Operational efficiency
The Spring 2014 issue of our SPARK eNewsletter is coming out soon. In the meantime, we wanted to share an excerpt from one of our upcoming articles. Our president Evan Smith writes about lean, which coincidentally is the subject of an upcoming Hypertherm webinar planned for this Friday. Here's a little of what he has to say...
"When I visit Hypertherm customers—pretty much anywhere in the world these days—the two most common goals that they share with me in the current slower economic environment are to improve the profitability of their existing operations and to find new avenues of growth. I’d probably answer in the same way for Hypertherm, as would most business leaders today. Up until about five years ago, the priority was more commonly to manage growth and increase throughput in a fast-growth world.
So what is today’s operations leader to do when the boss wants him/her all at once to maintain uninterrupted quality production, re-engineer current operations for improved cost and simultaneously develop/support new operational capabilities for growth?"
Evan goes on to say that today many manufacturers realize they can create competitive advantage by applying lean principles and standards for operational excellence across the entire workforce. The thought is that if everyone understands the fundamentals of value stream design, they can identify and fix problems. This improves operations and frees up managers. Instead of spending their time solving problems, managers can now focus on larger issues like business growth.
You can learn more about what we are doing at Hypertherm and how to put some of those principles into practice at your company by joining us at 2 p.m. for our Friday webinar. The webinar titled "Beyond lean: Advanced principles of productivity" will feature Hypertherm black belt and PhD Charlie Hackett and Kevin Duggan, a renowned speaker, author, educator, and expert on operational excellence. Register today.