Breaking Through to Flow: Banish Firefighting and Produce to Customer Demand: 1 Book

If you want to become truly lean but cannot imagine how to get beyond the fire-fighting associated with constantly changing plans, then this workbook is for you. A growing number of people are recognising that there is a lot more to lean than simply eliminating waste from current processes. But they struggle to see how to redesign their operations and abandon old ways of working. This workbook introduces a new pathway that is helping many organisations to overcome this hurdle and to launch them on the next phase of their lean journey - Breaking Through to Flow. The key starting point for this pathway is to question the batch logic, based on economic order quantities, that drives most planning systems. Batch logic creates a vicious circle where every change leads to a new plan, which in turn leads to further changes and fire-fighting. This workbook describes how it is possible to move step by step towards levelled production and later on to produce in line with customer demand. This simultaneously creates the stability essential in driving a virtuous circle of standard work, continuous improvement and increased performance. Every business is actually a collection of different product flows. This workbook introduces a tool and a management system, which we have come to call the Glenday Sieve, which enables you to quickly create a stable flow and replenishment pull system for the few products that account for a significant part of your output, while managing separately the tail of build-to-order products with low volume and unpredictable demand. Over time more products can be added to this flow, and the cost of product complexity can be reduced.Read More