Organizational effectiveness can be influenced by many things from the quality of staff to having the right tools but surprising efficiency gains can be obtained through simply having an effective layout within your business premises.
One of the first steps when implementing lean is optimizing the work area this is often kicked off by a 5s implementation. 5s is a system that applies rigour to your workplace through assessing your work area setting tools and equipment that are needed in order and removing those deemed unnecessary.
5s only goes so far and will have minimal impact if a businesses layout is fundamentally flawed. This is primarily down to the time your staff will spend moving around your organization to get their job done - for example if your material stores is at the opposite end of the building from where it's consumed on the production line then every time material is needed it will require to take that long journey adding journey time to the process - multiply this for all your business activity and you can see how getting layouts wrong can cost you.
So along with carrying out 5s your business should construct spaghetti diagrams to help analyze movement in your organization. Spaghetti diagrams are simple layout diagrams which use lines to track movement throughout the area - you can then assess these to review how efficient your layout is and look for weaknesses that may result either in bottlenecks or excess movement resulting in process delays and cost.
Before moving into other areas of lean or business improvement make sure you optimize your work environment - carry out a 5s to get things clean and organized and review your layout to minimize movement and get things placed where they need to be.
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