LEAN Thinking and the Great Game of Business Part 3
As we continue down the journey of becoming a LEAN company along with implementing the principles of the Great Game of Business (www.greatgame.com)
I have started teaching a financial literacy class teaching 5 of our team members. They come from various departments in our company. While they are separate they are finding out how they are really connected with each other from......order entry to shipping!!
These men and women have shown a great interest in how our business is ran and how they can have a direct impact on the out come. We meet every week for about 1.5 hours
and are going through in detail the various parts of understanding what the advantage is to understanding the financials - in addition I have been mixing in LEAN thinking. The questions have been nothing short of awesome.
The last couple of weeks we have been going over the seven wastes.
As you look over this simple chart you can see how the 7 wastes can affect your bottom line if not managed well.
We started with #1(over production) and asked why this was an issue - we quickly moved our thinking to the lessons learned in our GGOB training that over production not only wastes labor but it has an effect on cash as we may have purchased more than we need and that is cash that we cannot use to buy other inventory.
Also with over production you are never sure that you will have an outlet for the parts being produced and you run the risk of creating obsolete inventory which you may have to write off in the future....
The great part about all of this is that I planted the question and this team did the talking and problem solving...in a future article I will lay some of the answers out.
Here is really the lesson of the article - if you are a leader in your company grab a group of your influencer's and get them involved! What you are doing is preparing the seed for growth once these folks go back to their respective departments!
If you would like more information drop me a note and I will gladly share what we have done!