What Is FIFO Method and How to Use It to Deliver on Your Commitments

Did you know that almost one-third of all food produced for human consumption is wasted every year? For many of us, food waste has become a habit: buying more food than we need, letting fruits and vegetables spoil at home or taking larger portions than we can eat.

What Is FIFO Method?

So how can we reduce the waste of food at home? Here is my best advice: get a labrador. Or even better, get two of them!

Now, if you’re not a dog lover, I still have a solution for you and it’s called the FIFO method. FIFO stands for First-In-First-Out. It denotes that the item that enters the system first should go out of the system first as well. Essentially, old items always have a priority over the new ones.

And here is a great example of how to use the FIFO method to reduce food waste.

When you unpack your grocery items, always remember to move older products to the front of your refrigerator and put the new ones at the back. That way, you get to use your older products before they expire instead of keep buying new food.

How simple is that? It certainly made the difference for us (the doggies felt it too, where did all these treats go?

Now, you’ll be astonished by how the FIFO method can actually enable you to keep your cycle times consistent and deliver on your commitments just by making a small tweak to your management practices.

What Is FIFO Method and How to Use It to Deliver on Your Commitments

What Are the Advantages of First-In-First-Out Method on Your Performance?

Introducing the FIFO method as an explicit process policy will stabilize your delivery times by keeping the waiting time in your workflow to a minimum.

By using this approach, tasks are no longer artificially delayed or forgotten, because each work item is processed and begun in the order that it arrived – regardless of its nature or complexity.

Reducing the overall waiting time inevitably leads to improving the predictability of your delivery system. And the more predictable your system is, the more accurate forecasts it will produce.

The size of your work items doesn’t matter. The amount of data you have collected doesn’t matter either. The only prerequisite to coming up with reliable delivery commitments and hitting your targets consistently is to optimize your workflow for predictability. And implementing the FIFO method is just an example of how to get there.

It’s all about taking control of your management practices to ensure you deliver customer value in a consistent manner. That’s all it takes! It all boils down to building predictable workflows.