by The HLH Team
Reducing inventory waste has a direct correlation on patient wellbeing; the less time doctors and nurses are searching supply rooms, the more time they can spend with patients. In healthcare, fighting inventory waste is as much about organization as it is about how much inventory you have.
The Store Room:
Your clinic’s business model will determine the type, volume, and range of medicines and supplies you need to carry. A speciality clinic will need to be stocked deeper in its given field, while an urgent care clinic needs the broadest range to address the massive variety of cases.
Do not neglect store-room organization. Clutter happens fast, leading to increased time wasted looking while patients are left waiting, and potentially resulting in a lack of space when urgent supplies arrive.
Have a Tracking System:
What kind of inventory management software are you using? Do its required processes sync naturally with your clinic’s operations, or do your staff have to go out of their way to update it?
If you’re not using a third party to track inventory, how are you doing it? While documenting every tongue depressor is a time waste, losing high-value equipment can add up to massive wasted dollars very quickly.
5S is a pillar of Lean thinking with a disciplined approach to storing and maintaining materials and would adapt well to clinics.
Perishables:
Some inventory combines the unsettling mix of expiring rapidly and being costly. Waste reduction starts with being aware of how the medicines are being used and the context in which people are using them.
If the newest bottles go in front, the ones in the back will expire while those in front are being used, leaving you with the costly waste of throwing away expired meds. Even worse is if, in the clinic’s hustle and bustle, someone grabs a bottle for a patient that is expired.
A Lean approach would be to colour-code labels so that, at a glance, hurried nurses and doctors can grab the right medicine, rather than having to read the fine print on a dozen bottles to find the best one to use.
Office Waste:
How many pre-printed intake forms do you keep at the front desk? It may not sound like a serious waste, but if you have 500 forms at a hard cost of about $0.10 each to print, it becomes an investment. Multiply that with how many types of forms you have and it becomes potential waste.
Printing takes nominal time. While printing ahead of time is usually the work of well-meaning front-end staff, here are the downsides:
- You could change, or be compelled to change, the data fields required
- They could get lost or damaged
- They take up valuable real estate at the front desk.
Printing is low-hanging fruit for Just-in-Time Thinking (which stresses creating inventory only when orders warrant it). Print a couple days worth of forms at a time and use the example as a training tool to show your staff how easy it can be to fight waste if we just look for it.
by The HLH Team
Your jobs use massive amounts of Inventory, and all of it has to be sourced, delivered, and managed, so it’s available when the right person needs it. However, having excessive Inventory means absorbing unnecessary shrinkage costs and, to add insult to injury, paying more to move excess inventory off-site, either to another site or a landfill.
Take Time to Plan:
It starts with planning. Don’t assume how much product you’ll need based on broad strokes; dig into the details. The extra hour it takes could mean the difference between having excess materials sitting on site at completion or making an excessive number of trips to buy more during the build.
Staging Site Nightmares:
Take the time to properly manage your staging sites by running through the worst-case scenarios and preparing for them. Is your lumber sitting on or around dirt that could quickly turn to mud, degrading the bottom layers? If so, find a dry space where your lumber is safe from water damage.
If you don’t have access to an enclosed area, spend the money for proper fencing. External theft is a massive loss of inventory and is easy to avoid. For more extensive insurance, install a camera in a highly visible spot to deter would-be fence climbers. If you’re not able to hook it up to make it work, don’t worry: it just needs to look like it works.
Building Supply:
We all want to be confident in our businesses, but when confidence leads to idealism, over-inventory can be one of the side-effects.
Here’s a scenario: times are good, orders are piling up, and you could save 20% on materials by ordering a huge batch of pre-made trusses to service these and future orders, should the pattern continue. Instead, the orders dwindle, and the trusses sit. You’re now left either paying to store them inside, or watching the elements wear them down. That’s where idealism leaves a bitter taste.
You’ll pay a little more for the pull-driven system, only ordering the materials when orders come in, but that extra is well worth it if the orders stop and you’re prepared.
Document Your Inventory:
This will feel like a chore, and many will shrug it off in favour of just getting it done, but documenting your Inventory can ensure serious Waste reduction.
Whether it’s tools per truck or yards of sand on a site, make it company policy to write down where everything is. When a hammer is lent to another crew and 10 yards of sand are laid down, make a note of it. Here’s why:
- Theft: things will get stolen, but this will tell you what and from where, so you can take precautions next time.
- Borrowing: If one crew needs to borrow another crew’s equipment, they’ll be able to see if they can spare it, or if they’ll need it tomorrow. It will allow you to move tools, materials, and equipment back and forth between crews and sites without having to buy excess.
- Placement: Knowing what is in whose truck will help in scheduling tasks proactively.
by The HLH Team
Processes are the neural pathways of the brain that is your business. From how you call Clients to counting money, we engage dozens of processes a day… and we never think about them. How many processes happen in your business that you don’t understand or are even aware of? They drive your company and you don’t have the keys.
Process Improvement is about making small, sustained changes to daily details. But that’s a non-starter if we can’t visualize the details.
Here’s how to take control of your processes and start saving some money:
Processes make you Flexible:
How many people in your company manage/ control processes that you don’t fully know? For most companies, it’s a fair number. Now what happens if that person has an accident, goes on maternity leave, or simply quits?
Work with your staff to document their processes. Start with simple, daily processes and go deeper from there. The goal: that if something happens to them, someone else can learn the processes within 1 day. If the process only exist in someone’s head, you’re starting from scratch.
Keep your Processes Efficient:
We think of processes as purely functional, but the truth is that they’re highly personal. People develop and mould them to fit their preferences, even if that’s not most efficient.
It’s your company. You want to empower the people in your company, but you also need to ensure that the processes they’re developing are not:
- So personally crafted that they take more time than they should
- Creating silos and inhibiting interdepartmental cooperation
- So mysterious that someone else can’t learn them within a day
How to Document:
First off, forget Value Mapping. This isn’t about creating vast spreadsheets of complex supply chains. Get a bunch of multi-coloured sticky notes, a fistful of sharpies, and a room that will stay empty for a few days.
Make it collaborative: get all the involved stakeholders into the room with you. Have coffee and fruit and make it lighthearted. They may be thinking that you’re wanting to document what they do in preparation for firing them: address that paranoia head on. It’s about efficiency.
Start simple. Aim to document 3 common, fairly simple tasks in a couple hours (after that no one is thinking straight). Everyone picks a colour of sticky note to represent them. Start with the big steps involved in process and stick them up as headers. Below them you can get into the details. Every step, no matter how small, gets a sticky note of the colour of the person doing it. If there’s 2 people in a step, make 2 steps.
Get as granular as you can and fill up the board. If you do it right, you’ll be amazed at how many steps are involved in the simplest process. Assemble them all before saying anything. Then turn to your people and ask them: “so how can we simplify this?” Then shut up, stand back, listen and let the magic happen.
Integrate into Process Improvement:
An exercise like this should be monthly at most. Improving the bottom line is about making incremental changes that are sustainable over the long term. Only have another session once you’re confident that the lessons of the first have become habit.
Keep the stickies up. This is an organic process, and stakeholders can go in at will to look, learn, and hopefully make even leaner. After about a week, document the strategies into a shared spreadsheet, with accountable names attached to every task. Better yet, put them on a central board in the middle of the office.
I’d go about a month between sessions. If you rush, you’ll fail; that’s the essence of Process Improvement. It might take a year or more to document your business’s most basic processes, but the change in morale, the bottom line, and your piece of mind will be real.
by The HLH Team
Unlike manufacturing, wherein materials are assembled at home base, construction happens remotely, where literally tonnes of materials are being moved around each day.
Bullets don’t win wars, but logistics do. The same rules apply with construction. If the proper materials aren’t in the right place at the right time, downtime accumulates quickly.
Lean Thinking:
Building a house involves dozens of stakeholder groups all contributing to the whole, while prioritizing their own individual interests. Their logistics are largely their own, because they’re not motivated to collaborate. Lean thinking seeks to pivot the focus toward the value of the project as a whole, rather than its individual pieces. When partners collaborate with more than lip-service, value goes up, cost and frustration go down, and everyone benefits.
If the plumber needs to run to the store, maybe the electrician needs something. Rather than making two separate trips, the two could be tackled at once, saving time. With our current system, a process like this may feel like science fiction. However, if you change the conversation so the “task list” becomes a series of commitments that everyone is engaged with, in order to bring more value to the product, it’s not far off.
Staging Area:
This sounds self-explanatory, and it largely is, but it can also fall through the cracks when you’re rushing through setup time, trying to get started.
Take the time to map your jobsite, indicating where to stage your equipment, trucks, and materials. Mark your traffic flows and walkways. Ensure your delivery drivers have a reliably open path to the stage to avoid honking, panic, and overall chaos.
Distance Trumps Discounts:
Where are you buying your materials? Often, far away suppliers will tantalize you with discounts, but do your logistical math. If the fuel costs check out, and you’re not having to build up excessive inventory levels (more on that later), it may pay off for your initial shipments.
During the job, however, don’t send your foreman driving 40 km for fill-ins. You’ll always need last-minute deliveries, but there will always be local businesses to supply you. The 20% extra is well worth the cost of saving fuel and keeping a senior person at the jobsite for hours at a time, rather than on the road.
Check the Address:
This is the biggest “facepalm” Waste of them all. It’s also inexcusable in our technological age, and low-hanging fruit for improving Transportation Waste.
You should have zero tolerance for wrong address deliver. Bad handwriting or false inputting should never be an excuse. Your drivers should always confirm the address with someone on-site and take the extra 20 seconds to use Google Maps.
Keep Accurate Logs:
Many stakeholders in any construction project hate paperwork, but if you let your mileage logs fall behind, you’re sending your trucks out blind. It’s a sloppy habit that can easily snowball into massive Waste.
It may not catch up to you for a while, but it will hurt when it does. Roadside breakdowns or failed roadside inspections are profit killers. Even worse is finding yourself replacing critical and expensive equipment pieces because routine maintenance fell behind (due to improper logging). As painful as they may feel at the time, keep up to date with logs and prevent breakdown further along the line.
by The HLH Team
It’s easy to confuse “Transportation Waste with “Motion” Waste. The former is the unnecessary movement of materials, while the latter is the unnecessary movement of people. Manufacturing is full of both.
General:
Transportation Waste happens at every point in the supply chain, from raw material delivery to final assembly. To identify these Wastes, follow that chain and make note of the usual suspects along the way.
Here’s what you’ll find: Waste happens everywhere, but the instances happen less the earlier you are in your supply chain, as they are more costly per instance. However, while it’s more glaringly obvious with half-empty semis, half-full carts can be just as expensive due to increased frequency.
Waste Spin-Offs:
No Waste is an island. Besides wasting time, fuel, and giving you a stress headache, excessive transport can also lead to:
- Over-Inventory: things get stacked up in temporary places only to be sorted through later
- Defects: moving materials leads to dirt, damage, or loss.
- Waiting: the more you shuffle things around, the less likely they’ll be in their designated spot when needed, resulting in waiting.
Start with your Supply Chain:
This begins with thinking of where to set up shop, but continues throughout the life of your business. How close are you to your vendors? If it’s excessive, and you’re back and forth often, is it worth paying little more upfront for closer suppliers? Don’t assume: do the math.
Half-full trucks are a glaring Waste. Find partners to share, even if that’s with a competitor (only if your vendors ensure confidentiality, of course).
Don’t fear the milk run. We assume that direct routes are more efficient and they often aren’t. When that trailer full of raw materials lands at your dock, is it going to gum up your processes to store it all?
How’s your Storage?:
Transportation Waste tends to be more obvious in receiving rather than production.
You’re getting regular deliveries. Are the trucks being unloaded into temporary storage that you’ll need to move again later, or are they going directly from first storage point to production? Plan for the latter, unless a small storage area at point of production is necessary (see below).
How full are your carts? Are your forklift operators driving with half-loads when they could be full? Always opt to maximize your transport efficiency between processes, especially if it’s a longer distance. There’s a caveat though: sometimes loading the last third of that cart involves waiting or motion waste that kills the efficiency.
Keep your lanes clear. If you have to weave around piles of temporary storage and random clutter, you’re wasting resources in so many ways. Paint lines for runways to keep clear between processes, if you have to.
Your Production Area:
Whether you’re making cars or crayons, your job is to assemble raw materials into a finished product in the most efficient way possible. When a worker frequently needs raw material, anything further than an arm’s length away is wasteful.
Are all materials close-at-hand when needed? If not, what’s the process in getting them from storage to the production area? If you’re bringing raw material over in tiny batches often, ask yourself if it would be beneficial to establish a smaller storage area at the point of production.
This tactic is closely tied to Motion Waste. Once you bring your raw materials closer, you can zero-in on the steps and movements your workers need to take.
