Lean For Everyone

Lean for the Home: Getting Rid of the Dish Drying Rack

I'm doing some more Kaizen in the home life again and eliminating more Batch and Queue steps in the Kitchen.

It's been about 4 months since we did "Lean for the Home: Loading the Dishwasher" and things are much cleaner around the right side of the sink where we used to pile the dirty dishes.  It also uncovered a new issue in our kitchen.  That we stack the hand washed dishes on the left side of the sink to air dry.

That's right, another batch and queue process where we are creating another pile of inventory.  We either:

1. Put them away after 8 to 18 hours

2. Just re-use them before they even make it into the cabinets

3. We spill something on them and have to re-wash, starting the process all over again.  

                                                                                   

Solution:  We are removing another step in our process. After hand washing we dry them by hand and put them immediately away thereby simplifying the process, decreasing the WIP (Work in Progress).  "Presto Changeo'" we have one piece flow!

 

Reflection:  The kitchen has become much cleaner, but why didn't we do this sooner?  It seems like a "no-brainer". 

Easy answer, until we cleared away the dirty dishes on the right side we didn't notice the clean dishes piling up on the left.  It's amazing how just by fixing one thing,  a light will shine on the next problem to tackle.

Lean for the Home: Doing the Laundry

My wife K.  and I started talking about how to lean up our home and what we can do to make our lives easier.

We made a list of things we wanted to simplify in our lives and the laundry came up high on the list. 

We brainstormed about what we disliked most about the laundry.  Tops on the list were:

• Clothes overflow in the laundry bin and clutter our room (Excess Inventory)
• We are always looking for specific items that need to be washed right away (Expediting Orders)
• Sorting darks from lights (Re-work)
• An entire day is usually dedicated to laundry (Large production runs)
• K does most of the laundry (Un-even work load)

What we changed to make it easier:

    We divided the bin into 2 sides "Lights and Darks".  Each side is the equivalent of a single load of laundry.  

                 BEFORE LEAN                                           AFTER LEAN

 

Rules:

Dirty clothes are immediately sorted into the bin and not piled or put on the floor.

When the bin is full, the person adding the last bit of laundry is in charge of taking it downstairs and running the load.

Results:

We no longer find laundry to be a chore and it's now routine.  We have more time because we aren't loosing an entire day to laundry and we are both happier.

If you like this Lean for the Home tip you should check out:  Loading the Dishwasher using Lean

Lean for the Home: Loading the Dishwasher

                

My wife, K. "Leaned me" the other day.  I mean that she used my love of Lean to demonstrate how I can help her more around the house.

After dinner she asked that when I helped clear the table that I put the dishes directly in the dishwasher as opposed to letting them pile in the sink and then loading the dishwasher at a later time.

She stated that the sink was just a holding area for inventory being batched up to be processed (washed)  and that if I took the dishes directly to the dishwasher I would be removing an unnecessary step in the process.  Okay, so she didn't actually use those words, but she said the layperson's equivalent.

She was correct and now I'm much better at taking items directly from the table to the washer however now we have to solve the issue of decreasing the wait time between when the dishwasher has completed it's cleaning and when we unload it. *smile*