The business proposal is an essential document not only for sales people but also for anyone who wants to submit a serious proposition for internal or external approval.

Sponsored Content

‘My small business has landed a few very lucrative contracts and we’re growing. Honestly, we’re now struggling with quality control. We have management systems in place, and that’s helping, but we’re still having issues. I don’t know where to begin to get a handle on this.” —John Q. CEO.

T

Visual management is increasingly common in offices implementing lean. Yet even though signs, large LCD displays, whiteboards, and charts dominate the wall space, these tools often become part of the wallpaper. After just a few months, many offices revert back to meetings and management to provide information and services within the company or, more important, to the customer.

Double-digit productivity improvements resulting from workflow redesigns and new-capital equipment investments always get a lot of attention. But over time the returns from many smaller, more methodical changes and investments can rival more highly visible projects. Total productivity maintenance (TPM), for both existing and new equipment, offers just such an opportunity.

My client, a leader in innovative rail-friction management, was recently preparing for an integrated ISO 14001/OHSAS 18001 audit, and I was asked to provide on-site training to help prepare their employees. The company and its staff are well-versed in audits, having been registered under ISO 9001 for several years. In addition to the required environmental, health, and safety (EHS) awareness training, I was also asked to provide my thoughts on what to expect during the upcoming audit.

This article describes a novel approach to calculating the financial aspect of overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), with the result referred to as $EE (as in monetary units). By using $EE, a management team readily can “SEE” their operation in financial terms. Employees are then better able to focus on underperforming operations to improve the bottom line.

In today’s increasingly complex manufacturing operations, Murphy’s Law is only an unexpected hiccup away—anything from a data error to an errant vibration to a dulled cutting tool can undermine production. In a future with fully effective sensing and information technologies that anticipate and avert potentially harmful process spasms, however, everything that might go wrong, simply could not.

Of all the tools in the lean toolkit, 5S is the one that has proven to be the most effective—and also the most elusive. It’s effective because the actions needed to sort, set in order, shine, standardize, and sustain mirror the deeper, critically important philosophy of thinking about value, waste, and flow with a “big picture” mindset. Once an organization has adapted lean thinking and initiated 5S projects, improvement begins to accelerate in all operational phases.