Improve your perfomances by applying full kitting

Both relevant in project management and in production management, full kitting is a must to achieve the desired levels of performance. In a nutshell, we want to ensure that the "full kit" is well built before the start of a given activity: defining all the deliverables of the activity in question, finishing all the deliverables of the upstream activities, making all the required tools and parts available to the operator at the assembly workshop etc. Although this appears to be common sense and deployed in the majority of companies, we often realise during our assignments that this principle is derogated. As a consequence, the number of rework operations multiply, some activités are put on stand-by because of missing parts/tools, which inreases considerably the level of work-in-progress and the operators are naturally inclined to multitask.

By making full kitting a golden rule in your organisation, you will be able to limit multitasking and the level of WIP both in production (partly assembled products) and in projects (unfinished tasks and projects). To illustrate this point of view, Philip refers to four concrete examples he encountered in his career: pharmaceutical development, Engineering-to-order, small series assembly and aeronautical maintenance.