 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
CONSULTANCY... Outsourcing & supplier management |
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
The removal of wasted time throughout the business process. A high proportion of a company’s costs accrue with time, for example, rents and space occupancy costs, payroll, bank charges, loan servicing, outstanding debts, depreciation. Yet few costing systems monitor the detail of dwell time in processes. James Womack remarked: ‘The common snail travels at Mach. 0.0000094 (or 0.007 miles per hour). This is more than ten times the average velocity of a part flowing through a typical fighter aircraft production system.’ Even deadlier than wasting the time you pay for, is wasting the time your customer pays for. When Chairman of Sony, Akio Morita explained his job as ‘to make our products obsolete before the competition do’ – regarding time as a profit opportunity rather than a penalty. Yet how much product development time is actually spent in draft plans sitting on a hard disk awaiting someone’s approval? Supermarkets are only too well aware of the potential for lost sales while goods sit out on the unloading bay. In the average factory, only 5 to 10% of material dwell time actually adds value to the material. Throughout a whole supply chain the figure is a depressing 0.05 to 0.50%. Time spent in the supply chain is either shown as inventory, or as delay in serving the customer, or both. Time compression is not about making people work faster or cutting corners at the expense of quality – it is about making full profitable use of our most perishable resource – time. It is about improving cash flow while focussing on serving the customer promptly. Burman Associates have rich experience of analytical methods and simple disciplines which launch clients into self perpetuating practices of using time to compete effectively. Every business can benefit from a time compression initiative and typically by a very large factor.
|
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Copyright © European Logistics Consortium Limited 2001 (all rights reserved) Burman Associates is a member of the European Logistics Consortium Ltd. |
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||||||||||
