Why Go Lean?

You see clearly. 

You become agile. 

 

Lean is not just about reducing costs. It's about the top line as well.

You increase your market share when you stand out from your competitors in terms of cost, quality and delivery. Lean also means improving your organization's ability to grab business opportunities that were previously out of reach. The more flexible you are, the less you suffer from chaos. In fact, a chaotic market and business environment will benefit you, while it hurts your more rigid competitors! 

 

A key part of being lean today is to apply the just-in-time principle to labor, your most critical factor of production.

That’s where Veryable comes in. With on-demand labor, you can accurately match capacity to demand on a daily basis. This provides two business benefits: first, you maintain maximum productivity at all times, and second, you can respond to business opportunities that you would have otherwise ignored–either because they were too last-minute, or too small to justify the fixed costs of hiring temporary personnel.

To explore this new frontier of lean, start by familiarizing yourself with Veryable. Sign-up here and begin posting a few simple ops (an op is an offer for a contract worker–an operator–to perform a job for a short duration or a given quantity of work). Experiment with ops that are time-based (for example 7, or 8, or 9 hours) and ops that are piecework-based. The latter is a contract to perform a certain quantity of work, irrespective of the hours actually taken. Each time an operator completes an op, you must rate that person according to quality/proficiency, safety, attitude and timeliness. What differentiates Veryable from what you’re used to is that you decide the individual operator you want to work at your facility.

Start experimenting with turning work areas into labor-flexible areas.

Ideally, you would start with an entire value stream, but you may decide to convert just the assembly area to begin with. You will need to build a pool of vetted on-demand operators (we call this “Your Labor Pool” or YLP). This is very important, and we’ve found that the businesses which have the most success with on-demand labor rapidly build their labor pool to about 3 times the maximum number of on-demand operators they may require on any given day. You can now post ops on a daily basis to match exactly what you need for that day to meet your delivery commitments. 

The last step in this process is to understand what part of your workload is stable (this is typically the lower control limit on a control chart of your daily demand) and adjust your full-time workforce to that level. This is a gradual process that under no circumstances involves layoffs, but is determined by your natural labor turnover rate. As you adjust your FTE count down, you should adjust your YLP count up, so that you maintain the assurance of reliably  flexing your total workforce as needed.

 

The Lean COE is your resource for managing your labor-flexible area according to lean principles. Access our exclusive tools and guides and start exploring!