Sharing Knowledge, Growing Value

In these tough economic days with ever increasing both off and on shore competition you must consistently try to strive to eliminate "waste" throughout your organization.

1. If you don't and your competition does, then you are in trouble and it is questionable how long your organization will last.
2. If you do and your competition does not then you will drive up market share at the expense of you competition. You could dominate your market.
3. If both you and your competition do then you will have a level playing field.

Lean Enterprise (LE) concepts and practices are an extremely useful set of tools to identify and eliminate waste in any enterprise wherever there are human activities. We have successfully worked with:

1. Professional organizations – Engineering, Legal, Accounting
2. Service Companies - Insurance, Distributors, Logistics, Freight
3. Manufacturing – both heavy and light manufacturing

LE has a disciplined approach to identify and eliminate 8 types of waste.

This article is focused on eliminating the waste of human intellect or workforce intelligence. Too many organizations spend significant dollars in educating, training and providing experience to their workforces. Yet few realize the true benefits of doing so. Those that do, realize significant performance well above their competition.

Waste of human intellect is defined as:

The easiest way to avoid this failure is to establish a culture and process to effectively utilize the time and talents of your people.

Establish the culture:

1. Acknowledge that your people have time and talents;
2. All ideas, suggestions will be given the same consideration regardless of source;
   1. Ideas suggestions from Executives, Managers, workers will all be given the same consideration;
3. The best ideas usually come from the people closest to or doing the work.

Establish the process:

1. Some companies proudly show us their "Suggestion Boxes" and tell us how "progressive" they are. However an effective "Suggestion Process" is what is really needed and a "Suggestion Box" is only the first step.
   1. We define "Suggestion Boxes" without supporting processes as "Death Valley for Ideas or Suggestions".
2. All suggestions
   1. must be acknowledged and published. We recommend anything as simple as a 3 foot by 4 foot cork board(s) or some companies have it on their internal network.
      • List the Suggestor(s) and the date.
   • must have resources applied to them to analyze the suggestions, alternative actions, and both intended and unintended consequences.
   • A cross functional group of people to assess the suggestion in a given time & place to reach a conclusion.
   • We have had engineers solve accounting issues and accountants solve engineering issues.
   • Years ago I had a buyer save ½ a cent per fastener but cost us 5 cents on the assembly floor.
   • must have the conclusions published even if the answer is declining the suggestion.
     • Publish the analysis and the reasons for the decision
     • Congratulating the team for their work
     • Congratulating the suggestor regardless of the decisions as long as the due consideration was applied

With the culture and process established you are now ready to start harnessing the human intellect in your organization. Years ago when I was VP Operations and even though I had never seen a particular piece of equipment before I told the Head Setter how to set the machine. He was patient and listened to me and then asked me what I really wanted.

When I said I wanted to reduce the set up time from 4 hours to 1 hour thereby increasing production time, he pointed out:

1. They never took 4 hours to set a machine. That was just a number that had been out into the ERP Computer system.
2. They generally took 3 hours but given 2 tools (at a cost of roughly $ 700) they could do it in less than 1 hour.

When I asked him why he had never suggested this to anyone he replied "No one asked and besides they wouldn’t listen" That was in 1980 and unfortunately there are far to many companies still like that today.

Over the years we have hundreds of similar cases. In an Engineering firm we increased the productivity of the Engineers (Read billable time) by 1/3 by asking them and some of their colleagues how. That firm has had record profits for the 8 years following their harnessing of the intellect of their people and is track to break it again.

Caution:

Unless your entire enterprise is committed to the harnessing of the human intellect in your organization, don’t start.

While you are obtaining that commitment, concurrently develop the processes so that you are ready to support the culture change with the relevant processes.

Self Funding:

Harnessing the human intellect in your enterprise does have a nominal cost such as meetings, announcements, suggestions procedures and the time to analyze and reach conclusions. However it very rapidly becomes self funding.

• i.e. Saves/eliminates more waste and resultant costs than the cost of doing so.
• In fact very rapidly becomes a direct source to increasing the bottom line.

A few years ago it was found in an Ipsos Reid survey, that the average Canadian worker "wasted" 2 ½ hours per day not being productive by typically waiting for someone, something or directions. Imagine the savings your organization would realize if you could increase your use of human intellect and reduce only half of that waste.

For organizations who are striving to improve operational and bottom line performance, EnPower Group is a high performance consulting firm that uses proven processes and methods to help our clients achieve and maintain results. EnPower develops personal, on going relationships and provides flexibility, innovation, creativity in our approaches that lead to proven unprecedented value.

with your colleagues or Groups.

 By Richard P. Shaw, CMC
 President
 EnPower Group Inc.

 To Contact Rick Shaw
 rshaw@enpowergroup.com or (416)804-5078

Connect with Richard P. Shaw on LinkedIn

Visit us directly at EnPower Group Inc. http://www.enpowergroup.com

Other key contacts:
Doug Cranston           dcranston@enpowergroup.com     (416) 949-4850     LinkedIn
David Rosengarten     davidr@enpowergroup.com           (416) 788-2774     LinkedIn

Sharing Knowledge, Growing Value