TCO Lean
What you lose while you make it
Your productivity gaps persist despite the Lean projects. Your non-conformities keep coming back. Your material giveaways stay unexplained.
You will see what your indicators cannot show you, and where to start.
Production Manager on a SEVESO site for 7 years. I know the Lean that lasts.
A multi-product process workshop, SEVESO site of a specialty chemicals group, a subsidiary of a listed US group. 600 recipes, 100,000 T/year, 3,600 batches traced lot by lot. Cpk greater than or equal to 1.33 achieved on all critical parameters. Capability sustained over time through an SPC steering system, team training and managerial discipline. Not a one-off. A discipline.
How I get into your plant
What is going wrong, you already know. I look for what is drifting.
We deal with both, but everyone already knows the line that is failing. What has been sliding for three years, nobody saw go. A Cpk drifting from 1.5 to 1.1 produces no defects yet. It announces next year’s.
Your indicators lie if your standard times have been stretched.
A rate aligned on what was observed never comes back down. Useful time then rises mechanically, so your OEE improves while the plant degrades. I rebuild the nominal rate by calculation before looking at a single indicator.
A machine that runs is not a machine that produces.
Waiting while the motor turns is counted as production. No sensor reports it, because it was classified as normal long ago. You have to go and see what the asset is doing while it runs.
Time is lost between stations, not on them.
Preparation, delivery, reheating, sampling, quality control, packing. Time is lost wherever something passes from one owner to the next, and nobody owns the gap.
One more check slows you down forever. A poka-yoke removes the cause.
After a defect, the reflex is to add a control or stretch a cycle. That slows you down forever, it settles in, and it hides the cause. I look first for a way to make the error impossible.
See the demonstration: how an OEE can rise while the plant degrades
Same facts on both sides: 100 hours of required time and 1,000 good parts actually produced. The only difference is the nominal rate written in the standard.
Same plant, same 1,000 parts, 16.6 points of OEE more. Nobody cheated: every stretch was decided after a real incident, out of caution, and none was ever removed. OEE does not measure how the plant performs. It measures the gap between the plant and its own standard. When the standard follows the plant, the gap closes whatever happens.
And the doubt is settled by one question, not by a three-day audit. Ask your planning team: over the last five years, have standard times been increased, which ones, and why? They plan with those times and they keep the record of every revision. They answer in minutes.
Time cascade per standard NF E60-182. Illustrative figures, chosen for the demonstration.
What you get, and how it works
The costed assessment: what is drifting, what has stalled, the hidden waiting, and what each one costs you.
The action plan, with the expected return workstream by workstream, and what the next stage costs.
Stability analyses, updated procedures and the production dashboard come with the workstreams, not with the assessment.
The assessment, 5 to 7 days: 3 to 5 on the floor following the flows, 2 to build and cost the plan.
The next stage is costed afterwards, never before: the assessment is what sizes it.
A performance-based contract is possible on the second stage, on gains validated by your own controlling.
A standard time you stretch never comes back down. That is how a plant degrades without anyone deciding it.
Let’s talk about your context.
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