Tag Archives: error proofing

Lean Management For White Collar Work – DO NOT Be Fooled By Well Meaning Consultants

Lean CX, , , , , , , , , , ,

Lean Management white collar

When it comes to Lean Management in general, there is a lot of mis-information and mal-practice out there in the world.  After all, Lean Management and operational excellence sound good at face value.  If it’s been well defined, it will look like “Quality, Delivery, and Cost” – improving quality and tasks being first-time-right, improving delivery times and getting things to customers (and team-mates) faster, and reducing cost.  But most companies and leaders don’t even get that far.

Add to this another challenge – that being a manager often involves many parts of a business, not just manufacturing.

These are areas in your business that need Lean Management too – like technology, software or website development, customer service, sales, administration, human resources, quality assurance, projects, training, change programs, communications and much more.  They can all benefit from the right approach and start to improve on those Lean Management measures of “Quality, Delivery and Cost”.  But it just can’t be done using the old Lean Manufacturing way.

So buyer beware – Lean is traditionally a manufacturing methodology, and few (if any) leaders have gotten it right when applying it to the other important parts of a business – parts that are considered “white collar”.

Every company, even if they are primarily in manufacturing, has these white collar areas to be managed and apply true Lean Management to.  Sales have to be made, scheduling has to be done, items have to be handed between departments, customers have to be served.

So how do we adjust this decades-old approach to a white collar world to achieve real success?  Simple – we strip the principles of Lean and operational excellence back to their core, to the outcome they are trying to achieve, and take the parts that give us a meaningful result as leaders and applying true Lean Management.

Five Steps to Lean Management for White Collar Work

Before we define Lean Management for white collar work, traditional manufacturing Lean is based on a handful of solid principles, most commonly shown like this:

Continue reading Lean Management For White Collar Work – DO NOT Be Fooled By Well Meaning Consultants →

A Framework For Operational Excellence and Customer Obsession

Lean CX, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
This is a powerful definition of Operational Excellence, how it relates to Customer Obsession and has a huge impact on revenue, profit and employee engagement.  You can download a PDF version for yourself, free.  Enjoy!

 

A Framework For Operational Excellence and Customer Obsession

Operational Excellence.  It’s a term most of us have heard, maybe even used, but when it comes down to it few people know what it really, truly means.  Operational Excellence certainly sounds like something we should want – after all, everyone would say they want their business or team to operate well, and we want it to be excellent rather than average, right?

We need Operational Excellence

Operational Excellence is important enough for Jeff Bezos (the richest man in the world and the CEO of Amazon.com) to mention repeatedly in his shareholder letters, so there has to be some value in it.  And let me ruin the ending for you here – because when it comes to well defined operational excellence there is massive value indeed.

It’s a strategy that has helped Amazon become the most feared (and revered) business of the century so far – sending whole industries running for cover at the slightest mention of working there.  It’s a strategy that helped Toyota thrive for over 100 years in one of the toughest industries on earth.  It’s a strategy that took McDonald’s from one store to over 36,000 stores worldwide, and it’s a strategy that enabled Uber to grow to more than 2,000,000 drivers worldwide.  Bezos says:

Congratulations and thank you to the now over 560,000 Amazonians who come to work every day with unrelenting customer obsession, ingenuity, and commitment to operational excellence.

 

The thing is, when Jeff Bezos talks about customer obsession, he’s not talking about meeting a customer at a cash register and giving them a smile.  He’s talking about reducing any friction a customer might have in doing business with Amazon.com, and making it ridiculously easy for them to buy (and continue to buy) from them.

Which gives us some good news.  When it comes to Customer Obsession and Operational Excellence, those two things are 100% related.

Continue reading A Framework For Operational Excellence and Customer Obsession →

Leadership Card 31 – Impossible To Make A Mistake (Lean CX)

Leadership Cards, , , , , , ,

Leadership Card 31 – Impossible To Make A Mistake

Leadership_Card_031_ImpossibleMistake

Leadership CardsView All The Leadership Cards (48)

- or - Have the Leadership Cards delivered for your next meeting

We all make mistakes.  In fact, making mistakes usually is a good way to learn and become better in life.  But what happens when we allow – even encourage – our customers to make mistakes as they try to buy from us?  Or what about your team members, trying to do a good job in your business, but thwarted (yes, thwarted) by long, convoluted processes that seem to trip them up at every turn?

Making things easy is the real key to engaging your workers, getting customers to buy from you, and ultimately getting the results you deserve in your business.  And making things easy is done in a few ways, but one of the best ways is to find a way to make it impossible to make a mistake, as your team or your customer goes through their process.

If it’s impossible for them to make a mistake when they buy from you, they are more likely to buy.  If your team can’t make a mistake in the work that they do, they are more likely to do it.  But it also works the other way.  If it is possible, even easy, for your team to make mistakes, then they may have to redo their task over and over again, costing you more, frustrating them and reducing their engagement.

Designing your work intentionally to make it harder to make mistakes takes work, which is why most leaders don’t do it.  Instead, they fall on the crutch of “hiring the right people” or “hiring people smarter than themselves” and letting those superstars get to work.  But here’s the thing – hiring superstars is expensive.  And even when you do, there’s still an 80% chance they will be a dud – not matching the culture of your team, getting bored with the work, or wanting to go in different directions than your team, and the way they do things is ultimately still hidden in their minds (not made visible for all to see).

It is MUCH better, easier and cheaper for you to simply hire nice people – collaborative people – and give them the right boundaries with a repeatable process where it’s impossible to make a mistake.

After all, McDonald’s did it, and now it’s a multinational company with over 36,000 stores that has run for nearly eighty years.  Uber did it, and it’s now it has scaled across the globe and is worth 70 Billion Dollars.  Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, all the big names you hear about know the power of making it impossible to make a mistake.  They’ve all done it separately in different ways and have all had stellar success.  How will you do it?

Yes, you will have to brainstorm with your team.  Yes, you will have to put in a little extra work to make your process simpler.  But the rewards you will see are 100 times worth the effort.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

Leadership CardsView All The Leadership Cards (48)

- or - Have the Leadership Cards delivered for your next meeting

Leadership Card 25 – What Looks Like A People Problem…

Leadership Cards, , , ,

See The Leadership Card Deck Here

Ease of Use, Lean CX Leadership Card 25 – What Looks Like A People Problem…

Leadership_Card_025_PeopleProblem

Leadership CardsView All The Leadership Cards (48)

- or - Have the Leadership Cards delivered for your next meeting

…is often a situation problem.  Have you ever had a really bad day – maybe your car breaks down, your boss yells at you, you break your watch and then someone asks you to do something and instead of helping out you yell at them to leave you alone?  And they think “What a rotten guy!” when the reality is you would normally help, you were just having a bad day.  It was a bad situation.

People tend to blame the person, instead of realizing that it’s the situation that is the real issue.  If you were having a great day it would be easy to take on one more thing with a smile.  But the situation made you cranky, and lowered your likelihood of helping as a result.

What looks like a people problem, is often a situation problem.  This is one of the greatest lines from an excellent book – “Switch” by Chip and Dan Heath.  And they make an excellent point.  If you change the situation, more often than not you change the people as well.

This is also where designing your work and your customer experience for Ease of Use comes in.  If the work is easy to do for your teams – with no rework, no waiting, no searching, as few steps as possible, and the right result at the end, then there is a very good chance they’ll do it right and do it more often.  The thing is, most people don’t really design their work at all, let alone get intentional about designing their work for ease of use.

Most leaders just let the work happen, and give some vague outcomes to their team to try and make it work.  In reality they are trying to find the treasure without making a map.

And in most cases, it’s not your fault.  The majority of people don’t know how to define difficult work in a way that reveals solutions to their problems.  Having the right framework, in the form of Lean CX, makes it easy.  By ensuring you have a clear outcome and a clear set of steps to get there, you are closer to getting the right result every time.  But by reducing the steps to getting that outcome, ensuring your staff or people know what to do first time without having to ask, make it impossible to make a mistake, and check in to see if they are on the right track, you will be creating a process that is extremely easy to do and you will see the profit, productivity and engagement flow as a result.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

Leadership CardsView All The Leadership Cards (48)

- or - Have the Leadership Cards delivered for your next meeting

Five Minute Lean – Build in Quality with Error-Proofing and Autonomation

Five Minute Lean Excerpt, , , , , ,
Five Minute LeanThis is an excerpt from the book "Five Minute Lean", by David McLachlan - a wonderful book that blends teaching of the tools, culture and philosophy of traditional Lean with a modern-day Lean parable.

You can get the whole book on Amazon here and enjoy your own copy.

Build in Quality with Error-Proofing and Autonomation

‘By making it close to impossible to make a mistake, and making it easy to stop when something is wrong, we can save ourselves many hours in rework and many dollars of waste.’

Using Error-Proofing

Poke Yoke is a Japanese term for “error proofing”.  The idea is to build in quality by providing constraints to prevent incorrect use, making it close to impossible to make a mistake.

An example of this would be a USB cable – you can only plug a USB cable into a USB port – nothing else will fit.  It’s mistake proof!  This is Poka-Yoke.  Another example would be the fact that many cars are unable to start if they are already in gear, or a form with specific drop-down menus so the user choice is limited, avoiding errors.

The question we ask ourselves for Poka-Yoke is:

  • How do we provide constraints to prevent incorrect use in this product or process?

Lean Error Proofing

Figure 22:  An example of error proofing, where plugs around the home or workplace can only fit into the socket they are meant for.

Using Autonomation

Autonomation or “Jidoka” in Japanese, means providing both team-mates and machines with the ability to detect when something is wrong and immediately stop work so they are not passing on defects to the customer.

Doing this also highlights any problems in a process, because work stops when a problem first occurs.  By stopping when a problem first occurs, we can get a consensus on the root cause of the problem (3.3) before we try and solve it.  Then we can put a quick fix in place at first to keep the process moving, and work on a long term fix directly afterwards.

Using an Andon, which is a light that shows the status of a process or operation (such as green for go, red for stop) is one way to use Jidoka.

The questions we ask ourselves for Autonomation or Jidoka are:

  • How do we know when something is wrong?
  • What is the visual signal we would like to see when this happens?

This step is an extremely important part of our ability to make problems visible (4.1) at the Gemba – Jidoka must be a part of each step in our process so defects are never passed through.

It is also one of the main principles of Lean that we “solve problems close in person, place and time”, as they happen.  To give you an example, let’s think back to the Net Promoter Score in (1.3).  If our customer gives us a six out of ten or lower, and we arrange to get this information straight away, we might call them to sort out any problem they might have right then and there, instead of letting it get lost in the system or losing valuable information from the source.

Implementing Jidoka with a Zero Tolerance for Rework

Jidoka is not just about stopping when we have a defect.  At its core it is also about having a zero tolerance for defects and rework.

Before you implement Jidoka in your workplace, an easy way to begin is to have your team-mates set aside any item that comes to them requiring rework, and not work on it at all.  Then, at the end of the shift, collect all the unfinished items and note down the different “defect” types.  You can do a Pareto Analysis (3.2) to see which defect types are the most common, find out why they occur with root cause analysis (3.3), make errors visible if possible (4.1) and stop work if they ever happen again so you can fix them close to the source.  This is Jidoka.

Add any Poke Yoke or Jidoka ideas that fit with your space to your current state Value Stream Map, as a Kaizen burst (2.5).

Five Minute LeanThis is an excerpt from the book "Five Minute Lean", by David McLachlan - a wonderful book that blends teaching of the tools, culture and philosophy of traditional Lean with a modern-day Lean parable.

You can get the whole book on Amazon here and enjoy your own copy.

Check out these selected chapters from the teachings within Five Minute Lean:

Selected chapters from the story within Five minute Lean:

Poka Yoke or Error Proofing: Lean Glossary

Lean Glossary, ,

– Back to Lean Glossary –

Poke Yoke: What Is It?

Poka Yoke (po-kah yo-keh) is a Japanese term that literally means “Mistake Avoid”.  Translating to its English counterpart, it becomes “Error Proofing” and this is how it is used in Lean.

Error Proofing means using methods in a process step that helps our team-mates avoid making mistakes.  In other words, anything that makes it close to impossible to make a mistake becomes our Error Proofing ally in Lean.  The most common example of Error proofing is the household electrical plug – whose cable end is the exact shape and size to fit properly into the wall socket.  A USB stick that will only fit in a USB port in your computer is another great example of things that are nearly impossible to get wrong.

The idea translates to any work process with only a little imagination.  We have online forms with set, specific drop down menus, or character limits for credit card payment fields.  There are dispensers that only dispense the exact amount of an item required, and there are bar codes that are used to scan and record the exact item to avoid human error.

No matter what your line of business, you can find a way to “error proof” it.

By David McLachlan

– Back to Lean Glossary –