See the process

Over the years, I have found getting processes and procedures out of the head and putting them on paper make process improvement highly effective by creating the ability to see the entire process from begining to end at one time.  It takes tremendous effort but yields tremendous results.

I once visited a food manufacturing plant to implement a new accouting process.  We (meaning the accounting staff) spent the entire first day mapping each step of every staffer in a workstream during a closing period.  The next morning we reviewed the map looking for missing steps, then took a step back.

The team quickly identified redundancy when they saw two individuals did identical work.  They streamlined nearly 50% of the process with a simple solution: reassign tasks.



Current Process



New Process



What "seeing the process" can do:

• Show complexity, gaps, and/or redundancies
• Compare actual (current state) versus ideal (future state) processes to identify where to focus efforts
• Allow team members to agree on a single process
• Provide training

This series will provide some practical tips and insights to mapping a process.

Always show the data!

This week I began to encounter a little bit of resistance mainly due to perceived priorities.  A lot of people have a lot of passion for the issue I vaguely posted about last week, but have hesitated to make time to review the roadblocks to making a permanent change, yet I need their input to progress.  How can I influence them to change their priority?  With data!

Armed with historical trends (showing a significant spike in occurences of the problem in question) and  verifiable information on the "culprit" (a single component used on several assemblies), I can clearly show the impact of the problem in the following areas:

• customer service
• inventory accuracy
• rework costs (labor and materials)

Couple this with the frequency of the problem occurring, others would likely want to make changes somewhere.

Instead of approaching an engineering manager to ask for a moment of his/her time to talk about a lingering problem everyone is aware of, which he/she says will have to wait, I can now bring the quantified results and ask him/her to take a look and let me know what they think.  This approach will be perceived as a quick discussion and will create the window of time needed to get the input I need to move ahead.

Gemba rocks!

Gemba creates such a powerful understanding of a process.

This week I researched a persistent problem with potential for serious customer service issues.  I met an individual who very willing walked me through the process to physically show me the controls in place to prevent the problem from occuring.  We eventually found ourselves in the warehouse opening boxes of kitted parts.

Instead of seeing the control on the only example we had in stock, we found the actual problem in progress completely undetected!  What a great find!  Of course, she wanted to know why her system did not work, especially when her information showed the correct parts.  And since we were already out on the floor in the location where the process might have broken down, we very quickly saw the gaps.

She commented several times during our 2 hours together that we never would have found the problem if I had not come to her asking questions.  In reality, we would not have discovered the problem if we did not go and see for ourselves.

It's not enough to talk about the problem.  There is great value in going to see the problem itself.

What's happening today?

I recently was hired to improve processes.  For the last 2 weeks I have studied the processes as they exist today.  Two characteristics stand out strongly:

1. Good documentation of processes exist, but does not get followed.
2. The various departments that tend to point fingers at each other actually all try to accomplish the same goals.

My initial approach will generate value stream maps from the existing documentation to create broad visibility of the processes.  This will allow us to see where adherence falls short.  I will also generate cross-functional flow charts of the processes so each of the groups can easily see where hand-offs can more effectively occur and, more importantly, illustrate to them they really are aligned in their objectives.

By taking a step back to look at the processes as a whole, small changes can methodically be made that will generate large benefits.  I will post some examples as they occur.