Smoothing the Flow

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

  1. Our work flows through our system slower than we would like, our delivery lead time are extending and becoming unpredictable
  2. When defects arise they are identified late, causing significant remedial disruptions to our team’s work, and too often we have to mitigate impacts to the clients
  3. Too often work gets ‘stuck’ in queues, and waves of work grow as they travel through the system
  4. Continuous operation of our constraint is often interrupted, and when checked we frequently find it to be setting up for / working on jobs out of the sequence intended
  5. Our people are slowing down to hide any idle time, meaning there are seldom resources available when supervisors need them
  6. It seems that we are fully loaded, although we know we are not going flat out
  7. We hear phrases talking about our people like; “We are paying for their time, but they have switched their brains off”

With Smoothing the Flow, you will:

  • Calculate the release schedule to be a time-gap in advance of the constraint and completion schedules, and then schedule in based on what comes out
  • Explain to operators that we are scheduling just the constraint and that they are to ‘work when they have work and stop when they do not, be on standby’
  • Establish a culture of protecting the constraint sequence and output, by responding instantly to the arrival of new work at less loaded work centers
  • Move less loaded people to assist on the queue that is rising fastest, and then just as quickly pull them out again once the queue is under control
  • Halve and halve again the incidence of defects disrupting the flow. Give the resources frequent visual feedback of the defects produced.

With Smoothing the Flow, you will ensure that any side effects of the change will be worth it!

While implementing Smoothing the Flow, you will address the following common concerns people have. For example:

  • Despite releasing schedules frequently, we find schedulers are still ‘batching’ the production of those release schedules, and issuing more than one at a time
  • Resource allocation decision-making tends to be based on a laggy snapshot of where the current queues are, leading to over-resourcing and under-resourcing decisions

 

  • Many non-constraint operators believe that they are only adding value when they are busy, they do not realise that being busy can actually be decreasing value

Let’s get started!