Thursday, October 2, 2014

The 10 steps to reduce inventory of materials



Let us imagine you have to reduce the inventory of tapes you need during your process. 

Here the steps to follow:

1)
How many tapes (on average) you need every week?

2)
Set the space to contain maximum 2 weeks of tapes.

3)
Create a Visual Management tool to understand the 2 weeks level (green) and 1 week level (red).

4)
Determine who is the responsable and the accountanble for replenish tapes on weekly bases.

5)
Start by replenish the space with 2 weeks inventory and then every week refill the space and monitor the quantity ordered and its gap from the average.

6)
Now you have a fixed inventory in the shop and a statistical data set to work on.

7)
If the accountable is regular in his work, now the supplier could give tapes on weekly bases.

8)
Set a minimum (i.e. 2 weeks) and maximum level (i.e. 4 weeks) in the warehouse.

9)
Now you have fixed maximum inventory in the company for tapes.

10)
Start again from point 1 halving the stock space and doubling the frequency of the replenishment.

Following these steps you will reduce your inventory in a consistent way for your company.

LeanLab Staff.

Wednesday, September 24, 2014

When should we start with Lean?



One of the capital questions when a company decides to apply lean is if now is the best time to start.

When this questions arise, there are some people that say “let´s start now, because there is a big volumen of work, and therefore we can reduce the cost and the production lead time”, while others think that is better to wait for a future period when the volumen will be lower and therefore they will have time to define a better working process.

Who is right?

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