A relay race is won and lost by the slowest runner! Bottlenecks are like the slowest runner.

Why would I want to do a Value Stream Map, Capacity Analysis or Spaghetti diagram and what should I do with the information once my team has worked hard and developed it? Well, the answer to the question is certainly not display all the information to everyone around so that you can have a good dog and pony show about process improvement the next time a VP comes through (although if you follow through, it is the beginning of a great story). The real reason we go through all of that work is to identify key areas of improvement opportunity and start to implement changes that will allow better performance of the value stream.

One of the key areas of improvement that these tools drive us to is bottleneck elimination. A bottleneck is the process within the value stream that limits the output. For instance, if there are 6 steps in the process of creating a customer order (taking the call may be step 1, Engineering review of the quote request may be step 2 and so on), whichever step requires the longest amount of time to complete is the bottleneck. The output of the value stream can never be greater than output of the bottleneck process. As bottlenecks are identified and eliminated, products or information will flow through them more rapidly and new bottleneck processes will be identified and will need to be addressed.

In order to eliminate bottlenecks, you may consider the approaches below. Of course, the right one will depend on the specific set of circumstances in your value stream.

1. Balance the workload: Other processes may have excess capacity that can be utilized to offload some work from the bottleneck process. This is typically a very good method to alleviate bottlenecks.
2. Hold a kaizen event to reduce the non-value-add portion of the work.
3. Hold a kaizen event to reduce non-value-added work from another process so that work can be offloaded from the bottleneck. This has the added benefit of not disrupting the bottlenecked operation until some work can offloaded. Another kaizen event should follow to reduce non-value-added work in the bottleneck process once some of the pressure has been relieved.
4. Follow the high level value stream mapping with a detailed process map of the bottleneck and look for improvement opportunities.
5. Add resources to the bottleneck. Notice that this is the last suggested approach and I hesitate to put it on the list because it is very overused as a means to reduce bottlenecks. We typically jump to this one first, when it should really be pursued last. It made the list because there are times when adding resources is the only way to reduce the bottleneck, but this should be used primarily when customer demand has increased to a point that the bottleneck cannot keep up, rather than as a solution for poor process efficiency. Bottom line: Make sure you have the data to support the solution of adding more resources before you consider it as a solution.

Good luck and keep looking for the bottlenecks!

Type: Workflow Waste

In the last episode, our heroes were struggling with the office waste of handoffs – the relinquishment of responsibility over tasks, information, data, documents, forms, material goods, etc.  from one party and the delegation of that responsibility to another party.

Once we recognize that handoffs are ultimately waste, it’s time to start doing something about it.  The first thing to do is to find where it is occurring.  Fortunately, this is pretty easy to do using a swimlane diagram.  Even a rough flow of your process organized by departments (swimlanes) would highlight this waste wherever the process flow crosses the swimlanes.

Simply look for any place where the responsibility of the process and documents, data and other information within it change hands between individuals, teams, departments and even companies 

Once you have this, some simple metrics will show you which handoffs are the most important targets.  These could include:

• How long each item takes to be handed off
• The queue size when handed off
• How much rework takes place and
• How much time it takes between completion of work on the document from Alice’s side and resumption of work on Bob’s side.

Once identified, use the following tactics to combat this waste:

• Get rid of the handoff: Get Rid of the handoff: It sounds so oversimplified but more often than not, we find that the handoff may be a result of “the way we’ve always done it” and not a necessity. Other times we can look at a group of back-and-fort handoffs and rearrange the process to optimize these. Whatever the reason, make sure the handoff is even necessary in the first place at that time in that process
• Optimize your batch size: This doesn’t necessarily mean handing off each item as it comes along but perhaps handing off once a week or waiting until there are a certain count is too little.  Find the best fit, which usually means some discussion and experimentation.
• Build integrity in: Find a way to “trust” what comes without auditing the contents for quality.  This may mean continuing the audit for a short while and keeping track of how many are defective and which pieces cause the most angst. The majority of defects will usually be due to a handful of causes.  Fix each one in-turn and fade out the audits after a while
• Push authority down to the lowest RESPONSIBLE level:  Instead of 5 levels of approvals, trusting the line manager to do his/her job and execute the approval would lead to immense efficiencies
• Form cellular groups: Ok, this is a bit advanced and I don’t expect you all to jump on this, but it is one of the most powerful things you can ever do within the office.  Cellular groups are comprised of all the individuals who are needed to send an item through a process sitting together as a team in the same room.  Handoffs and discussions occur between people sitting next to each-other instead of in the next building. The best part is that you don’t need to reorganize or change your reporting structure to execute this tactic.

Out of the 30+ different kinds of wastes we have identified, this one is one of the worst offenders. It is a breeding ground for other wastes, causing inefficiencies, loss of productivity and worst of all, wasted time for your customers – internal and external.  Find it and snuff it out. 

Type: Workflow Waste

Birds do it. Bees do it. You do it almost everyday, especially in the office! I’m referring, of course, to handoffs – the act of turning over tasks, information, data, documents, forms, material goods, etc. to a colleague, group, department, etc. Unfortunately, for something that is such an embedded part of our process, the simple fact is that handoffs are a source of immense waste.

“But that doesn’t make any sense,” you say, “We need to hand our work-product off to the next downstream consumer!” True, but consider the definition of a handoff to see how they are a source of waste. Handoffs are the relinquishment of responsibility over an item or task from one party and the delegation of that responsibility to another party. Handoffs occur on different levels, including handing off within your own team, to another team, another department or another company (i.e., supplier, vendor, partner, customer, etc.). Unfortunately, with each handoff, we get other forms of waste creeping in, including, audits, batching & queuing, and worst of all, waiting. The more removed the party being handed off to is (both organizationally and physically), the worse the associated wastes become.

To illustrate this point, consider Alice and Bob who sit in neighboring cubes (yes, I know you know I hate cubes but that’s a whole different discussion). If Alice needed to hand Bob a document, she would merely do just that: hand it to him. He, in-turn, may have a brief discussion about it with her. If something requires Alice’s attention when Bob is working on it, Bob would just pop his head over his cube and ask Alice to look at it.

Now consider the situation if Bob worked for another organization. Because of the separation, she will most likely email the document to him, where it will sit until he can get to it. (Don’t discount how much the cliché “out of sight, out of mind” is a real contributor to waste.) He will then have to go through the document to make sure everything is in order (a wasteful audit) before he will assume responsibility. This may involve one or several meetings (when schedules align) and back-and-forths until Bob is satisfied. If Bob has to hand off to Charlie, who is a customer, this process will repeat, and so will the waiting and reviews.

Lets compound this by saying that Alice deals with numerous documents every week that need to be processed and handed off to Bob. Is it more likely she will hand them off when each is completed or when several are gathered? The answer depends on how closely they work together and know each-other. The larger the organizational and/or physical gap, the more Alice tends to batch-process. So what’s the big deal? The big deal is that batching leads to a lot of wasted time within a process for that document to just ‘sit’ waiting to be acted upon. Worse, Bob now inherits a stack of items to audit before he will accept them – more time to process before the real work can continue.

The person who really feels this is the end customer. While Alice and Bob are worried about their parts within the whole, the customer experiences the entire time, from start to end. This includes all the batching, waiting and reviews.

One more dimension to consider here are vertical handoffs. Consider Alice’s boss Donna. Many processes dictate that before Alice can hand off externally to Bob, she must get approval. This means she does the handoff song and dance with Donna, who may do it with Emily, her boss, and so on. I am sorry to say that I have worked with more than a few companies that had processes where one or more checkpoints required 4-5 levels of approvals. 80% of the waiting in these check points were due to the third level and above just getting to review it and sign off but the average time spent reviewing the materials to be approved was mere seconds. When asked why, the answer given was usually “We had multiple levels already review it. If they signed off, I have no reason to look at it.” If that’s the case, why have more than one or two levels of approval in the first place? (This is yet another blog)

Now imagine that parties within the process aren’t handing documents off but real people – you and me. We have all experienced this form of waste being the party acted upon. Consider the following processes:

• Help desks (especially with credit cards): Giving information to the automated attendant and then being transferred multiple times, each time being asked the SAME information (audit)
• Restaurants: different person taking order, delivering drinks, and delivering food (each time they are verifying they have the right customer while you wait and your food gets colder)
• Airports: Dragging bags from check-in over to a different drop-off point at airports

I would wager that you have experienced this waste in many more forms as a customer. Tell us about them. We’d love to hear from you.

Stay tuned – same Bat-topic, same Bat-channel. In our next post, we’ll discuss how to find this waste and some ideas to overcome them.

Type: Data and Information Waste

There is an old saying in the Lean Six Sigma community that audits and inspections are waste.  And again and again I see examples where this is reinforced.  Audits, while sometimes necessary, are usually wasteful because it requires someone to check the work product of another – the work product that should have been right in the first place.  To truly ensure quality, find ways to build integrity into the system that won’t let the mistake happen in the first place.

The one situation where I see the most extreme example of waste because of audits and inspections is where someone checks values or data outputted by an electronic system by recomputing them manually.  

Variations of this type of waste are:

• Manual checking of data that has been entered electronically
• Manual checking of results that have been computed electronically
• Manually removing incomplete entries
• Removing bogus entries e.g., bad phone numbers, etc.

Keep in mind here that the term ‘manual’ could be by hand or with another, independent electronic tool like Excel.  The point is work the system is doing is being redone, usually because it isn’t trusted.  Whether this is for accuracy, completeness, or other reasons, it is redundant checking that should not need to be done.

I once worked with a global Fortune 500 company trying to find root causes to the problem of sales professionals who would not get their commission check on time.  I don’t have to be a sales professional to tell you that this was not a good situation.  The commission checks were on average 7 days late with extremes of 20+ days late.  Process map and some data in hand, we performed a root cause analysis.  One of the worst areas of delay was a manifestation of this waste. 

Right after the quarterly sales figures were in and the automated commissions calculated, the process map showed a span of quite a few days where several administrative assistants manually recomputed the commissions for each Sales professional to make sure what the system had generate was correct.  This was going on for thousands of sales professionals.  Part of the reason was mistrust in the system to compute the wrong figures because something like that happened a decade ago and part of it was simply, “This is the way we’ve always done it!”  Although this is the largest example of this waste I have ever seen, it is remarkable that I see this waste hiding in an overwhelming percent of processes I work with.

Once you’ve identified this waste within your processes, ask the most powerful question in the world: “Why?” More specifically, “Why are we re-checking information?”  Amazingly enough, most people who live with this issue simply respond, “We do it because we don’t trust the system.”  The deeper questions then become, “Are we finding errors in the system?  If so, why aren’t we having them fixed? Are these discrepancies the exception or just the rule? If not, what the reason?”

Many times I hear that it is too expensive to fix the system.  This is extremely short-sighted.  Looking at a one-time expense vs. the expense for the time taken by one or more people to constantly do this work, not to mention the delays to the customers (internal and external) will easily justify the return on investment of a fix.

Have you seen this waste in your environment?  If so, comment about it. I’d love to hear from you.

I wanted to let you know about an interactive webinar that I thought you may be interested in called ‘The Top 10 Wastes in the Office’ on Monday, May 3rd at 2:00pm Eastern.   

Waste is any item, practice, task, process, etc. that adds no value to customers or shareholders.  It is all around us but we rarely see it as waste.  Join us for this free web event on what we consider 'The Top 10 Forms of Waste in the Office'. We will review definitions of value and waste followed by counting down some of the largest forms of wasted found in the office, including waste due to data and information, workflows and employees.

THIS IS NOT A TRADITIONAL WEBINAR.  Don’t expect to simply listen and type in questions at the end. This webinar will include interactive exercises and discussion.  Along with slides, you will see the instructor at all times via a LIVE streaming video.

Our goal is for you to start identifying waste in your own workplace immediately after this session.

For more information, please browse the webinar page.

Please feel free to forward this to anyone you think may be interested.

Type: Data and Information Waste

No matter which office environment and industry I have encountered, this type of waste is always prevalent and always a source of massive inefficiencies.  Redundant input and output of data occurs when the same data is entered or reported more than once without adding any customer value.

There is at least one place where we have all experienced this: The doctor’s office.  Every time we see a doctor for the first time, we are asked to fill out new patient forms.  Do you ever notice that an overwhelming amount of information you are filling in is duplicated across forms.  Who does that benefit?  Certainly not you, the customer!  The same applies your son or daughter’s school enrollment and other forms or information given during a call to a credit card company.

Although both these examples are the customer’s perspective, it doesn’t have to be.  This waste is prevalent within work processes, especially during handoffs from one party (or team) to another.  Furthermore, it may also occur electronically.  Redundant data entry will create more opportunities for error and creates work that shouldn’t need to be done. 

In addition to inputs, redundant outputs of data are just as bad.  One widespread example of this is creating the same report in different formats for different internal customers.  I once worked with a global organization that had 12 particular VPs receiving the same report but with the colors and formats varying according to each’s specifications, which frequently changed.  When we compared them, more than 95% of the information was the same.  However, the cost of supporting the formats was enormous.   To boot, most of the report past the first page was ignored.

This waste is deceptively hurtful and needs to be stomped out little-by-little.  The next time you are at work, look for these and suggest changes.  You will be amazed at even how much more efficient things are when removing even the smallest duplications.

What examples of redundant or duplicate inputs and/or outputs have you experienced?  Please share them with us through the comments.  We would love to know.

Type: Data and Information Waste

No matter which office environment and industry I have encountered, this type of waste is always prevalent and always a source of massive inefficiencies.  Redundant input and output of data occurs when the same data is entered or reported more than once without adding any customer value.

There is at least one place where we have all experienced this: The doctor’s office.  Every time we see a doctor for the first time, we are asked to fill out new patient forms.  Do you ever notice that an overwhelming amount of information you are filling in is duplicated across forms.  Who does that benefit?  Certainly not you, the customer!  The same applies your son or daughter’s school enrollment and other forms or information given during a call to a credit card company.

Although both these examples are the customer’s perspective, it doesn’t have to be.  This waste is prevalent within work processes, especially during handoffs from one party (or team) to another.  Furthermore, it may also occur electronically.  Redundant data entry will create more opportunities for error and creates work that shouldn’t need to be done. 

In addition to inputs, redundant outputs of data are just as bad.  One widespread example of this is creating the same report in different formats for different internal customers.  I once worked with a global organization that had 12 particular VPs receiving the same report but with the colors and formats varying according to each’s specifications, which frequently changed.  When we compared them, more than 95% of the information was the same.  However, the cost of supporting the formats was enormous.   To boot, most of the report past the first page was ignored.

This waste is deceptively hurtful and needs to be stomped out little-by-little.  The next time you are at work, look for these and suggest changes.  You will be amazed at even how much more efficient things are when removing even the smallest duplications.

What examples of redundant or duplicate inputs and/or outputs have you experienced?  Please share them with us through the comments.  We would love to know.

Lean is the constant pursuit of identifying and eliminating waste and there are many different tools that Lean practitioners use to accomplish this goal, but they all align with the one guiding principle of identifying and eliminating waste. We will discuss many types of waste in upcoming posts, but we should lay some ground rules and agree on some basic principles before going too deep.

First, let’s agree on how to define waste. I will give you the accepted definition, but your input would make this a much richer exploration, so please respond by adding to my definition or challenging it as you see fit. Primarily, waste is the opposite of value. Of course, this leads to the question of what is value. Since value may be a little simpler to get our minds around, let’s first define it as anything the customer is willing to pay for. Think of value as something that changes the form, fit, or function of a tangible product that the customer buys, or any service that someone is willing to pay for. Ultimately, this means that waste is any activity that doesn’t change the form, fit, function or value of the good or service. 

Next, we should discuss waste elimination as a philosophy. I contend that total waste elimination is a lofty goal that can never fully be achieved and is somewhat nebulous and idealistic. It may even be irrelevant. However, we should never accept waste that we see and we should be in a constant battle to eliminate it. 

Finally, the relationship between work and waste should be highlighted. Virtually all waste is work, but the opposite is certainly not true. Just because we classify an activity as something that the customer is unwilling to pay for doesn’t mean that it isn’t work. In fact, the very reason we strive to eliminate it is because work is required to perform the activity, but isn’t rewarded by the customer. We must always be mindful of this and be careful how we present our findings as we search for waste. People often take offense when an activity that they exert great amounts of energy to complete, is classified as wasteful. An employee who takes pride in his work will often feel stressed, angry or hurt at such an assessment. Handling these situations with empathy and coaching can make the difference in whether or not someone is willing to help us eliminate wasteful activities or not. After all, they are more than likely tired at the end of their work day, even if the customer is unwilling to pay for their activities. Being sensitive to this and helping employees understand how to eliminate waste without disrespecting their effort will help get everyone on board with our waste elimination efforts and maintain a healthy sense of respect.

This post will be followed by 30 or so more over the next few months which will deep-dive into different forms of waste in the office as well as suggestions on how to remove them.  Each post is meant to teach you how to see that particular form of waste.  We would love to hear examples for each from your environment one as well as what you did about it.