As a business owner or leader, I bet you are constantly thinking of and planning ways to continuously improve your business?  Well of course, that’s what a great business thinker should be doing but it doesn’t always have to involve grand, long term plans that involve huge capital expenditure.  Improving your business can be as easy as finding small improvements every day.

Paul Akers 2 Second Lean concept is a tool you can apply to make a difference in your business and continuously improve today.

Stop the waste

This concept involves making improvements every day – even those as small as 2 seconds – with the goal that every little change improves the business by removing the waste in your day to day life. 

When it comes to waste, this concept isn’t just referring to the stuff that ends up in the bin.  Waste is any step or action in a process that is not required to complete a process successfully.  When we remove waste, only the steps that are required to deliver a satisfactory product or service to the customer remain. 

There are 8 common wastes in business:

• Over production – Production that is more than needed or before it is needed
• Transportation – Unnecessary movement of products and materials
• Inventory – Excess products and materials not being utilised or processed.
• Defects – Efforts caused by rework, scrap, and incorrect information.
• Over-processing – More work or higher quality than is required by the customer.
• Motion – Unnecessary movements by people (eg walking)
• Waiting – Wasted time waiting for the next step in a process.
• Wasted Potential – Underutilising people’s talents, skills and knowledge.

Implementation of 2 second lean

To implement this concept all you need to do is encourage your employees to constantly think of small 2 second improvements. Some businesses even challenge their employees to think of a 2 second improvement every single day. It’s really quite simple - it just needs to be something that can be implemented in 24/48 hours and not involve a high cost.

To help your employees start to think in terms of improvements, you might ask a few simple questions to prompt them, such as:

• What is it that caused you to stop your work yesterday?
• If I could fix something right now for you, what would it be?
• What frustrates you in your day to day job?

Case study

One example of a simple 2 second lean improvement that has significantly impacted a business in a positive manner is this:

A client faced a problem whereby there were constant interruptions for the staff member responsible for guillotining customers work.  This team member needed to concentrate on precision cutting as well as preparing multiple jobs for a quality control and packing department.  She was continually interrupted with requests of small but important urgent jobs.  These urgent jobs needed to be done, but the constant interruptions caused mistakes in guillotining as well as lost time in productivity.  Frustrations were building.

By applying the principles of 2 Second Lean, they came up with the idea of marking out with tape a section on the cutting table for any urgent work.   Packing staff would come and place the required urgent job in this section and not interrupt the staff member guillotining. The staff member was able to focus properly on her specific task without fear of interruption, and she played her part in helping her colleagues by checking the urgent work area in between all scheduled jobs.

A great outcome - no more errors, productivity increased, and urgent jobs completed in the required time frames.  Everyone was happy!

Cost down, productivity up

Ultimately, this was a low-cost solution that actually saved this company money and more importantly increased productivity.  As a business leader, that’s the utopian solution!

Once you are making 2 second changes in your business and your team are heard and feel valued, they will look for improvements without prompting.  It’s infectious. 

So, if you are looking to get some wins on the board with improved productivity and reduced waste – not to mention a side order of increased team engagement, small consistent tiny 2 second improvements can make big differences to your business. We’re certainly not the expert in 2 second lean, but we are always helping our clients engage their team in business improvements and solutions, so if you want some help in this area, feel free to give us a call. If you’re super excited about this specific concept – here’s a link to a free download of the book -  https://paulakers.net/books/2-second-lean

We wish you much success in implementing business improvements!