Lean journal #4
The Logo Game activity was fun and educational. I felt that the 50 points incentive made it a little bit stressful. I believe that the activity helps me to understand how to apply lean system strategy to maximize the value added in each process of the activity and how to eliminate waste. The aim was to focus on strategy implementation in the three rounds and improve the process of production and satisfy our customers. It is “achieving an optimal work flow while minimizing waste and being flexible and able to change”.
Our team tried to apply different strategies in the three rounds. Our first round looked like we were just focusing on production. We didn’t focus on the priority orders and we were building logo as fast as possible. As a result a lot of work in progress inventory piled up and waste was accumulated. In the end, we had no finished products to give our customer. There was also a lack of communication across departments which led to our failures. We had lots of fixed costs that didn’t add value to the process which led us to lose lots of money. When I asses our first round, almost all the seven type of Muda occurred in our production process. Our team saw improvement on our second and third rounds. We discussed as a team what kind of strategy to implement and tried to look where our bottlenecks were and decided what we could do to improve ourselves. During round 2, we reduced our fixed costs by eliminating two tables and firing an employee and that helped us with an increase in revenue. This time we had less WIP inventories compared to the first one. But still we had lot of late deliveries. The third round we got another oven and speed up our production and saw an increase in revenue again. Overall we did a great job and