Three minutes is not much time. It’s about the amount of time to get a coffee from the vending machine or maybe not quite enough time to visit the restroom. Three minutes doesn’t seem important.

You have probably spent multiples of three minutes looking for a stencil that was misplaced. The job couldn’t get started until that stencil was found. Three minutes, 10 minutes; what’s the big deal?
Let’s say your company has a two-shift, five-days per week operation, and on each shift three minutes is lost each day. Assuming 250 days per year, this is 1500 minutes or 25 hours of lost production time in a year.

How much is this costing your company? Using ProfitPro cost-estimating software that I developed and information in annual reports, I analyzed the typical subcontract assembler’s profitability. It nets out that each hour lost on a typical assembly line is worth about $3500 of production. So 25 hours per year is almost $90,000 of lost production – all because of just three minutes.

And I’ll bet some of us are losing 30 minutes a day.