Saving money
Substantial savings through cost avoidance
Every company would like tosaving money, but it often seems impossible without cutting valuable resources. Saving money doesn't necessarily have to mean redundancies, though. Substantial savings can be made through cost avoidance strategies i.e. not spending money you might otherwise have spent. This can take many forms, from negotiating improved rates from a supplier, to reducing turnaround times for maintenance activities, to taking an alternative approach to the traditional way of doing things. Our application of lean thinking to a number of situations has helped companies from all sectors to save money in this way.
These are just a few examples of how we have helped:
Public Sector
We helped Wirral Partnership Homes to save a six figure sum on external legal expenses relating to Anti-Social Behaviour (ASB) within their estates through the development of new tenant-facing processes. These were victim-focused and improved estate visibility and resulted in a 60% reduction in open ASB cases.
Manufacturing
Through the reduction of waste our engineers helped Innovia Films (one of the UK's only producers of Cellophane) to save £2 million over 3 years. One particular aspect was a transit damage problem. We worked together with the workforce and in changing the design of the components used to palletise the product. The result, an instant saving of £300K annually - the estimated cost to Innovia in damaged goods.
Supply chain
Whilst working with a major global FMCG organisation and various key suppliers, we were able to reduce their supply chain working capital by 15% and reduce supplier lead times by an average of 20%. The exercise improved cross-organisational pan European team working and facilitated the development of a team of supply chain change agents committed to continuous improvement.
Process Industries
Maintenance programmes are necessary, but can end up costing several thousands of pounds in lost production time. Value Stream Mapping and waste identification activities at Piramal Healthcare (previously a division of Pfizer) undertaken with our assistance led to a change programme resulting in hundreds of man-hours being cut from the company's maintenance programme. The number of scheduled work orders was reduced by 25% leading to estimated savings of £100,000 per year.
What We Have Achieved
