Last week I made a meeting with a company owner. He is owner of a metal casting company. I made a small tour in his workshop for about 10 minutes, and I shared my insights to him clearly. Surely, what you say is always limited to the understanding of the other party. We talked without mentioning about lean production, ERP, or continuous improvement.
Below are the ideas I shared:
* Regarding the number of employees, revenue per employee ratio is very low,
* There are more workers than necessary, there are so much manually handled jobs.
* The working area is very large, and the employees are walking very long distances, that’s why the efficiency is low,
* The working environment is very dark, it causes loss of both motivation and job safety,
* The environment is dirty. It is difficult to produce good quality products,
* You are concerned with unnecessary duties as a boss, this is not responsibility of being a boss or general manager,
* Your employees are not qualified, but you need educated, talented, experienced employees to do good work,
CONCLUSION: If vision is only based upon generating money, the progress is limited to that extent. I expressed to him that “Right now you already achieved to the point that you might achieve to maximum. If you continue to do exactly what you have done so far, the level you achieve in the future won’t be better beyond this point.
If you think to reach to better levels, from now on you need to hire people who are educated and talented. If you insist on continuing to control everything, doing everything by yourself, also do not want do give money to talented employees, you are at the best position you might reach.
Of course I do not know everything, but these are very obvious things that are easy to inspect. The simplest thing for progress is to hire people who know their jobs well, as a good start.