VELOCITY - DEE JACOB [52]
“Now both at Oakton and at Rockville, there were many, many potential projects to choose from. If we found a process step in which there was no value being added, that was a potential project, because if it didn’t add value, it was some form of muda. So at both locations, there were hard choices to be made.
“The decision process considered a lot of factors, the first being waste elimination,” said Wayne. “But, also, every project was linked to one or more Winner corporate objectives – such as maximum utilization of resources, minimization of costs including direct labor, our commitment to safety, environmental friendliness, and our mandate from Peter Winn to achieve Six Sigma quality. Still, the chief deciding factors were the magnitude of the waste to be eliminated, the expected cost benefit, the time to accomplish the project, and the difficulty of implementing the solution. In other words, if a project can achieve a big payoff in a shorter period of time, it wins out over a project that would be hard to execute with a smaller payoff. So it’s not like we just pulled these out of a hat. A lot of hard work has gone into these choices.”
Wayne peered into the semidarkness to find Sarah Schwick, and said, “Let’s begin with the Formulation and Design unit. Sarah Schwick is going to tell us what the LSS team in Rockville came up with.”
Sarah came to the podium and her five-foot-one-inch stature almost vanished behind it. To compensate she stepped to one side and bent the gooseneck of the podium lamp down to shine on her papers. She then began reading her presentation aloud in a monotone. She had written it just as she would write a lab report, just as she had been taught as a young chemical engineer. Every sentence was in passive voice: “A variety of projects was considered by the team.” She utilized the word utilized at least once in every paragraph. And any phrasing that might have even hinted at imagery, irony, humor, or life itself had been avoided or purged. Every so often, she would look at those around the table and the clear-frame glasses she wore made her eyes seem enormous, but with tiny, dot-like pupils.
Oh, my, thought Amy. She really is a geek.
“A final matrix of LSS project candidates was made after thorough analysis,” she read. “A standardization of report formats and a reduction in report templates was identified as having the properties of a significant reduction in resource requirements. A timely manner of implementation was determined.”
Fortunately, Amy had a good idea of what Sarah was talking about from earlier discussions. She knew that Rockville, for all its rules and strict procedures, had an insane variety of different report formats, many of which were inconsistent with one another, and which could potentially lead to confusion or misinterpretation of the test results.
“Utilizing a standard report format could result in a fifteen percent decrease in the time required to generate a test report for client review, and a twenty-five to fifty percent decrease in formatting time,” Sarah read.
There were other projects. They would also seek to reduce the physical distances that employees had to travel within the F&D buildings in order to prepare materials samples for the project engineers and their clients. Currently, adding together all the distances between workstations to prepare one sample required a transit of as much as 1.2 kilometers. The LSS project would seek to reduce the distance to mere meters traveled, not kilometers, and cut the total time to produce the sample, from an average of four days, by 50 percent.
“Excellent,” said Amy.
“The savings from such an implementation of this improvement could conservatively exceed two hundred fifty thousand dollars per year,” said Sarah.
“Even more excellent!” said Amy.
Of lesser