No matter what side of the political fence you fall, BP failed to take the proper quality control measures.  As the weeks pass more information is coming to light how the organization cut corners with safety to keep costs down.  Safety is not the place to take short cuts.  In the long run this can cost you thousands of dollars and possibly your business.  In BP’s case it is running in the billions not to mention what it is doing for their stock value. 

The ramification of poor quality control is costly.  So how could a corporation save money without sacrificing vitally important areas?  Run a continuously Lean organization.  This saves, time, money and resources across the board.  It improves employee morale and results in a superior product or service. 

How Lean is BP?  Are they examining  the wastes  that should be eliminated to create a lean organization?  Eliminating the wastes below and streamlining your operations allows a company to spend time on growth and strategic development.

Examples of Lean Office Waste:

• Waiting  - Delays in receiving information
• Overproduction  – Producing reports no one reads or needs
• Overprocessing  - Repetitive data entry
• Motion - Searching for computer files or paper documents
• Transportation  - Over-addressed email distribution lists
• Defects - Data entry errors
• Inventory - Work awaiting task completion by others
• Underutilization of people – Unbalanced workloads due to lack of cross-training

There are the same types of waste in the manufacturing and service environments.  Once you eliminate these an organization can begin to see how to truly maximize their staff, technology and financial resources.  This is the point when process reengineering can occur.  What can the organization do to make their operations efficient, effective and error proof?  Do we have in place contingency plans for disasters?  What is everyone’s role and responsibilities if a disaster occurs?  How do we communicate effectively with all areas when a problem arises so it is resolved quickly?  How often are we doing drills to make sure issues are handled ASAP? 

These might sound like rudimentary questions but based on the response of BP I am wondering what their best practices are in those areas.  They need to do what Toyota did after their quality issues.  Go back to the Lean model that made them great.  Toyota changed their design area to ensure that equipment failures like the ones that plagued them in the beginning of 2010 do not reoccur. What is BP doing to make that happen?

Time to make some serious choices and decisions.  The leadership of BP should “step up to the plate” by resolving the current disaster and review their operations to ensure this never happens in the future.  The oil industry as a whole should work together to develop best practices and create a high quality, low cost drilling operation model for the future.

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disaster planning · disaster recovery · eliminating waste · faster cash flow · improved productivity · lean