work will expand to fill the time available.
- People will “make work” in order not to seem to be slacking off.
- The Constraint is the heartbeat of your Workflow.
- Any stage upstream of the constraint, that is before it, can be reconfigured to only produce what the Constraint needs.
- This might mean fewer working hours and/or fewer people and plant at each Workflow stage.
- The distribution of work stages can be moved around among staff:
- Particularly if it turns out they can work the same amount of time but cover more Workflow stages.
- The pressure is off to produce as much as they can with the Workflow stages they already have.
- You can continue to refine the Workflow by reading up about pacing systems like “Drum, Buffer, Rope” and Takt Time.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.