How to Use 5 Whys Problem Solving Technique
Often you are faced with a problem and have no idea what is causing it. You don’t even know where to start looking! Actually, you and your team may know more than you think and 5 Whys is a way to unearth possible reasons from complete unknowns Five Whys and its sister Five Hows is […]
SM2.6 80/20 Business Analysis
We talk about the 80/20 Rule a lot in 12Faces. This article looks specifically at how to analyse many parts of your business with 80/20 to rapidly improve productivity. It is a mix of Yellow and Blue Belt
How Kaizen Leads to Continuous Incremental Improvement
Most improvement is an incremental process. It is rare to get something completely right the first time so, over time, we improve parts of the system so as to continue to improve the whole. A Japanese word for incremental improvement is “Kaizen”. Read this article for insights into incremental improvement of your business. Incremental improvement, […]
SM4.0 Business Efficiency: Waste Reduction Introduction
Eight Types of Waste Business efficiency relies upon managing and reducing waste Here are 8 tested ways for doing this What is Waste? A straight forward explanation of waste is that it is anything that adds no value to the final product or service. This is something that the customer is not willing to pay […]
SM4.4 How to Reduce Waste in Offices and Service Industries
Most improvement is an incremental process. “Kaizen” is a Japanese word for incremental improvement. Most people think of the removal of waste occurring only on the factory floor. Waste can also occur in Office Operations; administration, human resources, sales & marketing. Experts report that Office Operations waste is at a higher level than waste on the factory […]
SM4.1 Eight Types of Waste
The well-known Toyota car company identified seven types of waste that had an impact on Productivity and Profit. An eighth has been added more recently. By gradually reducing these wastes, you can improve the Productivity and Profit of your business. In Japanese, this is referred to as reducing “muda” (pronounced Moo-da). This article discusses how these types of waste might show up in […]
SM4.3 Prioritising Waste Removal
Any waste removal project will identify literally hundreds of instances of waste. There is a serious risk that such a vast quantity of information will overwhelm the business operator’s ability to manage it in the best interests of the business. We need to discuss ways to identify the most important wastes to remove first.
This is a Yellow Belt article.
C2.4.2 Optimise100 – Types of Waste
Waste is a term very widely used in the various optimisation methodologies like Lean. There are many types of waste. Take the time to read though the 12Faces material on the sources of Waste and how to record and reduce it. For example, experts usually talk about 8 types of Waste in general and well […]
SM4.2 Capturing Waste in the Wild
Once you get on the trail of waste out in the wilds of your production system (service, retail or manufacturing), you are going to find literally hundreds of examples of waste. It’s too much to hold in your head so you need a simple way to find, measure it and record it for later prioritised removal. This is a yellow belt approach to these tasks. It is the second article in this series on waste.