Paul Akers, a Lean enthusiast and entrepreneur, understood the benefits of giving employees free time for implementing improvements instead of excessively reducing headcount. In his company, most employees serve an 8-hour shift. However, only five to six hours are spent working on order fulfillment. Every employee has more than enough time to do the most important of all jobs: improving. They start with 3S, their standard for cleaning and organizing the workplace. The focus here lies mainly in finding and eliminating problems. Paul recalls that slowly and over time, FastCap employees became so productive that they managed to finish in five hours what used to take ten hours to be accomplished. When most companies would reduce personnel, he uses the gain in productivity to enable more improvements.

Reference: fastcap.com


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