Anecdotal Efficiencies

By Kevin

DoD and the military services are trying to implement a "new" program/institutional structure to reduce waste:

Defense Department managers say past Lean Six Sigma projects have revealed that between 57 percent and 90 percent of the time it takes to accomplish a given process is time wasted — that is, time not spent on something a customer is actually waiting on. It is time spent waiting for a problem to be solved, a technical glitch to be fixed, for a tool, parts or information to arrive, or duplicative work to be completed.

-- June 7, 2005 12:35 PM |

Comments

Jonathan Goff wrote:

Kevin,

Sadly enough, from my previous experience as a Manufacturing engineer, these numbers are more or less par for the course. If anything, I think they may be optimistic. Most big manufacturing companies are about that bad. "Non-value-added time" usually takes up the majority of any process--unless the managers actually know what they're doing that is.

You'd be truly disappointed to realize how rare it is to actually have managers who know how to efficiently run a production system.

~Jon

-- June 7, 2005 5:58 PM ∞

Talbot wrote:

...absolutely nothing new here, despite the author's assertions to the contrary.

Just another DOD management fad that will fall by the wayside.... like TQM and zero-defects.

The military is the classic 'bureaucracy' ... with a rigid centralized hierarchy that is fundamentally immune to the decentralized management system 'required' for this type of process improvement.

Such 'change' requires generals & admirals to effectively remove their 'stars' from their uniforms -- ain't gonna happen.

-- June 8, 2005 2:29 PM ∞

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