Over the last few weeks we have been doing some good old fashioned time and motion studies using 21st century apps. We are experimenting with this to understand where our time is spent and how much non value added “motion” we are doing every day. Tracking your movement on farm during your day is an extremely powerful tool to use to begin to understand the flow of what you are doing – your spaghetti diagram. Here are a couple of images of two of Mat’s work days over calving recently. (He has been our first test bunny). We were shocked to see the 65-100 km travel each day. What this helps us to see is how much movement we are doing every day (and in the lean world “motion” is waste – non value added activity). We want to understand how much of this motion is absolutely necessary (eg we just can’t get rid of) and how much is avoidable through better planning, better layout, better flow, better communication etc. We will be rolling this out across our team to get a good feel for where our time is spent each day so that we can use the data to continuously improve our work and efficiency and reduce our work hours. There are many apps including Google Maps for android that allow you to GPS track your every move. And if you haven’t done this yet go and do it – its super easy and it will be an eye opener! #leanfarm#theleanfarmproject #waste #motion #continuousimprovement #flow
