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Ten steps on the road to efficient by Seth Godin
A daily blog by Seth Godin
If you have a repeated production process, the method for improving it is almost always the same, regardless of what you and your team produce:
1. Measure before you change
You can’t improve what you haven’t observed. Go to the floor, watch the actual work, time it, and document what’s really happening — not what you assume is happening. Taylor called this time study. operations research calls it data collection. Either way, you start by looking.
2. Map the flow
Trace the path of materials and information from start to finish. Where does work queue up? Where does it sit idle? Where does it move backward? A simple process flow diagram reveals bottlenecks you’d never see otherwise.
3. Identify the constraint
Your system can only move as fast as its slowest step. Find it. Everything else is secondary until you address that bottleneck. (At a buffet, when you double the number of stations of the slowest item, the entire line runs faster.)
4. Separate value from waste
For every step, ask: does this transform the product in a way the customer would pay for…
