Workshop on Improving Productivity through Quality Enhancement and Cost Reduction

Program Overview:

How do organizations improve productivity? What is productivity to start with? This course presents best practices on how to boost productivity by focusing on quality and cost saving initiatives. In this course we will share best practices and tools from organizations that implemented quality methodologies to improve their processes and achieve faster cycle times, lesser defects and simplified operations. Participants will also learn how to apply these practices in their organizations and understand how to manage change. They will master the skills to leverage the existing culture to their advantage by creating a solid platform and moving the organization into a new mindset. This course is critical for every organization aiming to save cost and become more efficient and productive.

For Whom:

Managers, supervisors and all those who are responsible for, or indirectly involved in, a cost or profit center or a quality improvement function

Learning Objectives:

At the end of the program, participants will be able to:

• define productivity and various types of organizational waste;
• identify areas of poor productivity due to poor quality and suggest ways to increase effectiveness and efficiency;
• justify and apply quality improvement tools and techniques in order to improve productivity;
• apply several cost reduction strategies in order to meet changing global, statutory and market conditions; and
• apply measuring initiatives and set targets in order to improve productivity.

Course Outline:

Day 1: Productivity defined

• Definitions
• Productivity limitations
• Process based view
• The ‘Muda’ factor
• Eight types of waste
• Cost of poor quality

Day 2: Principles of cost reduction: the quality approach

• Quality defined
• Cornerstones of quality
• Barriers to cost reduction programs
• Setting up a cost reduction program
• Resistance psychology in humans
• Techniques to involve employees in your quality improvement tasks
• The role of suggestion schemes

Day 3: Productivity improvement tools

• Productivity improvement project road map
• Tool selection
• Brainstorming
• Pareto
• How-how method
• Why-why method
• Ishikawa fish-bone diagram
• Six Sigma
• Lean principles
• Non-value-added analysis
• Re-engineering
• The ‘Focus’ method

Day 4: Cost reduction opportunities 

• Streamlining the organization and the ESSA method
• SMART practices for increasing productivity
• Cost savings opportunities
• Barriers to a cost cutting program
• Getting commitment to a cost cutting program
• One hundred and forty ideas to cut costs

Day 5: Measuring your productivity initiatives

• Key performance indicators
• Types of measures
• Setting targets for cost reduction
• Benchmarking
• Types of benchmarking
• The balanced scorecard
• The dashboard

Training Methodology

Lectures, discussions, exercises, case studies, audio-visual aids will be used to reinforce these teaching/learning methods.