Pinnacle Strategies Saves on Costs by Rebalancing Resource to Maximize Flow

May 4, 2013 - PRLog -- Mark Woeppel, President and CEO of Pinnacle Strategies, recently posted the monthly blog entitled, “Rebalance Resources to Maximize Flow,” on the company’s website.   Woeppel shared, “Knowing what (and where) the drum is for your process does not mean that you should run out and buy more capacity to fix it.  In my previous blog post, I discussed that before you react to an increase of demand and making any changes in the process, you first need to analyze the process and identify the constraint.  Only then will you know where and what to change (to change the behavior or the entire process).”
Before a company starts throwing additional money at the situation, find ways to make more effective use of current resources.  To find ways to increase output a few questions should be asked:
Woeppel asked, “Do all the resources at the constraint take a break or lunch at the same time? Often, staggering lunches and breaks at the constraint will give you a big boost.  The numbers work, too.  Let’s say you spend an hour a day for lunch and breaks.  In an 8-hour day, that’s 12.5% more output.”
If the constraint is a machine, there is one skill set to run the machine, and another to set it up.  Often running the machine is loading and unloading parts.  Automation is a better choice, but often companies can add a person faster.  This may be the constraint.  Every additional hour industry leaders can get at the constraint equals one hour of sales.
When Pinnacle Strategies worked with boom manufacturers to immediately boost output (in support of containing the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico), more output was needed to be immediately.  Not the ideal situation to hire and train new people or to order and wait for new machines.  Our teams questioned how to improve output and then pursued the answer until a solution was found.  Read about how the improvements were found at these manufacturers and how improvements can be achieved by examining ways to use existing resources smarter and then implementing those changes in the second lesson of our eBook, Achieving Top Performance Under the Worst Conditions: 7 Lessons Learned from a Disaster link http://pinnacle-strategies.com/lp2/
Pinnacle Strategies is an international management consulting firm focused on operations management excellence. We work with organizations to increase shareholder value by developing high-performance business processes that significantly enhance productivity, reduce costs and time to market, improving profitability and accelerating sustainable growth. Pinnacle Strategies offers results-driven consulting solutions in the areas of performance management, project management, operations management, and supply chain. Pinnacle Strategies is the developer of ViewPoint a service that dramatically simplifies managing projects, enabling project teams to rapidly improve project performance.  The RABIT methodology is a proprietary approach that is concentrated on implementing quick response solutions with rapid results. The RABIT methodology culminates years of practical experience and expertise in continuous improvement; it consistently delivers dramatic increases in process output to deliver solutions to industrial and manufacturing firms worldwide. Pinnacle Strategies offers results-driven consulting solutions in the areas of performance management, project management, operations management, and supply chain.

Pinnacle Strategies
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Jennifer Thompson, Marketing Coordinator
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