Getting Green With Lean
Situation Analysis
In the summer of 2008, the JDSU legal department’s global trade unit faced a potentially enormous increase in workload. JDSU was considering relocating manufacturing operations from two U.S. plants to Guadalajara, Mexico. Projections showed a workload escalation of 900 percent would result for the global trade unit if manufacturing shifted from both plants, and 500 percent if the operations of just one plant relocated.
Given the economic climate and the company’s ambition to develop best-in-class lean processes, hiring additional employees was not the most desirable solution. The team challenged itself to find innovative approaches to reduce the impact of the looming changes.
Quality Solutions
The team established a lean initiative to design more efficient and productive U.S. import processes without compromising legal compliance and cost-avoidance imperatives.
Brainstorming, process mapping, and flowcharting exercises helped the group pinpoint the most time-consuming activities in the overall process and identify improvements. Ultimately, they identified five separate initiatives to streamline the import management process:
- Creating a paperless customs entry process.
- Expanding the amount of electronic data received from customs brokers to support a paperless format.
- Simplifying internal self-assessment and audit programs as the department chose to reduce audits of low-risk transactions.
- Establishing the use of electronic transmission of trade data from the company’s contract manufacturer in Mexico.
- Consolidating import shipments to reduce paperwork.
Results
The project far exceeded initial expectations, as the trade group had no difficulty in handling a 500-percent increase in transactions (due to the transferred operations for only one plant rather than two). Thanks to process improvement, the work associated with tasks like printing, sorting, matching, collating, filing, and retrieving was eliminated.
The new paperless process is also more environmentally friendly. The company typically generates 10,000 customs entries per year, which equates to roughly 70,000 pages of documentation. By eliminating a tremendous amount of paper, JDSU gains environmental benefits such as reduced paper, ink, electricity, and storage costs. Employees benefit from faster retrieval time since photocopying, scanning, and faxing are no longer necessary.
Additionally, through the streamlined process, the trade group reduced the import management function to a one-person job. The second staff member who previously worked with the import management process was able to help bolster other programs inside the department.
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