Top 7 tips for lead time reduction-Lean Kaizen Consultancy & Training for Process Improvement and Quality Improvement

Top Seven Tips for Reducing Lead Time

All of your probably work in organisations that have some
things in common.

You have a "customer" at the beginning and at the end of your
process who demands an excellent product or service from you.

For your business to be truly successful one of your main challenges is “how long" it takes you to provide your product or service to your customers.

Lead Time : How Long ?

So if a customer places an order,how long does it take you to complete that order successfully?

e.g. what is your turn around time or lead time?

Let's look at my Top Seven Tips to reduce turn around times for your products and services.

Understand what makes up your turn around time and start to measure it

There are many people in business who do not even know what their turn around time is, far less measure it.

Is that you?

Before you can improve your turn around times you first of all need to know what it currently is!

Once you have worked out the overall lead time for your product or service you need to break it down day by day, minute by minute into all of the activities involved in supplying your product or service.

Once you've identified them ask yourself the question "Does this task do anything for the customer?"

Strip out all of the wasteful steps in your process

Having identified the overall turn around time you need to eliminate all activities that do not add value to your customers.

Here are just a few examples of wasteful steps that appear in many business processes:-

Counting things, moving things, inspecting things, looking for items, storing items, filing items, waiting
for items, processing items when they are not required.

These steps can often be eliminated and will have a dramatic impact on helping reduce your turn
around time.

Identify the beat rate for your process based on your Average Customer demand.

In many instance businesses are made up of lots of functional groups whose resources do not necessarily reflect the demands made upon them by customers.

To reduce turn around time we need to have work flowing through our processes at the same rate as our customers demand it - not faster, not slower, just at the same rate wherever possible.

This is not always easy to achieve but having a customer focused process flow, rather than functional silos, that are not particularly well connected, will again help reduce turn around time by eliminating bottlenecks and wasteful "hand over" between one department and another.

Measure and then eliminate errors

In most processes mistakes cause rework and add dramatically to your overall turn around time.

Many organisations accept chronic errors as a way of life, and don't do much to eliminate them.

You need to build in fail safe mechanisms to prevent errors occurring in the first place.

The first step is to measure what your chronic types of errors are, by collecting data for a short period of time - say a month. Once you've established the few errors that cause you the most rework and customer dissatisfaction then establish why the errors
are occurring.

Often if you ask the question why 5 times you can get to the root causes for errors occurring.

You should then full proof your process to eliminate these chronic but usually avoidable errors re-occurring.

Eliminating errors and rework will again have a dramatic impact on turn around time and customer satisfaction (both internal and external).

Never pass on an error to the next part of the process!

Look at the geography of the process - improve it.

Walk though you process from beginning to end and work out how far people and information have
to travel.

Imagine yourself as being a piece of information travelling through your organisation:

Question this Where do you travel to?

Why do you travel there?

Who do you meet along the way?

Are you delayed at all during your journey?

Do you ever have to queue?

Ask why, why, why, why, why?

Doing this can be a real eye opener!
It usually exposes lots of wasted time that is currently part of your overall turn around time.

By bringing process steps closer together we can often improve communications, reduce turn around times and eliminate many errors.

Reduce batch size

Larger batch sizes mean longer turn around times - fact. Doing things one at a time is counter intuitive to most of us. Economy of scale and all that!

"If I do 25 at a time I can work on a batch all day and be really efficient".

In my experience the larger the batch sizes the longer the turn around time will be, so try and bring it right down -1 is best if it is practical to do!

Larger batch sizes are also great at hiding waste!

Have an aggressive turn around time reduction goal

If you are really serious about improving customer satisfaction then you need to be totally committed to striping out waste ,improving quality and reducing turn around times.