The key benefits of lean and six sigma include providing structured methods of improvement to reduce waste, shorten production time, reducing cost, reducing lead times, promoting concurrent work, accelerating activities, improving planning and control and ultimately high levels of customer satisfaction.
An essential element to making lean and six-sigma work is in ensuring that its practices are used beyond production. From land development, marketing, sales, estimating, design,...
Creating change is not easy, neither is coming up with fresh ideas and perspectives to prompt those changes in the first place! Below I provide a model for change management and a list of change/improvement idea prompts.
First of all here is an eight stage process for implementing change referred to as Kotters Model.
Here is a list of some of the best books on quality and performance improvement.
A book that can help make the penny drop regarding the importance of change and improvement isWho Moved My Cheese by Johnson & Blanchard
A great detailed book on quality tools is The Quality Toolbox by Nancy Tague
An indepth look at the Deming Cycle PDCA is The Improvement Guide by Langley, Moen, Nolen, Nolan, Norman & Provost
The...
There are a wide range of quality improvement tools and techniques, below are a list of some of them. We will be touching on all of these in this blog. At the end of this blog are links that will take you to free downloadable excel templates for many of these tools.
PDCA and DMAIC.
One of the most basic things to understand about process performance improvement is the Deming Cycle or Plan, Do, Check and Act (PDCA) This is also referred to as the earlier Shewhart Cycle which is Plan, Do, Study and Act.
The plan–do–check–act cycle is a four-step model for carrying out change. Just as a circle has no end, the PDCA cycle should be repeated again and again for the foundation of continuous improvement.
SELF-ASSESSMENT
Self-assessment is in itself an important process which should be conducted at least annually to monitor the performance of your business. This can be done using the National Housing Quality Award Criteria for Performance Excellence. NHQA Criteria has been an important tool for hundreds of home builders and trade contractors to assess and improve performance on critical factors to business success.
Since the start of the NHQA in 1993 through...
Metrics are all about the effectiveness of your processes. There are four key types of performance that we can focus on in this blog.
This can include focusing on for example just in time delivery, supplier and partner performance, product, service, results, steps, cycles, unit produced, units per employee/sales/invested capital, reduction in resources...
THE MARKET
Surely the most important issue facing everyone in the homebuilding industry, indeed every industry today is improving performance. Reducing costs and leveraging resources to improve profitability.
In fact an ASQ (American Society for Quality) survey (with 1000 respondents from around the world) shows a majority of manufacturers are optimistic about an economic uptick at their organizations. However, respondents believe further cost-cutting measures...
If there’s one housing sector that is poised for a strong recovery in the next 12 to 18 months, it’s the rental housing market, namely apartment buildings.
If you’re not evaluating the apartment sector, it may be worth consideration for your local markets because it appears that conventional funding sources may soon become more-readily available for these projects.
Case in point: A January poll of more than 200 commercial real-estate investors, lenders, brokers...
