Management
Be lean: reduce waste, improve margins, sell more
Dan Sparrow
How to make continuous improvement part of your business strategy
This is the final article in our series on lean manufacturing
for printers. This installment focuses on the structures and
processes that reinforce production efficiency.
In the first three articles we
explored ways to identify
and reduce some of the
practical waste that occurs
in manufacturing. We’ve
seen that by developing
ordering and ideation por-
tals for our clients, we can
drastically reduce errors
and handling, while provid-
ing a ser vice that
customers will value. Then
we explored the automation of repetitive tasks in prepress
and project management, creating production ecosystems
that ensure consistent results while minimizing processing
time. Finally, we explored how implementing a 5S strategy
can increase productivity and the quality of outputs. Now
we’ll briefly explore what is arguably the most critical compon-
ent of kaizen culture, which is the way we identify, monitor,
and improve key performance indicators (KPIs) in our value
stream.
It’s not uncommon to discover that graphics shops have a
wide variety of systems and paperwork supporting produc-
tion. Some systems may be unique to a specific production
area. Some paperwork is only used as an active tracking
mechanism that is physically archived immediately after pro-
duction. These conditions create opportunities for errors and
eliminate an opportunity to easily generate valuable business
intelligence.
Single source of truth
Data is one of any company’s most valuable competitive
assets. Having it locked away in various physical archives or
sitting on production-floor hard drives renders it impotent.
Ideally, there should be a single source of truth for all data
– that is, a centralized accessible digital master domain for
any relevant set of data.
For example, it’s not uncommon for customer data to be
entered and stored by the sales, project management,
accounting, and shipping departments. If each department
manually enters this data into its own system, this creates
four completely different data sets. If, instead, all systems
draw the information from one centralized, accessible, digital
customer-account record, then anytime there is an update,
it’s available to every department.
32 | October 2018 | GRAPHIC ARTS MAGAZINE
Likewise, production planning may publish a hard copy sched-
ule which gets manually overridden due to a production issue
that doesn’t get reported until the hard copy is reviewed well
after the shift has ended. That data may never get introduced
into a centralized, accessible, digital system – meaning that
the reasons for the change and the performance implications
can’t be tracked and measured.
The most common reasons for not following this common-
sense strategy are: “Our systems are incompatible.” “My team
can’t do their jobs without hard copy and we don’t want to
duplicate effort.” “The costs to integrate our systems are
prohibitive.” “I can’t keep that information online! What if we
got hacked?”
Successful lean printers have made the investments into their
digital infrastructure to ensure that they have a single source
of truth that connects the entire value chain.
Business intelligence
Ideally your business systems incorporate your entire value
stream. Several companies sell systems that provide ordering
portals, customer relationship management, accounting,
ordering, payroll, project management, and logistics modules.
This can be very convenient, but even companies which have
invested in these systems eventually find that there is some
nuance to their business or some capability they seek that
isn’t accounted for in the standard packages. Consequently,
an important feature in these programs is a simple, well-
developed application programming interface (API) that allows
for custom integration.
If, for example, you want to take advantage of the data gener-
ated by a press through its internet of things (IOT) connection,
it may be that your MIS solution doesn’t have the capability
or fields to deal with the machine-generated data. So you can
hire a programmer to develop a script that will convert that
data into a form that can be used by the system, but without
an API you can’t automate its entry. If for example you’re
looking for real-time data on the productive uptime of a press
as it relates to a particular type of work, or substrate, or cus-
tomer, or operator—all of which might be useful business
intelligence—it would be a labour-intensive project if that data
capture wasn’t automated.
If it can’t be measured, it can’t be improved
If it is captured automatically, it can form part of a real-time
dashboard, useful to both line managers and senior staff in
understanding the production status. When the trend is under-
stood, and all data is present, it’s possible to develop theories
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