Ali Banholzer Absolutely. So one project we’re working on right now is error rates, and it’s across the entire company. How much is it costing you? I can tell you in my shop for the first quarter, it costs us $1,059 in errors. I post that on the wall, and not not in the way I’m going to say it here, but in a nice way I look at my employees now and say, “Man, look at the party we could have with $1,000.” So how can we tighten this up? And then we brainstormwhere the error’s coming from. We track where the errors are originating by the department and then what error —what is the specific error? We track. I track the employees as well, but not in a punitive way. But in a “Do I need to do new training? Do we need to change the way we’re doing the training in that manner?” So I’m in the middle of that project right now, and we’ve always tracked error rates, but we haven’t tracked them to this degree. But my point to that is like you said, if you continue to do these projects, you will save money. So I always say your business is the Money Monster. It takes money to run it. Labor is expensive. A lot of businesses, if you’re not analyzing your processes, think “I’ve got to sell more, I’ve got to sell more, I’ve got to sell more.” Because somewhere I’ll get more money in, the business will be more profitable. But if your processes are out of control, the more you sell, the more your processes are out of control, and the more the processes will cost you. So it’s a never-ending cycle. You’ll never outrun the Money Monster. You’re just going to be working harder to feed it more. And so you’ve got to take a step back, look at the processes get Lean, you know, and there’s you talking about Lean all the time, there’s the five S’s of making sure your shop isn’t cluttered… making sure everything is where it needs to be within a step or two. And so, you know, if you can lean down your processes, do small, incremental, continuous improvement, a little every month, you’ll reduce your overhead, you’ll reduce your costs, and you’ll slay the Money Monster. Marshall Atkinson Yeah, in previous discussions, I’ve always used the concept of minnows, you know. Minnows eating all your cash, either just constantly nibbling at it. But I liked the idea I think of monster eating just because it’s such a better picture. And it’s a little more dramatic. And because you need to like, stop that thing. I think having a monster is just probably a better analogy than Minnows.
<<COMMERCIAL>> Marshall Atkinson
Alright, so we’ve gone over a lot of things and you did a fantastic job of explaining how you get into a project. But I think for people listening, you know, Lean Six Sigma is Japanese words, it’s you got to have a black belt. I mean, there’s just a lot of stuff in there that can just seem really daunting to people. And I really want people to understand it’s not — is not unobtainable, it’s not difficult, you just have to get started. So walk through how somebody should think about something or where they should start, where is a good origin — jumping-off point for somebody to get started with this process?Help them out.
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