INFOGRAPHIC: Our value to industry

QMI Solutions quantifies manufacturing productivity success by regularly measuring the value and impact of work undertaken by QMI Solutions and delivered in partnership with the Queensland Government. 

The primary mechanism to determine this value is based on an independent survey where, participating companies are asked to define the value and impact on their business resulting from working with QMI Solutions. Click here to see more information.

How to get "Better Through Lean" in only 10 minutes

Discover how advanced your company is in becoming a Lean organisation by taking our 10 minute “Better Through Lean™” assessment.

The core idea of Lean Manufacturing is to maximise customer value while minimising waste. Simply, Getting better through Lean means creating more value for customers with fewer resources.

A Lean organisation understands customer value and focuses its key processes to continuously increase it. The ultimate goal is to provide perfect value to the customer through a perfect value creation process that has zero waste.

To accomplish this, Lean thinking changes the focus of management from optimising separate technologies, assets, and vertical departments to optimising the flow of products and services through entire value streams that flow horizontally across technologies, assets, and departments to customers.

To begin your Better Through Lean assessment, go to: www.betterthroughlean.com

Use Lean to take the waste away

It is still a little surprising to me when I read about companies just discovering the benefits of Lean Manufacturing. The concept has been around for quite some time (it was originally termed "Lean" by the LEI in the late 1980s) and it is even permeating into other sectors such a Health, Finance and Administration. In fact, any business that has a process of some sort (every business?) can benefit from Lean.

In brief, Lean is the reduction of waste in all its forms. And while the traditional Seven Wastes has been expanded to include Eight or Nine Wastes, Lean essentially aims to reduce the following wastes:  

1. Over production
2. Waiting
3. Transportation
4. Inventory
5. Motion
6. Over processing
7. Defective Units

Click here for more details about what these mean and how they negatively affect your business.

Two important things to remember here. Where Lean Manufacturing fails is when companies have approached it as a one-off event - it should be treated as a continuous improvement program and there are tools you can use to ensure Lean is implementable and sustainable in your organisation. Second, it's success should be measured as a cultural change above all else. It is fine to see productivity rise and that's ultimately what everyone wants, but when staff buy into the Lean mentality and it is part of the culture, you know you have been successful and will be in the long term.

The Lean tools I mentioned before are outlined in our ProEdge Manufacturing Excellence program, which has been scheduled for this year - the next one is in Mackay, Queensland on 19th February.

Lean Manufacturing gets results too. Read some of our recent success stories of companies that have implemented Lean well (click on the business name to read the full case study):

Austchrome:

• reduced job turnaround times from 30 to 17 days
• increased production volume by 50%

Before and after Lean at Austchrome

Townsville Pallet and Crate:

• 100% delivery in full, on time

Brisbane Tray Bodys:

• increased productivity by 100%
• increased productivity wins mining client

There is a whole new blog topic where you can relate the principles of Lean to those espoused by sustainability advocates, but for now, just know that Lean works, it's scalable and your competitors are probably already doing it.

Engaged workers make inspired/happy/productive workers

A great article from Innovation Excellence about the three types of workers in any given organisation: Engaged, Not Engaged and Actively Disengaged.

The article details the ramifications of having workers not engaged in the business and happily, a number of strategies to remedy the issue. Of particular use is the infographic see below:

An article well worth reading especially if you're interested in re-engaging your staff. Click here to read the full article.

Why manufacturing matters - the difficulty in disconnecting

Tim Mazzarol blogs on The Conversation about some of the reasons why manufacturing matters. He reasons that it is almost impossible to disconnect manufacturing from its flow-on benefits to other sectors in terms of innovation and productivity specifically, but this doesn't mean propping up unsustainable industries either.

Both government and industry have a role to play to ensure we don't lose manufacturing as a key enabler for economic growth and become too reliant on a finite mining boom. He also refers to the US commitment to rebuild their manufacturing industry and the reports that underlie the movement. It's quite a good read.

Click here to read the full story.

The extra challenges that SME manufacturers face

Good article posted on NGM Update:

* * * *

Small manufacturers have claimed for years that they have a tougher road to profitability than larger manufacturers, and new data seems to back them up. This year’s Next Generation Manufacturing Study found that while four out of five manufacturers were profitable in their most recent fiscal year, large manufacturers are far more likely to have solid bottom lines than smaller competitors.

Click here to read to full article.