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Project Management
10 Steps to Avoid
Project Failure
Operations
Associates would like to
introduce our new Best Practices
Booklet, Project Management: 10 Steps to Avoid
Project Failure. Our goal is to share this critical
information with you to help
you avoid project failure and
to better prepare you for your future projects.
Please contact us for a free pamphlet
to view all 10 of the lessons.
Webster
defines a project as “something that is planned or
devised; a large or important undertaking, especially
one invoking considerable expense, personnel, and
equipment.” Projects come in many forms. At home,
projects such as building a home, remodeling the
kitchen, or taking a vacation are created for personal
gratification or to satisfy family obligations. In
business, projects are launched for many reasons. One of
the most important is to improve the financial condition
of the company. Yet, despite this goal to improve
company profitability, a large percentage of projects
fall short of business expectations or fail completely.
The examples of projects not succeeding are endless.
Companies design and implement:
• Facilities that are too large, or cost
too much.
• Operations that fail to achieve the expected
throughput and quality.
• Information technology that increases, not decreases,
real operating costs.
• Supply chain projects that fail to increase inventory
turnover and return on assets.
• Strategic projects, such as Lean and Six Sigma, that
fall behind schedule and consume many more company
resources than planned.
Studies
estimate that only 80% of general projects and only 20%
to 30% of IT projects achieve their stated goals.
Results have improved slightly over a long period of
time, but the overall success rates are still
underwhelming. Given the poor success rate of projects
across a broad swath of industries and areas of focus,
one of the primary project goals for any company should
be to increase the probability of project success. We've
organized this Best Practices guide to help you
significantly improve your chances of success. We hope
that you find this guide to be a valuable asset in your
efforts to improve your projects.
The Robbins-Gioia Survey (2001) Standish Group CHAOS
Report (2003)
Please call us to request a copy!
For more information
contact:
Alan Nager, Principal
AlanNager@oallp.com
Mike Rigg, Principal
MikeRigg@oallp.com
Christi Suchyna, Marketing Manager
ChristiSuchyna@oallp.com
800-860-4902
FREE Offers!
Call us for our free "Best Practices"
booklets:
Ten Mistakes To
Avoid In
Distribution Center Planning
Ten Steps to Avoid
Project Failure
& Our Brand New Booklet on
Hiring a Consultant:
Ten Lessons From the Trade
also...
OA'S Overview
Brochure
Advanced Project
Management Seminar
Contact Mike Rigg for information and
pricing on seminars for your office.
Mike Rigg, Principal
MikeRigg@oallp.com
800-860-4902
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What
is Lean Warehousing?
By: David Graham
Lean Quest is an OA alliance
partner located in Huntington Beach, CA
David’s lean knowledge came from 17 years with the North
American Parts Operations Division of Toyota, where he
applied lean concepts to the launch of a distribution
center, the company’s largest, supplying all North
American sourced parts. He worked
closely with Operations Associates on the project.
He also was responsible for
teaching just-in-time concepts to North American
distributors and dealers. His Toyota responsibilities
included creation of the Toyota Consulting Group to help
the company’s North American suppliers, distributors,
and dealers implement lean methods. While at Toyota, he
applied pull and flow at the company’s second-largest
distribution center and deployed just-in-time principles
to dealerships in two regions of the U.S. He currently
aids companies implementing lean through Lean Quest.
Lean Warehousing is a component of a Lean Supply
Chain initiative. Its origin comes from the Toyota
Production System in manufacturing. The word “Lean” was
coined in the book The Machine That Changed The World by
James Womack and Daniel Jones. Toyota applied the
manufacturing production system concepts throughout
their supply chain including warehousing. Lean
Warehousing applies the concepts of levelized work,
continuous flow processing, pull, standardized work and
quality processes based on a customer first mentality,
respect for humanity and continuous improvement to
create a competitive advantage through greater customer
responsiveness and reduced costs.
There are four major components of a Lean Warehouse
Operation: Storage, Foundations, Small Batch Processing
and Culture.
Storage
The goal of Lean Storage is improved productivity,
quality, safety, standardization and storage density.
Alignment of sales and purchasing policies, procedures,
practices with the facility stocking policy helps the
organization achieve the greatest possible improvements.
Through the application of Lean concepts of
levelization, continuous flow and pull to facility
layout and slotting along with applying Lean Storage
Techniques a facility can improve performance by as much
as 20% and improve storage density by 20% to 40%.
Foundations
Often times the processes are not in place to create a
foundation for the successful execution of a Lean
warehouse operation. The components of Foundations are
Knowing Your Business: Volumes, Performances,
Capacities, and Workforce Allocation; Worksite
Organization; Standardization: Process Flows and
Standard Work Instructions; and Continuous Improvement.
These components create an environment that is
levelized, organized and standardized, allowing for a
strong environment to apply Continuous Improvement.
Companies have experienced reduced volume variation of
50% to 80% and productivity improvements of 10% to 15%
through this phase.
Small Batch Processing
Small Batch Processing increases the velocity of the
operation resulting in reduced lead time, increased
operational efficiency and reduced equipment and
operational space requirements. Components of a Small
Batch implementation are: Standard Work: Standard Batch,
Cycle, Takt-Time; Operational Diagramming;
Synchronization of Operations, Work Load Planning, and
Visual Management. Results of this phase in the
implementation are reduced lead times by as much as 30%,
improved efficiency of up to 15% and reduced operational
space of 20% to 30%.
Culture
A Lean Warehouse Operation creates a competitive
advantage through creating an operation that drives
customer loyalty and reduced costs. Additionally a Lean
warehouse operation results in improved agility to
changing market conditions. This is somewhat paradoxical
for people, because standardization and standardized
work is often times associated to the tyranny of the
work site. However it is through employee involvement in
Continuous Improvement activities that nullify this
perception. It is the combination of standardization,
standard work and continuous improvement that allows the
warehouse to be responsive to changing business
conditions.
Converting your operation to a Lean warehouse environment is not just another project or program. It
is a different way of doing business. People are able to
work successfully in an organization because they have
internalized current ways to think about things and do
things. These paradigms become firmly rooted in an
organization and are very difficult to change. Often,
they are so pervasive that they simply are stated as
"the way we do business" without knowledge of the
underlying business drivers that have resulted in those
policies, procedures, and practices. This is actually
strength, not a weakness. Without these paradigms,
companies would be chaotic. However, times change and,
over time, companies need to change to meet the
challenges of the future business environment. Because
these paradigms are very "inflexible" and difficult to
change it is critical to have a strong strategy and
implementation plan to ensure a sustainable Lean
environment.
The four components of a Lean warehouse operation
have reaped a tremendous competitive advantage through
improved customer responsiveness reduced costs and
operational agility for companies that have identified
Lean as their supply chain and warehouse operations
strategic direction. |
