The Toyota A3 Report | shmula
This is a really good article on the Root Cause analysis technique developed by Toyota.
The Toyota A3 Report | shmula.
Improving your processes doesn’t mean buying expensive tools
The other day I was speaking to my cousin, a dentist, about process improvement. His thought process quickly led him to describe how expensive some of the tools in his industry can be. These tools tend to revolve around digitizing the dental office.
I quickly shifted the conversation to Southwest. He knew where I was going with this as he had read a book about how Southwest used one model of planes, etc. The classic Southwest case study. I think he understood that process improvement does not have to mean capital expenditures. Sometimes the biggest wins are the low hanging fruit.
If a secretary sends and receives a lot of faxes, but has to walk to another room to perform this action, is there a way to move the fax machine closer? Most people can identify this because it is pretty obvious, but in a dentist office, like with Southwest, utilization is the most important thing. So keeping this in mind, what can be done so that chairs are never empty? What could he do to increase the number of patients he sees in a day?
I know he has down time between seeing patients, so he may be able to improve utilization by examining the set up process for each station. How long does it take to prepare a chair for a new patient? When he gets there are the tools he needs ready for him? How long does it take to sanitize the area once the patient is done? By asking simple questions he may find ways to carve out an additional appointment in a given day.
There are many things you can do to improve a process without spending a dime. You just have to be creative and ask the right questions.
Your office is moving to the web, get ready
Today I woke up to read a tweet from Robert Scoble (@Scobleizer) and it was the canary in the coal mine for me. For years I have felt that enterprise collaboration was moving to the web and this tweet confirmed my intuition. (for those who are mistified by the “tweet” visit Twitter <- this is more then “telling people what you are doing”). Okay, back to the post, so what did Robert say?
Info on GE going with Zoho …
WHAT? That can’t be the Six Sigma, continuous improvement General Electric I know, can it? Well, I click on the link Robert provided which led to this article (GE Drops Google, Selects Zoho ). Wow, that’s huge, but I am just finding out something which was stated back in September of 2008.
So what is this all about? Well, Zoho is a company which is offering a suite of office applications on the web, think Microsoft Word, Power Point, Excel. They not only provide these applications, but a whole host of other collaboration tools.
If you have ever used one of these tools you may have thought that they are not as full featured as their desktop counterparts and you’d be right. The revolution however is how these tools are changing the way we work. Think of the last MS Word document you created which you needed to share with someone else. If you are like most people out there you created it on your computer, possibly saved it to a network drive, and then emailed it off to some people for review and input. If you are lucky they turned on track changes and when you get back their comments and changes you take your time making sense of all the files and compose the final document. Some of the “more advanced” companies will have implemented systems like Microsoft Share Point or some other document management repository which helps the collaboration process, but most companies aren’t even doing that. The problem with these document management systems is that they are within your companies’ firewall so collaboration is usually limited to employees of the company, but collaboration has no bounds. In today’s global economy people need to collaborate with customers, suppliers, and even competitors as part of standards setting bodies.
GE’s move is a sign of things to come. You can bet yourself that if they get the concept of the “web office” then many companies are soon to follow. Actually, there is more evidence in Robert’s stream (here, here and here). Maybe Robert is just pointing out examples which support his argument and I am just reiterating to make my case stronger, but if you don’t think this is reality, go look for yourself.
If these tools aren’t that great, how are they going to succeed? Well, if you used the web in the mid to late 90′s and if you can remember how limited the whole web experience was at that time you would not have predicted YouTube, Hulu, or Salesforce.com
Technology moves at an amazing speed and Zoho is a perfect example of that. I have been following their products for a while and every time I visit their site, I see some new product offerings. Extrapolating to 2012 there is no doubt that these tools will be up to the task and many more companies will be using them. It makes sense. You no longer need to install programs on your desktop, you no longer need to email files around. You can get new features as soon as they are ready, you can access your files from anywhere. You need to collaborate with someone outside your corporate firewall? No problem, just share that single document with them. In some cases you can all work on the same document at the same time and see each other’s changes as they happen. All your changes get saved so that you can go back to previous versions of the document if you need to. The entire workflow is streamlined. What if you don’t have internet access? No problem, some of these tools have off line mode and you can be sure that by 2012 internet connections will be even more ubiquitous than the are today. (did you know you can already get internet access at McDonald’s?)
So get ready and stay ahead of the curve. When you are analyzing your processes think about your collaboration tools and learn how the innovators are improving their processes. Technology alone does not solve process issues as I mentioned here, but with a good process, the right technology can mean the difference between modest and significant improvement.
Get to the root of the problem if you want to fix it
The other day I read this post about how Jeff Bezos facilitated root cause analysis at Amazon when a worker was hurt at a distribution center and it gave me great insight on how Amazon works. Getting to the root cause of a problem and implementing a fix is the basis of real continuous improvement, but if you look around you will find many who rather deal with problems as they arise instead of dealing with the issue that led to the problem in the first place. It’s like looking for your lost keys every day instead of determining why you lost them in the first place.
Finding the root cause can be difficult in certain instances, but you may find that a lot of the time there are quick fixes all around you in both your personal and professional life which you can fix by going through the 5 why’s.
As an Industrial Engineer, I live and breathe root cause analysis. I always ask deeper questions to everyday problems, but my wife, who has a career in social services didn’t originally think this way. When she would ask me where her keys or her glasses were I would walk her through root cause analysis and illustrate by example how I never lose my stuff because I have a system. I just put things in the same place every day. Annoying as that may sound, I am amazed how my wife now applies these techniques in her job. Now when she recounts stories of how people in her workplace don’t attack the root cause I can’t help but smile.
Root cause analysis is a way of life. Once you embrace it you will find opportunities all around you and you will no longer lose your keys. :-)
A great tool won’t fix your bad process
It’s amazing how often people think that simply implementing a new tool will solve their problems. If there is something to be solved, a computer can surely do it, right? The trouble with this conclusion is that technology is just a piece of the solution. More often than not, the better approach is to spend time understanding your process by defining what you are trying to achieve and determining how the process fits in with the company’s goals. I suggest fixing the process prior to adopting a new tool instead of trying to fix it with the tool.
The need for a new tool may be the catalyst an organization needs to revisit their processes, but usually most people are focused on implementing the tool, not fixing the processes.
It has been my experience that good processes benefit from new tools while bad processes are made worse. If a company starts with the presumption that whatever they do can be done better, then they will learn from the exercise of selecting the tool. First, map the “as-is” process or remap it if it does not match documentation, then step back and figure out why the process was put in place in the first place (what is the goal of the process?). Brainstorm on how it can be improved by taking out unnecessary touches, automating segments, and even eliminating parts which add little to no value.
Once you understand what you intend to improve with the new tool, you will be able to subjectively analyze the potential candidates. Your questions to the vendors and their references will be more specific and you will be able to create demonstration scripts for the vendors to follow as they present their tool as it would work with your processes. Their ability to make your process more efficient will lead you to the right tool for your company.
Throughout the selection and implementation activities you must fight the urge to customize the tool. If the tool does not do what you want, you have two options; change your process, or change the tool. I usually presume the tool is right. After all, most of the time you won’t be the first to implement the tool, so best practices are probably already baked in. The questions to ask yourself are: “Is our process world class?”, ”Are there others using this tool without customization at a similar company?”, ”Are we holding on to sacred cows?”
More often than not you will find that your company is not the model for the Malcolm Baldrige award. Your processes can always be improved. If others are using the tool without customization, how are they doing it? Are there other areas of your organization that need to be improved first? Be willing to slaughter your sacred cows and don’t incorporate poor decisions made on other processes into your new and improved process. Customization means more time and money and most likely it will yield less return than improving more fundamental issues with your company.
This inevitably will mean a longer analysis and selection process, but it will expedite implementation and in the end, the tool will indeed improve your process because you took the time to improve the process along the way.