Critical Thinking Example

Critical thinking begins at the earliest stages of life. As you mature the process becomes more involved and by studying and practicing critical thinking methods you can improve and become more efficient in the process. You eventually learn to apply past experience, emotions and concepts that you have learned. Although there many critical thinking examples in personal lives such as decisions on health, money and family, for this paper we will discuss a critical decision process at work which resulted in a significant cost savings for a customer.

At work we use a variety of methods to solve problems and which almost always also results in some sort of cost savings. We have access to twenty three decision making tools that can be used to investigate, decide and implement a variety of problems from, personnel issues, office workflow, manufacturing, delivery, root cause analysis and much more. This particular work related example has to do with a request from a customer asking that chemical handling costs that our company was currently providing be reduced. A team was assembled and scheduled to meet at the work location for five days and use a tool called Kaizen Manufacturing. This tool is applied in a shop or manufacturing environment that uses a small cross-functional team of people assembled for short period to address a specific problem. They apply simple tools to chart distance, movement of people and material and sequence of events in order to identify and eliminate non value adding activities.

The first step taken by the team was to identify the problem. The problem as the customer describes it is that we were charging too much for handling chemicals. The team mapped out the entire process on large sheets of paper that tracked all the movements of personnel and materials. They decided that there goal would be to eliminate or restructure movement of personnel and products to be more effective. Many problems were quickly identified such as, there were many points where personnel had to lift product from floor level to a delivery wagon, product rotation in regard to expiration date, identification labels, access to materials/products, customer ordering times and customer ordering quantities. The team brainstormed ideas for each of the problems, evaluated which ideas were suited best for each problem and then physically began to implement the ideas. The first problem dealing with personnel lifting too many products from floor level was solved by replacing the wagons with delivery carts with no side rails and placing the products on stands that kept the products close to waist level. This way the product was loaded on to the cart there was very little lifting, mainly just sliding the product onto the cart which was purchased to coincide with the storage level of the product. Product rotation where you want to give the customer the oldest product to keep product from expiring was the cause of a lot of double movement when bringing in new products. This was solved by storing all the products in the middle of the storage rooms instead of up against a wall, this way personnel could walk completely around the product not having to rotate older material to the front each time new material arrived. Labels came next and instead of small identification labels on the wall about 10 feet from the eye, larger labels were created and applied on the floor around all 4 sides of the product which is now being stowed in the middle of the floor away from the walls. Customer ordering use to take place my multiple person multiple times a day. This was reduced to just one person and a designated backup taking all the customer orders only twice a day. This resulted in less confusion and standardized the delivery times of the product. The last item was the customer quantities, the team by looking at the customer usage and storage areas was able to deduce that large quantities