The 10 steps to reduce inventory of materials

Let us imagine you have to reduce the inventory of tapes you need during your process. 

Here the steps to follow:

1)
How many tapes (on average) you need every week?

2)
Set the space to contain maximum 2 weeks of tapes.

3)
Create a Visual Management tool to understand the 2 weeks level (green) and 1 week level (red).

4)
Determine who is the responsable and the accountanble for replenish tapes on weekly bases.

5)
Start by replenish the space with 2 weeks inventory and then every week refill the space and monitor the quantity ordered and its gap from the average.

6)
Now you have a fixed inventory in the shop and a statistical data set to work on.

7)
If the accountable is regular in his work, now the supplier could give tapes on weekly bases.

8)
Set a minimum (i.e. 2 weeks) and maximum level (i.e. 4 weeks) in the warehouse.

9)
Now you have fixed maximum inventory in the company for tapes.

10)
Start again from point 1 halving the stock space and doubling the frequency of the replenishment.

Following these steps you will reduce your inventory in a consistent way for your company.

LeanLab Staff.

When should we start with Lean?

One of the capital questions when a company decides to apply lean is if now is the best time to start.

When this questions arise, there are some people that say “let´s start now, because there is a big volumen of work, and therefore we can reduce the cost and the production lead time”, while others think that is better to wait for a future period when the volumen will be lower and therefore they will have time to define a better working process.

Who is right?