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.
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