While walking through a plant that makes furniture, I noticed how often we ignore technology, resources and energy available to improve efficiency.  I witnessed a myriad of people at the end of a paint line removing and manually stacking bad product.  I asked my tour guide why this was happening and he said that they were having issues with the painting process and HAD to have visual inspectors to ensure that no bad product was sent to packaging.  I asked, why wouldn’t you just repair the paint process, and put in a vision system with a reject option?  “Oh that’s too expensive.” replied my guide.  But you have 12 people taking every 3rd piece off the line and stacking them up for recycling, how much does that cost? “Don’t know, all I do know is that we have no capital to fix this problem.”  Then I asked the obvious, “What is your cost of doing nothing?”

We see victims of  this mentality of mediocrity and hear  “we don’t have the funds this year” or “it is on our list of priority projects” or the best of all, “this is normal in our business”.  It may be time to take a closer look at investing in an evaluation for your operations and applications, find where your inefficiencies are and how much are you losing if you DO NOTHING.

ZEN Tip:

1. Identify what’s most important to you.
2. Eliminate everything else.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 6th, 2011 at 5:08 pm and is filed under Author's Experience. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.