Reduce Work-In-Progress

You are in the right place if an increase in output would help, but you need to control costs

  1. Wasteful switching costs due to interruptions are too high
  2. Sometimes, an operational job seems to ‘go on and on…’ and we have no idea how far progressed are any of the deliverable jobs, within that operational job
  3. Operations has waves of inventory moving through it that are many multiples of a typical deliverable job
  4. We are forced to hedge against unpredictable internal lead times by offering longer external lead times
  5. Operators often find that managers set job priorities only to come back and change them a few days later
  6. Everyone is always busy, and team leaders are asking for more resource
  7. Job investment, due to the use of less-than-ideal resources, increases

With Reduce Work-In-Progress, you will:

  • Include deliverable quantities when passing on demand information
  • Cut the ‘transfer batch’ in half, and then in half again
  • For each job, list the expected outputs and the intermediate states, and break the work into chunks based on these expected discrete execution handovers
  • Move the deliverable handover points to the completion of the earliest chunk where the deliverable becomes usable
  • Review and withdraw jobs from operations that have been started but are not in the near-term window of jobs
  • Instruct supervisors to reject any attempt to push work in, and establish the expectation that only jobs that have been approved for release, using the formal release process, are to be processed

With Reduce Work-In-Progress, you will ensure that any side effects of the change will be worth it!

While implementing Reduce Work-In-Progress, you will address the following common concerns people have. For example:

  • As we ‘cut the batches,’ the switching costs of some processes rises
  • As work-in-progress falls, there will be a burning desire to release a surge of work, for fear that there is not enough work or due to due-date pressure
  • We are often tempted to release more work, or inflate our run quantities, to maintain efficient use of resource

Let’s get started!