Your Business Walks Stuck, Slow, Locked? Doesn’t It Profit As You Wanted? Here are Tips on How to Eliminate Waste, Simplify Processes That Suck Your Profits, and Sabotage Your Business Success Based on the Book “Lean-Agile Quality Business Leadership Systems”
By Prof. Aecio D’Silva
How to Eliminate Waste, Simplify Processes, and Leverage Your Business – Waste elimination and process simplification techniques in business today have become an essential part of any successful business strategy. In fact, one of the main reasons companies fail is because they don’t know how to eliminate the “waste” in their processes. Waste elimination and process simplification techniques are two ways that companies can save money and improve efficiency.
Both techniques involve making changes to your company’s processes to make them more efficient, but they differ in their approach. Waste elimination focuses on eliminating wasteful activities within an existing process, whereas process simplification involves removing unnecessary steps from a process altogether.
Waste elimination and process simplification are two different things, but both are important for a company to consider.
Elimination of waste and simplification of processes are defined differently, but both are crucial for a company to grow, prosper, and not be left behind by the competition. Here are tips for implementing these two methodologies in your company based on the Book “Lean-Agile Quality Business Leadership Systems“.
1 – How to Eliminate Waste, Simplify Processes – Tips/Techniques for Eliminating Waste in Your Business
Waste elimination is a process in which the company eliminates wasteful activities, such as unnecessary meetings or tasks that do not add value to the organization’s business goals.
Waste elimination has been around since Dr. Edward Deming pioneered total quality management methods in the 50s. Deming was who initiated the quality movement that gave the base for the Lean production system in Japan. Lean focus is on removing wastes and continuous improvement in the production line.
When a company eliminates waste from its processes, they create more efficiency and effectiveness in its workflow. This can be done by identifying the steps that take up too much time or cost more than they should and eliminating them from the process. For example, if you are using four employees to do a job that could be done by two employees, then you should consider reducing the number of employees needed for this task.
Eliminating waste is the ultimate goal of lean manufacturing. It is not something that can be achieved overnight. In fact, it takes a long time to get rid of wasteful processes and behaviors.
Steps in eliminating waste in your business
According to the Lean production system, there are seven basic wastes in the production line:
The seven wastes production are:
Overproduction — This is one of the most obvious forms of waste: Producing more than needed.
Transportation — unnecessary movement of material or information.
Inventory — Excessive inventory is typically applied in the “for safety” inventory thinking.
Waiting — time spent waiting for something to happen or someone else to take action before you can continue working on your task.
Motion — wasted effort due to moving around unnecessarily while performing a task.
Overprocessing — adding too many steps to a process that don’t add value to the customer’s experience with your product or service.
Defects — work that isn’t done correctly due to carelessness, lack of training, or poor-quality control measures in place at your facility.
The first step to eliminating waste is to identify which of the seven wastes exist in your production/work line. This can be done by taking an inventory of all the processes involved in making a product or providing a service, then listing all the steps required to complete each process. The next step is to identify how each step adds value to the end product or service.
The last step is to remove waste by eliminating all non-value-adding steps from your list and keeping only those that add value. For example, if you’re making a product or service and have 10 steps involved in making/delivering it, and only 7 add value to the client, then 3 of those steps should be completely eliminated because they don’t add any value to the final product/service.
You need to have the determination and create a positive-creative mindset and attitude in your leaders to have minds open to change/improvement and decide what will be eliminated. Remember that like parachutes, the mind only works when it opens!
For example, if you are doing a product/service that has 10 steps involved in its production/delivery and discover/analyze that only 7 add value to the customer. Consequently, 3 of these steps must be completely eliminated because they do not add any value to the customer in the final product/service. You’ll be amazed how there are camouflaged wastes with complicated/mysterious names, but they add no value to the customer in the final product/service. There are only adding costs and inefficiencies to your company.
Waste elimination also includes reducing batch sizes and making sure that buffers are never allowed to build up between workstations or departments within your organization’s supply chain network. Process simplification refers to eliminating unnecessary complexity from your business processes by minimizing variation and redundancy within them — for example, by establishing standard protocols for everything from customer service calls to shipping orders out on time every day without fail
2 – How to Eliminate Waste, Simplify Processes – Process Simplification Techniques
Process simplification techniques help companies reduce complexity while increasing productivity and efficiency within their organization. It is another pillar of Lean/Agile Business Quality Leadership and was introduced by the Lean Production System and Agile software development manifesto.
When we apply process simplification, we are referring to eliminating the unnecessary complexity of business processes in your company/enterprise and minimizing variation and redundancy within them. For example, establishing standard protocols or contingency plans (what to do when…) for everything from customer service calls to one-off order deliveries and not accepting failures/delays. No matter how big or small it is.
Another strategy is to fractionate deadlines and breadth of what will be released, dividing the final product into by-products that work and are within the established specifications, and so on. There is a complete lean-agile quality leadership technology (lean-agile) to implement this fractionation where possible. The goal of process simplification techniques is to help companies reduce complexity while increasing productivity and efficiency within their production/service line.
In today’s competitive business environment, companies are constantly searching for ways to improve their processes. Process simplification is one of the most effective ways to increase efficiency and improve customer satisfaction.
Process simplification is a set of techniques used to eliminate unnecessary steps in a process and reduce the time it takes to complete the activity. It is an important part of lean-agile quality business systems manufacturing.
Process Simplification Implementation
Process simplification can be implemented in many ways, depending on its goals:
1 – Reduce cost by reducing waste, saving resources, and reducing inventory levels
2 – Increase productivity by increasing employee efficiency
3 – Improve customer satisfaction by offering faster service and reducing errors
Processes become more complicated when there are too many steps involved with completing a task or project. By eliminating unnecessary steps within these processes, companies can simplify them and make them easier for employees to complete on time and in budget without sacrificing quality results or customer satisfaction levels.
Identifying the activities to be streamlined and areas for improvement
The process of simplifying a business process involves identifying the activities that can be eliminated, consolidated or streamlined. It also involves identifying the areas where there is potential for improvement in the existing process.
The objective of simplification is to eliminate waste from a process and make it more efficient. Reducing waste helps reduce costs and increases productivity by eliminating bottlenecks and improving the flow of work through an organization.
Where to Start Identifying Points to Simplify Processes?
A good place to start when looking at ways to simplify processes is to ask yourself what you would do differently if you had unlimited resources available? This may seem like an odd question, but think about it – if you had unlimited resources, what would you do differently?
What would happen if you could hire more staff or buy more equipment? What would happen if there were no time constraints on this project? How would you approach things differently if there weren’t any other projects competing for your time?
Asking yourself these types of questions will help give insight into how your current processes could be improved upon. Once you’ve identified ways in which things could be made easier or simpler, act! Start implementing these improvements one at a time and then stop once everything is in place so that you can see how well
Tips for implementing process simplification
Here are some tips for implementing process simplification techniques in your business today:
- Identify opportunities for improvement
This is where you start your process simplification efforts — by identifying areas where you can streamline your processes and make them easier for workers to follow.
- Set goals and develop action plans
Your next step is to come up with specific goals for streamlining each of these areas, as well as an action plan for achieving those goals. You’ll want to outline the steps you’ll need to take in order to implement each change, as well as estimate what resources will be required (such as equipment purchases or employee training).
- Implement changes incrementally
The final step is changing things around in order to simplify processes and make them less complicated — but don’t rush into things here! Instead, try out some small changes first.
How to Eliminate Waste, Simplify Processes, and Rekindle the Vitality of Your Business
Conclusion
There are numerous places in a business where waste can creep into admin and support operations. At times, it might be something as simple as timing the walk from your seat to the photocopier. Other times, it might be scheduling meetings in rooms that might be unavailable for myriad reasons.
Either way, if you’re looking for places to improve efficiency in your workplace that are neither time-consuming nor labor-intensive, anywhere you find waste and inefficiency bloating the production system, it is a good place to start implementing improvements.
After reading this article, if you’ve already discovered ideas for removing waste and/or simplifying processes in your business, the tips in this article are the steps you can take to put your work improvement project into action.
If you want something much more complete, didactic, and detailed about removing waste, uncomplicating/simplifying processes, and more, you can have it in my new book “Lean-Agile Quality Business Leadership Systems”. This book available on Amazon is a super practical business management/leadership administration manual ready to be used/adapted in any company on this blue yet round planet.
Books of Prof. Aecio D’Silva