Lean organisation and continuous improvement

In a large number of organisations in various sectors (healthcare, services, construction), a high percentage of the activities and tasks performed by the staff do not add value to the customer or the user of the service.

Sometimes, the employees perform many jobs and operations to satisfy internal or routine demands. Various of them were born provisional, but over time they have become permanent. In some cases, the layout needs a revision.

Solving the situation seems simple. Only is required:

• Analyse the company and determine the processes that are not necessary and
• proceed with its reorganisation or
• redesign the process again.

But when there is an organisation project, it is common to find barriers:

• Requires personnel with experience in Lean projects of the organisation and continuous improvement. It is undoubtedly not a suitable job for a recent graduate.
• It requires personnel without habits and vices acquired by their company’s activity, with a clean, modern and broad vision. The customs and ways of working in an organisation are not necessarily harmful, quite the contrary. The combination of knowledgeable people of the company, together with external experts generates the perfect formula.
• Continuity: If it becomes a secondary activity or responsibility, the project is doomed to failure.
• Economic: If the company does not have a large volume, recruiting qualified professionals for this type of project, which is only required in the design and development phase, can be very expensive.

OAK began its consulting activity at the end of the ’90s. We developed organisational projects in small and medium-sized companies, a sector in which we are specialised.

In our continuous improvement projects, we attach great importance to the preliminary analysis. It undoubtedly is necessary to determine the most appropriate Lean manufacturing techniques and tools to implement each organisation:

5s, Andon, SMED, standardization of jobs, TPM, Value Stream Mapping, Continuous flow, Heijunka, KPI, Kanban, Jidoka, Just in time, Takt time, Visual management, Bottleneck analysis, Gemba, Hoshin Kanri, Kaizen, PDCA, Poka-Yoke, Root cause analysis, Eight disciplines problem solving (8Ds), Total quality management (TQM).

Our main contribution to companies is to build projects and improvements that add value to them actively. We develop this work through our consulting and engineering services, an asset that we are in a position to provide.