The 5 Focusing Steps

Do you want to produce more and faster?

If you suffer from delays or if you need to improve your operations, read what follows. ??

You must know the entities that limit your value production. These resources that have less capacity than others.

Bottlenecks are the resources with the lowest capacity

They limit the overall production and prevent meeting customer demand.

Remember that everyone doesn't need to be 100% efficient.

Except for these famous bottlenecks!

Step 1: Identify your bottlenecks

To find bottlenecks in the flow, look at the queues.

Where does work accumulate?

Bottlenecks are where the queues are the longest. It is best to express these queues in hours.

Also, look at the evolution of volumes produced per week at different stations, and smooth them over several rolling weeks.

To see how the production chain behaves over time.

Beware of strong variations.??

Step 2: Help the bottlenecks produce more

Then you want to maximize their production, catch up on your delays and meet your customers' demands.

Bottlenecks can work better. Toyota taught us that waste is everywhere and human ingenuity is limitless.

You should encourage teams to practice continuous improvement and collaborate to make the bottleneck operation easier, more ergonomic, simpler.

Don't leave the bottleneck alone. For better work, bottleneck stations will need collaboration from other services.

Cross-functional managers must facilitate this collaboration.

We will see that we can better exploit the bottleneck by making it work on products that bring in a lot of € compared to the hours they require. (cf. throughput accounting ??)

Step 3: Subordinate other operations to the bottlenecks

This means that the upstream and downstream processes of the bottleneck must synchronize with the bottleneck.

Downstream has little choice because it will struggle to produce more than the bottlenecks.

But upstream must not drown the factory under work-in-process by working faster than the bottleneck.

“WIP (Work-in process) is not WIP (Work-in-progress)”

The non-bottlenecks should help the bottleneck, as the whole chain will benefit.

Therefore, developing multiskilling is crucial.

Upstream processes must feed the bottleneck and maintain a buffer stock to protect it.

Step 4: Invest to debottleneck.

If the bottleneck remains in the same place. Invest to debottleneck sustainably.

Recruit, buy a better machine, etc.

But avoid moving to step 4 without having gone through step 2!

Lean and Toyota have shown that a lot can be done with little.

Continuous improvement allows for the development of employees, to educate everyone on the understanding of processes and techniques, and to make the organization stronger.

It is demanding but necessary to sustain the activity.

Step 5: Beware of inertia

There is a new bottleneck somewhere, so go back to step 1.

You want examples and stories to apply it :

Read the newsletter (it's free!): Subscribe for more details