|
January 5-6 I attended the Northern Green Expo in Minneapolis where I listened to some excellent presentations.
One of the more interesting presentations was given by Roger Fisher and focussed on "Lean Business Operations: What Does That Mean?" The Lean Business philosophy is based on Kaizen, the Japanese strategy for continuous improvement.
In a nutshell, it involves dissecting every activity in your operation to determine if they are a "value added" part of the activity, a "non-value added but necessary" part of the activity, or a "non-value added" part.
Value added is what your customer will pay for
Non-value added by necessary is where you can figure out how to increase margins
Non-value added is the inefficient parts of the activity.
All of this analysis speaks to how you optimize your employee's time, i.e. how effectively something is done so it is not wasted time.
Fisher employed volunteers to mimic an assembly line - or in our case a potting operation, and ran it the first time as it would normally be run - then the second time made changes to optimize time or redirected activity - so that time wasn't spent "sitting around" and not earning money.
Obviously, Lean Business, is much more than my summary - but the visual example and practical advice given by Mr. Fisher, as well as the first person stories of several managers who have subscribed to the philosophy left everyone in the audience with something to think about. | 
