Driving out Waste from your Business

How Lean is your Business?  Are you Driving out Waste?

There were many great examples and ideas to introduce “lean thinking” into your business but as always it is the implementation of those ideas that is critical step, so I thought I would share a couple of ideas that I have used.

 

The first ideas comes from when I was in Accountant in Industry.  All of the company’s 400 employees were encouraged to submit waste saving and cost reduction ideas by having a cash bonus relating to the saving made.  The idea didn’t have to come from their own department or area of expertise, the employee just had to identify the opportunity.  Though to make the idea come alive the employee also had to put together a one page plan that covered the following essentials: –

  1. What the waste reducing idea was
  2. How the idea can be implemented
  3. The cost of any investment required
  4. The savings that could be achieved

 

This system ensures a stream of well thought ideas that the employee can see the benefit directly to them in sharing in the year one savings achieved.

 

The second idea is one that we have implemented at Aspirations and that at the start of every team meeting we used to ask for the top 3 issues that the team have, we have now changed that to the top three waste saving ideas.  We will link this to a cash bonus based upon year one savings.

 

It is the first item on the agenda so that its importance is highlighted, it will always get discussed and the team are still fresh.  There is a cash bonus element so that our team are encouraged to behave in a way that benefits the whole business.

 

I hope these ideas inspire you to take action and implement a routine to reduce waste in your business, I would love to hear what action you have taken.

2015-06-04T13:58:11+01:00