The objective of all improvement projects should be to improve the overall process. Everything else should be secondary to this objective. If you improve the efficiency of a support process, or even a portion of the core process, but at the same time lower the efficiency of the overall process, what have you gained?

At one of my clients, a compounding department known as Department 13 had material costs that amounted to 75% of its department costs. During what we’ll call Year One, a project team was formed and given the job of reducing the material costs in Department 13.

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