Remodeling: When there is a surge in leads, sales and projects in design, remodeling companies are left with the challenge of getting projects through pre-production (estimating, design, material ordering and project planning) quickly and accurately to get jobs into production. Business owners that are facing this challenge can look to improvement of their pre-production processes.
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The process of bringing a show to life involves a lot of stages, each of which have a set time allotted to them during which they must be completed. But for the most part, each task tends to take longer than what it has, either because there was an issue with the task itself or because the task preceding the next one took longer.
This article talks essentially about these glitches, which it refers to as “waste”, which is honestly so helpful because it helps categorize these wastes and understand why they occur in the first place.
The first kind of waste, waiting, is the kind of waste that happens for the task to be done as the one before it is completed. The other one, defects, is the time it takes to actually complete the task at hand. The lean process that this article talks about helps to look at these wastes in a productive way, which is definitely helpful.
The pre-production process of estimating, designing, material ordering, and project planning is essential for every project. However, the pre-production process can make or break a project and this article delves into the task of improving a pre-production process for future success. There are a lot of different ways to improve a pre-production process. This article talks about the LEAN process movement. This movement focuses on mapping each step in the process and determining how long each step takes and which team member handles that step. While this is great it definitely doesn’t account for mistakes or problems that can happen in a production process in general. I like the idea of thinking of “waste” as the things that don’t have to necessarily occur in a process. The LEAN method feels like it's shooting for a perfect process, which I feel like never happens. Thinking about how in a perfect world one could avoid these waste moments is something a little unrealistic when thinking about particular processes. I feel like its smarter to just account for waste moments rather than try and avoid them.
This article brings up the really interesting method of looking at waiting and waste in pre-production to try and maximize efficiency and cost on production of some object/ material/ product and I think that is really effective for larger scale companies and could translate in some ways to the work we do. I think that looking at processes from a big-picture perspective to see where we are ineffective or slowed down can make a more efficient work environment even on the scale of a small scene shop. Frankly I just think the method of stepping back for perspective regularly allows for greater insight when we so commonly get caught up in the details and carried away. My only caveat is that going too much into the idea of defects could be problematic because we’re doing so much prototyping in our industry (assuming one off productions) that trying to nail down particulars or hold ups could lead to more time being wasted on the process then is effective in enhance production and efficiency.
This article brings out an interesting point. I have thought about the inefficiencies in our processes as a shop and often come up with regular inefficiencies like material waste or other forms of similar ideas. This article states that our greatest inefficiency is the time when we are waiting, and it is absolutely true. Moving projects forward can be rough because of the amount of waiting that you need to do, and to which is sort of out of your control. Over the summer, waiting for vendor responses was the bane of my process. There is nothing I can do except keep calling and emailing. The thing is, as much as it is necessary to hear from a vendor or the client about decisions or to inform your decisions; it is a great halt on moving projects forward. Of course this is the bigger example as there exists the waiting when needing information or other steps to occur to work on something that may not have caused waiting if they were done earlier as those steps often didn’t rely on a previous step to be completed.
I really appreciate this mindset of preventing waste in theater. That’s something I had never considered in my prior experience. In community theater our first concern was always doing something as cheaply as possible in the short term. I feel like we may have disregarded taking some steps to reduce our waste because the “art” justified it. But I’m now starting to realize this mindset is extremely unhealthy. There is always room to reduce waste, even in the often extravagant and lavish world of theater.
I agree that increasing the planning phase to reduce trial and error is a worthwhile method of waste reduction. Often I would just try ten ideas in hopes that one would work without doing as much research as I should. Only one would end up getting used and the rest would end up in the trash. I will definitely be adjusting my behavior in the future with this mindset in mind.
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