+ Capacity“Serve more” pillar

Serve more customers, without heavy investment

The left-hand pillar rests on capacity. Before buying a machine, hiring or building, there is almost always hidden capacity in the flow: waiting, changeovers, breakdowns, queues.

In the house

Each part of the drawing leads to its own page.

What the literature says

The reference works this part of the house rests on.

Bicheno, J., & Holweg, M. (2016). The lean toolbox: A handbook for lean transformation (5th ed.). PICSIE Books.

Check : WorldCat

The Lean Toolbox is one of the reference handbooks of Lean in the English-speaking world. John Bicheno, Emeritus Professor at the University of Buckingham, and Matthias Holweg, Professor at Oxford’s Saïd Business School, bring together the tools and, above all, the principles that connect them: flow, demand, variability, capacity, waste.

Their message on capacity is counter-intuitive: a resource loaded to 100% is not efficient, it is congested. As soon as there is variability, waiting time explodes as load approaches its maximum, as queueing theory describes. Reducing variability, levelling demand and protecting the bottleneck release more capacity than speeding up every workstation.

How Phi-Lean applies it

What we actually do, on the ground and with your teams.

The VSM Express Diagnostic measures, on a real flow, the time that adds value and everything else. Finding a few hours of useful work in several weeks of lead time is not unusual.
We measure the OEE of the bottleneck, in real time if needed with our partner Factbird, to see where capacity goes: stoppages, slowdowns, poor quality.
Shorter changeovers (SMED), pull flow and kanban to stop producing what only waits.
Lean Plant Flow for the shop floor, Lean Services Flow for offices: hidden capacity exists in administrative processes too.

Go further :

Lean Plant Flow Lean Services Flow Factbird: real-time OEE

And in your company?

This will sound familiar if…

You turn down orders, or stretch lead times, for lack of capacity.
An investment project is on the table to “get through the peak”.
Overtime has become the norm.
Nobody can say which machine, or which person, sets the pace.

What it changes for you

More volume from the same resources, before investing.
Shorter lead times, so customers are served faster.
An investment decided with full knowledge, if it is still needed.
Less overtime, and less strain on teams.

The cost of waiting

Lost capacity cannot be stored. An order turned down today goes to a competitor, and it rarely comes back.

Phi-Lean is a small firm, on purpose: Manuel Gourmand leads every engagement himself, from the diagnostic to the last workshop. The number of engagements running at the same time is therefore limited. If this is on your agenda this quarter, it is worth talking now.

Book 30 minutes Start with the VSM Express Diagnostic