Going Lean for Big Savings

At some point, regardless of what your job is, the question of “how can we make this work better?” has probably come up in one form or another. Companies always talk about wanting to improve their processes and make things run more efficiently. If you have asked this question, you have probably thought to yourself, “well, if I knew how to make this work better, don’t you think I would be doing it?” It’s easier said than done. Or is it?

I recently participated in a Lean event with our client. We decided that we wanted to improve our process for tracking shipments that we didn’t have tracking updates for. On the surface, it seems like a pretty cut and dry process. Each day, a report is created that lists all the shipments we need updates on. We use the list and either email the carriers or go to the tracking sites to collect the updates on our own. I was hesitant at first. It’s a straightforward process; how would we find ways to improve this process significantly? The answer? Value Stream Mapping (VSM).  

First, we created a process map showing how the process is done in its current state. For nearly 4 hours, we mapped out every single step in the process. It quickly became apparent that this “simple” process was not as cut and dry as we thought. Once complete, it showed every single step and answer to every “what if” question we could think of. Most importantly, it showed the waste in our process. Anywhere we found waste, no matter how small, we wrote it on a sticky note and placed it on the map. At the end of this evaluation, we had 33 sticky notes. Therefore, there are 33 areas in our process where we were doing more work than we should have.

From there, we prioritized the sticky notes based on how hard it would be to fix the issue and how much value it would bring. This gave us a list of what we should focus on improving first.

Following Lean principles and VSM, we identified over an hour’s worth of extra work done by our team each day. That’s 260 hours of work being done each year that was bringing our team zero value. That’s the equivalent of having an employee sit and do nothing for 33 days. Somewhere on your team, you may have this employee too, and now you know how to find them and improve your processes.

Contributor: Brent Hendricks

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About Allyn International

Allyn International is dedicated to providing high quality, customer centric services and solutions for the global marketplace. Allyn's core products include transportation management, logistics sourcing, freight forwarding, supply chain consulting, tax management and global trade compliance. Allyn clients range from small local businesses to Fortune 500 firms. Allyn conducts business in more than 20 languages and has extensive experience in both developed and emerging markets. Highly trained experts are positioned throughout North America, Europe and Asia and Allyn regional headquarters are strategically located in Fort Myers FL USA, Shanghai P.R. CHINA and Prague, CZECH REPUBLIC. For more information, log on to www.allynintl.com.