Diaz Consulting, LLC

     A few years back, our CFO visited our facility as part of his yearly plan to personally see an operation, something I found refreshing in many ways. We were exposed to a different point of views we never considered. We started a Lean journey a few years back, and the financial results started to show the progress and the effectiveness of the culture change. At that point the facility was a real showcase starting from the simple cleanliness, organization and visuals. The machines were spotless, fully operational, and free of temporary fixes and other visible inconvenience.  Not obvious to the naked eye was the culture around Safety and Quality, on the other hand the Delivery and Cost were a result of the first two; something difficult to understand at first glance. Let me explain, because our Safety was improved tremendously in the last two years, the potential for new first aids or near misses was removed for the most part from the assembly process; a lot more o...

     I would like to start by saying that planning lead time is not a popular parameter, very few people understand the impact of ignoring the lead time when it comes to computer parameters and as a planning tool. More than ever, the pandemic, highlighted the impact of ignoring the parameter. In the MRP world there are two kinds of master production schedulers, the ones who love "safety stocks" and the ones who understand "lead times". The first category are those who suffered from shortages in the past and at night, still hear the screaming and yelling from the people needing the material. On the other hand, very few people rely on lead times to ensure a healthy inventory level. In order to understand the difference, we need to clarify what happens when the safety stock and the inventory level is not the same or more. Internally the system will send signals to the planner or planners to make sure those items are addressed. This will create a list of items in desper...

     One of my least favorite task while at work, is opening emails with large spreadsheets attached with the data representing last day's business performance or transactions. We can view this from many point of views, but for the sake of the discussion in my first internet blog ever, let's pick three. 1) Review yesterday's transactions/performance, which is the sole purpose of the email and the attachment. 2) Incredible inefficient way of transporting large data from one person/system to many users and 3) Time spent every day filtering, sorting, rearranging and formatting the raw data into a pivot table or something "user friendly". So let's begin, reviewing yesterday transactions/performance is not the right way to correctly have a good understanding of the direction of the operation or the business. The worst possible outcome for this is to start making decisions based on a very small set of data because the reality is just snapshot in time, a picture. it ...