Building Better Businesses

ILS will carefully review your operations to identify waste that can be eliminated and systemic improvements that will reduce costs and enhance value delivery. We engage your people to create a future state vision that results in major performance gains and sets the stage for establishing lean value streams, management systems and culture.

This assessment goes beyond typical capacity modeling or finding excess staffing following standard costing formulas. We apply analytic techniques that focus on your key processes, identify better ways to do the work and make sure your people have the skills they need to work to a highly productive and satisfying level of engagement.

Customers find our analysis penetrating and our ideas creative, practical and effective.

Some Examples Include:

Order picking and packing process: Our assessment found operators doing excess paperwork and pushing carts on random and convoluted patterns through the aisles of a warehouse to pick parts. Most pieces were handled multiple times to get them packed properly and the legacy IT system was cumbersome and making data collection a chore. We identified projects to establish efficient zone-picking operations where operators use inexpensive electric tuggers and follow short and simple routes designed around high pick density and direct pick-to-box. Other projects would streamline the IT interface for quick and simple data collection. After completing these projects, productivity (production lines per hour) increased by 75%.

Packaging operations: Our assessment identified opportunities to realize a 20% improvement in labor efficiency for a 200 person packaging operation involving a high number of SKUs and short production runs. Projects included a system to define part families, design balanced lines with improved part presentation and minimize motion waste for all major product families. Others established improved line management practices and developed improved cell structures for packing low volume SKUs.

Plastics manufacturing: Our assessment identified opportunities to dramatically reduce batch sizes by partitioning the facility into work cells and dedicating equipment to specific parts families. This with focused rapid changeover standardized work and milk run logistics support, boosted efficiencies significantly.

Assessments typically involve a 3-5 day visit to your facility. We spend this time observing your operations and interacting with your leaders and front line personnel. The assessment defines a future state vision for the operation, identifies cost saving and performance gains and establishes a road map for achieving this vision in a short time frame. It insures that your lean transformation activity will yield very meaningful results.

Assessments identify a set of opportunities to pursue through projects. Each will have an estimate of the potential savings.