In automotive manufacturing, reducing quality costs can be like trying to bail out a leaking boat. You can empty bucket after bucket over the side, but you can’t get above water until you plug the leaks themselves.
Being agile puts you in a better position for opportunities.
August 1, 2017
Lean and agile can work alone but they can be very powerful together. Reducing waste keeps your company sustainable. Being agile keeps your company ahead of the competition.
To be Lean, in process improvement speak, is to maximize customer value by eliminating waste. This means that an organization can create more value for customers with fewer resources if they can understand customer value and focus key processes to continually improve.
We’ve all heard the term “practice makes perfect.” It’s something instilled in us from a young age, from the repetition of the alphabet to the memorization of the multiplication table.
It is still surprising how many people, from engineers to managers to quality professionals to technicians, possess limited understanding of product and process (manufacturing) limits.
While process improvement initiatives, including SPC and its use of control charts, sometimes get the greatest attention in manufacturing environments, the backbone of a quality improvement effort is often the quiet, unnoticed measurement devices that represent an organization’s commitment to consistency and accuracy.
Many quality professionals, including statisticians, have remained mired in their rapidly diminishing consultative roles of teaching statistical tools, analyzing data, designing experiments and performing internal consulting duties while having few leadership responsibilities and limited accountability.