Manufacturing

Too much waste in production?

Waste in production is rarely visible as waste. It hides as “the way we do things here”: buffers that feel reassuring, waiting time perceived as natural, rework that has become routine. The sum is capacity that disappears without anyone being able to point to where — and it can’t be removed until it is made visible.

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Low OEE — and hard to see why?

An OEE of 60% means that 40% of the planned production time doesn’t create good parts. It isn’t a grade — it is a map of where the capacity disappears. But only if the number is honest, and only if someone reacts to it.

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Changeover times eating your capacity?

Long changeover times are expensive twice: first as downtime, and then as everything they force on you — large batches, high inventory, long lead times and poor flexibility towards customers. The good news: changeover time is one of the most rewarding places to improve, because the gains can typically be harvested through organisation rather than investment.

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The same machine stops — again and again?

There is a difference between repairing a machine and removing a breakdown. The repair gets the machine going again; but if the root cause isn’t found and removed, the repair is just a pause until the same stop comes back. Recurring breakdowns aren’t a maintenance problem — they are a system problem.

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Delivery times slipping — again?

When deliveries slip, the reflex is to tighten planning: more meetings, more expediting, more frequent status updates. But planning can’t save a flow that is broken. Long and unreliable delivery times are almost always a symptom of too much work in progress, an overloaded bottleneck or unstable processes — and none of that is solved in the planning meeting.

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Quality

Quality defects and complaints that keep coming?

A complaint never costs only the case itself. It costs rework, freight, credit notes, a rush inspection of stock — and a little of the customer’s trust every time. But the most expensive thing about recurring quality defects is what they reveal: that the organisation closes cases instead of removing causes.

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Administration

Case-handling time too long?

A case that takes three weeks to process typically contains less than an hour of actual work. The rest is waiting: the case sits in inboxes, waits for information, waits for approval, waits for the colleague who is the only one who can do the next step. Long case-handling time is rarely a resource problem — it is a flow problem.

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The backlog grows no matter what you do?

When the pile grows, effort is increased: overtime, temps, weekend shifts. The pile shrinks a little — and grows again. That is the sure sign that the problem isn’t effort but system: either structurally more comes in than capacity can handle, or capacity is eaten by rework, interruptions and duplicated work that no one has made visible.

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Management

Every day is one long firefight?

Firefighting feels productive — you’re solving problems all day. But most of the day’s fires are re-runs: the same stop, the same shortage, the same customer escalation as last month. Firefighting’s real price is not the fires that are put out, but everything that never gets done: the prevention, the improvement and the planning that could have prevented next week’s fires.

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Operations resting on a few key people?

The test is simple: what happens if your most experienced employee is signed off sick for three weeks tomorrow? If the answer gives you a knot in the stomach, operations are carried by people — not by systems. It isn’t only a risk in illness and resignations; it is also a daily bottleneck, because everything has to pass through the same few heads.

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Board meetings that don’t move anything?

The board meeting is the Lean world’s most copied ritual — and the most frequently hollowed out. The board hangs there, the meeting is held, but nothing moves: status is read out, red numbers are noted, and everyone goes back to what they came from. A board meeting without consequence isn’t management; it is a daily reminder that deviations are acceptable.

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The improvements don’t last?

It is the most common pattern in improvement work: the project succeeds, the results are celebrated, the project group is disbanded — and six months later everything has slid back. The conclusion often becomes “Lean doesn’t work here”. But what failed wasn’t the method. It was the anchoring: no one owned the standard, no routine detected the slip, and management’s attention had moved to the next project.

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The strategy never reaches the floor?

The strategy seminar went well. The plan is sharp, the slides are polished, and everyone nodded. But three months later the day-to-day is exactly as before: operations run on their own logic, and the strategic goals live only in the quarterly report. The problem is rarely the strategy — it is that there is no chain translating the executive team’s goals into what happens on the floor at nine o’clock on a Tuesday.

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