Less Waste
The article Manage Your Waste Stream provides an example of how simply reducing waste in a cookie business provides substantially larger profits. This same process can be applied to other businesses as well.More Profit
As another example, Timber City Lumber Company (not a real company) shows how to reduce waste in its industry to increase profit. Timber City buys logs from local loggers, cleans them up, and then cuts them into lumber that it sells. The profit margins in the lumber industry are very small so reducing waste can make a major difference.The company has two major waste streams, bark and sawdust. The logs purchased as the raw material have bark on them that has to be removed in order to process (saw) the logs into lumber. The cutting process that turns the logs into lumber generates the second waste stream, sawdust. Originally, both waste streams had to be disposed of. The company paid to have them removed. Those removal charges increased costs and reduced profits. Then they figured out that they could sort the bark chips by size and sell it. That reduced the disposal costs, but also increased sales so profits went up. Then they learned that they could compress the sawdust and shape it into artificial fireplace logs and sell those. This again reduced disposal costs and increased sales and profits.
Cut Waste In Your Company
Your company has waste. You want to find out how to reduce or eliminate that waste. That will increase your profits. So how do you find what your waste streams are? More importantly, how do you find ways to reduce or eliminate them? You can hire consultants, of course, but the best way is to ask your employees. They are the people closest to the process. They are the ones dealing with the daily frustrations of wanting to improve it. So ask them.This excerpt from Leslie Kossoff’s article What Managers Need to Know About Quality further illustrates the point that you need to eliminate waste in any form.
There is too much waste in organizations. Whether in time, resources, talent, opportunity or any other contribution possible by people or equipment, you will find waste.
Think about the time you spend in meetings about topics over which you have no authority and little input, reading waste of time emails or solving problems that shouldn't have occurred in the first place.
And if you're spending time dealing with those things, your employees are facing the same frustrations. Add to that the time that equipment and other non-human resources are not being utilized to their full capacity. Or the time you and your employees spend rolling your eyes, blowing off steam and complaining to others - most often because you knew the solution before the problems occurred.
It's all waste.
