In today's competitive business landscape, maintaining consistent quality standards and operational excellence is crucial for long-term success. One effective tool that empowers organizations to achieve these goals is Layered Process Audits (LPAs). LPAs provide a structured approach to monitor and improve processes, offering a range of benefits that enhance efficiency, quality, and customer satisfaction. In this blog, we will explore the advantages of LPAs and how they contribute to business success.

The modern business environment is continually transforming, from world events drastically changing consumer behavior, to rapidly improving artificial intelligence, which is making adaptability a critical factor for competitiveness.  Quickly adopting new ideas and practices, especially in this digital age, seems like an obvious strategy.  However, mature and established industries are typically more hesitant to change what’s been working well in decades past.  This is where a company like Diligent Delivery Systems stands out as an example of embracing new ideas in the centuries old industry of logistics.

The current lean paradigm is about to drastically change, leading to an expansion of just-in-time. While leveling is a part of any lean production system, we need to see it for what it is: a countermeasure to rigidities that ends up being anti-lean. The gist of this article is that we now have a better solution.

Data maturity is a skill which, just like any other skill, requires an initial foundation of knowledge and practice with incremental advancement until excellence is achieved.

In this blog, we’ll provide a solution to a common problem across all industries: insufficient standardization, leading to quality issues and inconsistent throughput rates.

Imagine yourself sitting at a table, attempting to complete a puzzle blindfolded. Without the use of your eyes, you find your hands scrambling around the table, hopelessly feeling edges and shoving pieces together at random. With the use of your eyes, the information needed to complete the task efficiently is clear, like where the colors match and where they don’t.

It’s important to know which actions will drive results, especially when there’s so much noise. Being able to narrow down your to-do list to what matters is a crucial skill for doing work that matters in today’s world.

As an operations leader in today’s hypercompetitive landscape, you’re always on the lookout for ways to reduce lead times to better satisfy internal stakeholders and, ultimately, delight the customer. In a volatile time with so many supply chain disruptions, the companies able to put products on shelves and in carts are the ones that get orders.

There’s a good reason you hear about Lean, Six Sigma, and probably Lean Six Sigma all the time as a manufacturing leader. It’s a powerful way to manage your production, and so contagious that proud practitioners of this method often include their certification next to their names like doctors or lawyers.

Quality is a qualifier for keeping business. The balancing act between cost, speed, and quality isn’t easy. Luckily, you still have control of your situation and can take action to save your operation from quality issues.

Most operations leaders know that service is the number one differentiator between suppliers. If you can consistently deliver on time and in full, you will win customers. On the other hand, if you can’t do those things, don’t hold your breath waiting for new customers and don’t expect to keep the ones you have for very long.

Sure, on-demand labor sounds like a great solution for finding workers when you need them. But what business goals can you achieve with on-demand labor?

You’ve probably reached what you thought was the limit of how far your cycle times could be reduced. And when that happens, you start to wonder if there’s something else to be done so that you can deliver to the customer faster and quit feeling like you’re treading water just to stay afloat. 

If your production facility or shop floor is struggling to maintain consistent results or reach productivity targets, then it’s time to step back and consider taking a more basic approach and cleaning up your facility. Uncontrolled production variability cannot be addressed until the work areas have been organized and eliminated as a source of variability.