Improving Operations with Process Management and Maintenance
Jason Todaro
Blue Ridge Services, Inc.
Atascadero, California
The entire solid waste industry has been wading through a myriad of challenges related to profitability, sustainability, operational efficiency, and safety. The changing global recycling markets are triggering an increased focus and drive toward diverting food/green/wood waste. With these change, many organics processing operations are finding themselves in a “sink or swim” scenarios they strive to minimize traditional inefficiencies, wasted effort, and non-value-added activities.
Process improvement tools –used by manufacturing giants like Motorola, Toyota, and General Electric –can be applied to repetitive tasks like sorting green waste, turning windrows, or transporting composted material, often with dramatic improvements in safety and efficiency. When utilized correctly, process improvement tools, like Lean, Kaizen and Six Sigma, can identify inefficiencies and aggressively eliminate constraints.
While process improvement is most often used to improve efficiency, in almost all cases, safety is drastically improved through the implementation of standard operating procedures and more efficient work techniques.
At the heart of process improvement is the ability to evaluate a current process or activity, identify in detail what’s working and what isn’t, and come up with ways to improve and monitor the process or system.Using industry specific scenarios and real-life examples, this presentation will discuss how to apply process improvement tools to organics processing operations.