Zero Lead Time

I was reading a post on a friend's blog that was related to lead time and thought that I would share it here. With products that have zero lead time, you never have to keep anything on hand to clutter your house or hard drive. Movies, music, books, recipes, journals, artwork, pictures, and communication have all gone digital. This allows their lead time to be limited only by the speed of your connection. Also all transportation costs are eliminated, so the overall cost of the product delivered to you should be less.

A Leading Question

How can you travel lighter without sacrificing comfort on the far end of a trip? The answer to this question is another variation on the theme of lead time.

My family really only travels regularly (probably 90% of our travel) to two locations: my in-laws house and my sisters house. These are generally weekend trips at regular intervals throughout the year. Without fail the most likely time for everyone involved to be frustrated and impatient is during packing and loading the car. By understanding the concept of in process stock a lot of this frustration can be avoided.

In the manufacturing world, in process stock refers to a small quantity of product (usually one) that allows an operator to do other tasks while a machine is running.

The majority of what is packed for a weekend trip is clothes and toiletries. If these items were already waiting at the other end of the trip, the preparation process at both ends would be cut significantly. Thus you are using a small stock of travel supplies to free yourself from the hassle of packing the same things for every trip.

Negotiating a little space in a spare closet or drawer can significantly reduce both the stress and the preparation time for a trip. Spare toiletries are cheap and the space taken up by the the only risks of keeping extra clothes at frequent travel locations are that you will always be wearing the same thing in family pictures, or that you will outgrow them between trips.

The association is a little bit of a stretch, but it works.

Faster Food Saves Cash

Let’s think a little bit about the waste in your life. How often do you clean out the refrigerator? If you are like my family this activity generally coincides with either a shopping trip (pushing fridge capacity to the limit) or an attempt to find “that smell”. During one of these purges, we tend to throw away a lot of food. The discarded items fall into several categories: leftovers, overbought and under used items, and things that got pushed to the back and lost or hidden in a drawer and forgotten. Nearly all of these losses are related to lead time. Lead time is the time between purchase and use of a consumable product. When you drop something into your cart at the grocery store a clock begins counting down. If you have not eaten your purchase within the time window for that item, you might as well have thrown the money you spent on it out the window on the way to the store. You cannot return the unused portion. Leftovers result from overproduction. You have cooked more than you needed and unless you plan to finish off the rest in the vey near future, the time window of all of the ingredients used just got a lot shorter. The key to avoiding these traps is to understand exactly what you need and when you need it. This principle is well known in business but is not well understood in the wider world. If these two things are understood, and all spending falls into line with them waste can be significantly reduced. To put this into practice for food expenditures requires:

1. Make a menu and stick to it. Plan for the shortest interval you can comfortably deal with. The absolute best case would be a daily trip to the store to buy only what you need for that day. This is difficult for some people based on time and transportation constraints. Start with one week then begin reducing the interval until you reach your own minimum.

2. Make a grocery list. Be exact in the required portions and do not buy one ounce more than needed. DO NOT BUY LARGE QUANTITIES TO SAVE MONEY!!! You often pay less per some quantity, then throw away all your savings at some point in the future. Meanwhile you could have held onto all that you overspent and had a cash reserve.

Wasting Away (but not in Margaritaville)

Right now everyone is trying to save money. Everywhere there are lists of the things that you can do to cut your expenses. They are all good suggestions, but rarely do the authors get to the real meat of the problem: Waste!

Much of the world has fallen into a culture of waste where convience has taken precedence over everything else. The disposable world surrounds and seduces us. Waste is everywhere in modern life. Prosperity has simply blinded most people to its existence. I am no saint in this respect, but recently I have begun to open my eyes. In studying the Toyota Production System, the ignorance that passes for common knowledge, and the wrong thinking that have led many families to ruin have leap into sharp focus. I hope to begin sharing my discoveries with you here. For those of you that come along for the ride, buckle up tight. Some of the principles will turn your present thinking on its head. One thing that I will never seek from you however is faith. The logic of the principles cannot be denied.

And so without further ado....