Quotes About Productivity

A plant in which everyone is working all the time is very inefficient.

All those calls and meetings were fire fighting. I remind myself. No fires, no fighting. Now, everything is running smoothly— almost too smoothly.

Henry Ford achieved the highest throughput per worker of any car manufacturing company of his time.

Alex, you cannot understand the meaning of productivity unless you know what the goal is. Until then, you're just playing a lot of games with numbers and words." "Okay, then it's market share," I tell him. "That's the goal." "Is it?" he asks. He steps into the plane. "Hey! Can't you tell me?" I call to him. "Think about it, Alex. You can find the answer with your own mind," he says.

En todos lados, el mejoramiento ha sido interpretado como sinónimo de ahorro en costos. La gente se concentra en reducir el gasto de operación como si fuera el indicador mas importante.

And he's saying, "Alex, I have come to the conclusion that productivity is the act of bringing a company closer to its goal. Every action that brings a company closer to its goal is productive. Every action that does not bring a company closer to its goal is not productive.

Was your plant able to ship even one more product per day as a result of what happened in the department where you installed the robots?

Check your numbers if you'd like," says Jonah. "But if your inventories haven't gone down . . . and your employee expense was not reduced . . . and if your company isn't selling more products—which obviously it can't, if you're not shipping more of them—then you can't tell me these robots increased your plant's productivity.

Flow means that inventories in the operation are moving. When inventory is not moving, inventory accumulates. Accumulation of inventory takes up space. Therefore, an intuitive way to achieve better flow is to limit the space allowed for inventory to accumulate. To achieve better flow, Ford limited the space allotted for work-in-process between each two work centers.

The daring nature of Ford's method is revealed when one realizes that a direct consequence of limiting the space is that when the allotted space is full, the workers feeding it must stop producing. Therefore, in order to achieve flow, Ford had to abolish local efficiencies. In other words, flow lines are flying in the face of conventional wisdom; the convention that, to be effective, every worker and every work center have to be busy 100% of the time.

that's a third assumption that's wrong," I say. "We've assumed that utilization and activation are the same. Activating a resource and utilizing a resource are not synonymous.

When you are productive you are accomplishing something in terms of your goal

productividad es el acto de acercar a la empresa a su meta. Las acciones que acercan a una compañía a su meta son productivas. Las acciones que no acercan a la compañía a su meta no son productivas.

bringing a company closer to its goal. Every action that brings a company closer to its goal is productive. Every action that

Producing a quality product efficiently: that must be the goal. It sure sounds good. "Quality and efficiency." Those are two nice words. Kind of like "Mom and apple pie.

the goal is to make money, then (putting it in terms Jonah might have used), an action that moves us toward making money is productive. And an action that takes away from making money is non-productive.

All this is, if I understand it correctly, is a different way of doing the accounting. All employee time—whether it's direct or indirect, idle time or operating time, or whatever—is operational expense, according to Jonah. You're still accounting for it. It's just that his way is simpler, and you don't have to play as many games.

La meta sigue siendo la misma, pero podemos expresarla de otra forma, y que signifique lo mismo que esas dos palabras: "ganar dinero". -Bien

utilizing" a resource means making use of the resource in a way that moves the system toward the goal. "Activating" a resource is like pressing the ON switch of a machine; it runs whether or not there is any benefit to be derived from the work it's doing. So, really, activating a non-bottleneck to its maximum is an act of maximum stupidity.

Increase throughput while simultaneously reducing both inventory and operating expense.

What you're saying is that making an employee work and profiting from that work are two different things.

The goal of a manufacturing organization is to make money," I say to him. "And everything else we do is a means to achieve the goal." But Jonah doesn't laugh at me. "Very good, Alex. Very good," he says quietly.

First, make sure the bottlenecks' time is not wasted," he says. "How is the time of a bottleneck wasted? One way is for it to be sitting idle during a lunch break. Another is for it to be processing parts which are already defective—or which will become defective through a careless worker or poor process control. A third way to waste a bottleneck's time is to make it work on parts you don't need.

That's how Jonah knew. He was using the measurements in the crude form of simple questions to see if his hunch about the robots was correct: did we sell any more products (i.e., did our throughput go up?); did we lay off anybody (did our operational expense go down?); and the last, exactly what he said: did our inventories go down?