Enhance Your Operation 6: Reduce Time at Workstations

This continues our series on how enhancing your operation increases your profits

We dealt with a little bit with reducing time at workstations in our streamlining and bottleneck posts. Today, we add more points to reduce the amount of time product or paperwork spends at any particular workstation. Time stalled at a workstation costs you money.

Find the answers 4 questions about the product, paperwork, processing step or other (referred to as “it” in the questions below)):

How long does it stay at that workstation?

• Many machines, computers, and other workstations come with programs that allow to time how long it performs a certain task, input a record, or keep a file open.
• If not you may use the stopwatch app on your smart phone.

What happens to it at that workstation?

• Once again a program or app may keep track of exactly what happens at the workstation.
• You can also assign an employee or consultant to write down what they see the person the workstation do.

Why must it spend so much time their?

• Ask the observer to notice roadblocks that may delay getting it off the workstation: slow computers, slow workers, misplaced product that delays processing
• Observe if the worker need to set up, change, or open different templates or programs.
• Look to see how many interruptions, time away, or meetings delay processing.
• Examine the motivations for workers to speed up or slow down

What can we do to reduce time spent at that workstation?

• Reorganize the workstation to streamline task and material flow, and reduce duplication or lost movements
• Repair, tune, or enhance the equipment to function faster
• Train the worker to work faster and more accurately to eliminate mistakes
• Divide the tasks and responsibilities of that workstation to process faster
• Reduce interruptions, approvals, meetings, or other barriers slowing down the workstation
• Ask the workers for opinions to speed up the reduce time at the station
• Consider incentives to move the work faster

Join me on Tuesday when we share some success stories of business clients