UNDERSTANDING THE BASICS
What is Continuous Improvement?
You and your team should always be making improvements. This will be part of your day-to-day routine when following 2-Second Lean. Even areas that have previously been improved heavily should still be looked at.
You and your employees should be constantly asking themselves, “How can I do this better?”. This will lead to improvements being made daily and processes being improved constantly. Even areas which have been improved massively before can still be improved!
What is a 2-Second Improvement?
A 2-Second improvement is a small change to the way you work that saves at least 2 seconds on a particular process. This can be as basic as labelling a tool so you pick up the right one each time. It can be as complex as building something that can do part of the process for you.
Making multiple improvements every day can help reduce the time and effort of your tasks. Saving 2 seconds on one task, reducing another by 5 seconds, it all adds up!
Example
In the toy factory, they are in the middle of manufacturing a toy car. The next step is to screw the wheels in place.
The screwdriver you need to use is 2m from your workstation. No-one else uses that screwdriver. You work out that it takes you around 8 seconds to walk to get the screwdriver and walk back.
You move that screwdriver onto your workstation right where it is needed. Now there is no walking involved, and grabbing the screwdriver takes less than a second!
You have saved 7 seconds on that process. Imagine if you did that process 10 times a day? That’s over a minute saved every day.
What's in this chapter?
The 8 Wastes
4 Criteria for a Lean Improvement
When making an improvement, there are 4 handy things to keep in mind.
Value vs Non-Value
We should try and remove Non-Value activity from our processes and workflow, but how do we identify it?
One Piece Flow
Working on one thing at a time rather than jumping between tasks can massively increase efficiency.
