Lean Management. The Company agrees to minimize the ratio of non-bargaining unit employees at the facilities covered by the Agreement, including full-time or full-time equivalent contractors of any sort performing services historically performed by the Company’s non-bargaining unit employees and other employees of the Company who work at other locations but whose work is associated with, related to or supports the activities at the facilities (Non-Bargaining Unit employees), to bargaining unit Employees and shall take all reasonable actions (including transferring responsibilities and duties to bargaining unit Employees) with the objective of achieving a ratio of no more than one (1) Non-Bargaining Unit employee for each five (5) bargaining unit Employees, with an absolute commitment to a ratio of no more than one (1) Non-Bargaining Unit employee for each four (4) bargaining unit Employees.
Lean Management. Most of the Lean processes focus on manufacturing businesses, but the theory can be applied to service businesses like Linjebygg Offshore as well, and the effectiveness can be just as effective as in manufacturing. This will be the warehouse manager’s responsibility to carry out in the warehouse department. According to Xxxxxx (2010) there are some key success factors in reducing costs in services: ● Involve the people who do the work. Make them understand their work process in terms of value-added and no-value-added activities. Before you can teach them this you should introduce them to the sources of wastes so they can be able to recognize wastes in their own work processes. ● Focus on identifying and eliminating Non-value-adding work people do. Make the involved employees describe the activities their job includes and decide which of these activities are value adding or not. ● Look for and formalize best practices and turn them into repeatable processes. In workplaces where there are many stations, employees or locations and practices can develop in different directions. Same process, but different quality of performance. Do a research and identify the best practice and pass this on to the other. ● Look for opportunities for cost reduction in the infrastructure. It is easy to get the main focus on the front end like the service of the products the customer purchase. It can then be difficult to give focus to the infrastructure that is necessary to be able to deliver the particular service. It is important to assess the infrastructure from time to time. ● Recognize interfaces with technology. It’s more difficult to recognize where in the process waste and high cost builds up in service processes. An aspect none of the previous theories has discussed is the planning strategy. We want to present the positive and negative effects of two different strategies and use our improvement suggestions to support the chosen planning strategy.
Lean Management. Where are we now? Today the warehouse can clearly be improved in relation to the management. We observed that the warehouse employees manage their days as they want and there are no or little participation from the warehouse manager. Routines and work habits are carried out without focusing on what is most time and cost efficient. Where do we want to be? The goal in this area is to involve management more and structure activities and methods to be as time and cost efficient as possible. The warehouse manager should be more visible in the warehouse and plan and structure the work based on incoming and outgoing orders. Higher time efficiency could be achieved by increasing the time spent on value adding activities and reducing time used on non value adding activities. Through working smarter and be ahead of time, the company can be more cost efficient. This will save the extra expenses of being late, like higher transportation fares and overtime on the warehouse employees needed to finish orders on time. How to get there? We have suggestions, both regarding leadership/management and how to structure specific activities; “Monday morning meeting”, priority plan, RFID, plastic pallets, warehouse layout etc. (ref. Chapter 7). Lean management is the main tool in the process of improving these areas. Potential in money When we focus on lean management, savings can be achieved through spending as much as possible of the warehouse employees’ time on value adding activities. Accurate calculations of these savings are difficult to estimate. In the calculation of savings, we will look at the average percent of productivity. We will focus on the value adding activities in the warehouse. The goal of this calculation is to increase the productivity of the value adding activities and decrease the non value adding activities.
