ImagesMagUK_August_20

www.images-magazine.com 80 images AUGUST 2020 BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT 7. Replacing the jerry can lid 8. Replacing the funnel 9. Replacing the spray bottle lid 10. Mopping up where we spilled some degreaser as the jerry can tends to ‘glug’ as it is tipped up Each step uses up valuable time, as well as some wasted inventory in respect of the spilled degreaser and the blue roll required to mop it up. When we timed the activity, we found that filling the spray bottle took four minutes. This is a daily task yet it adds no value to our business. That’s 20 minutes a week, or one hour and 20 minutes a month. The time soon starts to add up. You may think this is mildly pedantic, but just consider for a moment – our shops are full of little day-to-day jobs, which take time but add no value to the bottom line on our invoices. Searching for a ruler, tightening clamps on a press, spotting out screens... The list is endless. Imagine you find 10 little jobs like our trigger bottle, and you used the PDCA cycle to reduce the time taken for each by 70%. All of a sudden, you’re looking at saving 30 minutes a day, or 10 hours per month, per person. That’s when the time really starts to add up! Will Pearson concludes his examination of how to implement Toyota’s lean culture in your print shop with a simple illustration of how he applied the PDCA cycle in his own business them. Here’s an example from my shop of a simple PDCA cycle that is going on within our screen reclaiming process. Like many other screen print shops, we clean and reclaim screens by hand, and we use a degreaser on a brush as the final part of the process. We’ve found using a spray bottle to be the best way to apply it to a screen: I know others will have their own preferences, but this is what works for us. The degreaser comes to us in five-litre jerry cans, which we then decant as required into our trigger bottle using a funnel. This all seems straightforward enough, but let’s dive in and find some problems with it, and let’s keep in mind the waste it produces currently. Now is the time to buy a stop-clock if you don’t have one in your shop already! The steps to refilling the spray bottle are as follows: 1. Removing the spray bottle lid 2. Fetching the five-litre jerry can 3. Removing its lid 4. Fetching the funnel 5. Positioning the funnel in the spray bottle 6. Tipping up the jerry can to pour in the degreaser I n the previous article I introduced Toyota’s PDCA (Plan Do Check Act) cycle and explained how it fits when introducing lean culture to your own print shop. Now, I want to provide some insight into why so much of lean culture is focused on developing the habit of trying to find a problem where there doesn’t really appear to be one. Seven deadly wastes The first question that begs to be answered is: why do this? The answer is simple: as you’ll recall, in the aftermath of World War II Toyota decided that its best chance of survival was to drive waste from its operation. There are seven deadly wastes, as defined by Toyota: ■ Inventory ■ Waiting time ■ Defects ■ Over-production ■ Transportation ■ Over-processing ■ Motion When you go looking for problems, you are really keeping in mind these seven types of waste, and trying to eradicate ‘Chaos theory’ - Part 2 As well as being time-consuming, the original set-up led to spilled degreaser and further waste in terms of the rags and time required to mop up the spills Pouring degreaser from the 5-litre jerry can into the spray bottle: the process took four minutes