OVERVIEW

The buck may stop with the CEO, but waste elimination ends up on the desk of the implementer. No matter how successful the company, waste is still abundant, and the goal of all employees needs to be to eliminate this waste. Just like all important initiatives, implementing the solution can prove very challenging, but it must be accomplished. The three strategic focus areas for Waste Elimination are:

1. Quality at the Source

2. Continuous Improvement

3. Execution

These three areas will be discussed in this chapter.

QUALITY AT THE SOURCE

Truism: There is a significant difference between an operational error and a customer defect.

Initiatives are often doomed before they start because we fail to build quality into our products, services, and processes. The trick is to define quality up front and not allow design or operational errors to pass down the line, ultimately turning into customer defects.

A key Lean concept is that an error is very different from a defect. Errors happen because people and machines are involved. The exciting news is that errors do not have to turn into a customer defect. This is the foundation of the quality at the source concept. The challenge is to build error-proof processes into our procedures and manufacturing systems. Error proofing (or mistake proofing) allows us to catch errors before they turn into defects. To support this concept, Figure 19.1 describes the difference between an error and a defect.