Category Archives: Business Process Improvement

Making the world a better place through the healing energy of lean six sigma

Email Insight

29 Tuesday Jul 2014

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I discovered today that if you send an email promising an attachment, but you forget to attach it, you’re far more likely to have a real interaction with the recipient. Today, I was using a mail merge in Word to send out a friendly reminder to about 85 people at work that I didn’t know. I asked them to do a simple task, and to follow the attached instructions, which they had received a couple of times already but chose to ignore,

Of the 85 people I contacted, I got 30 emails saying “Hey, where’s my attachment?” I learned that 10 people had left the company unexpectedly. Another 15 found their old instructions and signed up without bothering to engage me.

Now this was the third time they were asked to do this, so it was surprising to me that 55 out of 85 recipients were checked off my list, leaving a short list of people who would do well to take my time management class.

I really connected with the 30 folks who wrote back. It was a chance to wish the sick people a get well soon, and to say goodbye to a few people who were on their way out.

It was unexpectedly productive to withhold the needed information on the third go round. Food for thought.

Pittosporum Rescue

05 Monday May 2014

Posted by in Business Process Improvement, Creativity

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As a youngster I had never understood the aphorism

Necessity is the mother of invention.

To understand it, I needed to experience it. This morning I finally realized what it meant.

The past two weeks brought extremely dry, hot weather to the San Fernando Valley. Scorching desert winds blew through the garden, and reduced our Pittosporum Silver Sheen to a half-dead bundle of twigs. But it has not died. I watered it regularly, but I discovered that the root ball had dried out and needed a slow drip of H2O in order to mend. The water just wasn’t soaking in. A slow drip the best way to persuade the powdered dirt to let in the water.

The solution I first devised seemed like a winner. I drilled a 1/16 inch hole in the bottom of a 5 gallon bucket and placed the hole over the root ball. This morning, I expected an empty bucket, but there was an issue: as the water turned the dirt to mud, the little bits of wood in the mulch floated up and blocked the hole, and the drip was essentially stopped up.

When I lifted the mostly full bucket, the slow constant dribble began again. I set it on the edge of the planter and watched it drip in a spot about twelve inches away from the root ball.
“Hmm, maybe I can channel the water to the root ball with some sort of mini aqueduct,” I thought. For some reason, a shoe horn came to mind. I went inside and got my shoe horn. It was way too short.
I needed something with a channel, like the sides of a shoe horn, but longer. A lot of odd solutions came to mind…a turkey baster? Impractical and we only have one…I wouldn’t want mud in my Thanksgiving gravy. I rummaged through my kitchen drawers and found two wooden incense holders. One wasn’t long enough, but two would be. I inverted a 3 inch perennial pot and placed it below the bucket drip. I propped the first incense burner in lean-to fashion against the inverted pot, and the stream began flowing in a perfect channel into the dirt, about 8 inches away from the sweet spot.
After a great deal of experimentation, I was able to get the second incense burner positioned to receive most of the water from the first incense burner, but there was some water loss at the transfer point. The second incense burner did get some of the water where it was needed, so I shrugged and walked away.
Here is where the aphorism ends. I had invented a rather inefficient but functional Rube Goldberg-esque solution to the slow drip necessity.
Then I went inside and drank my morning cup of Reishi Tea. Here is where my particular skill set kicked in. Reflecting on my inspired but inefficient garden rescue, I suddenly realized that I had built the whole contraption based on where I had randomly placed the very heavy five gallon bucket. If I moved the bucket to a better spot on the edge of the planter, it would only require one incense burner to reach the root ball! I moved the heavy bucket to its optimal position, retired one of the incense burners, and watched in amazement as the new device did its work perfectly, delivering 100% of the water to the root ball.
So I have a second aphorism to add to the original :

Necessity is the Mother of Invention; Reflection is the Mother of Efficiency.

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Scorecards and Those Nasty Green Potato Chips

14 Saturday Sep 2013

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One of the best ways for a company to improve its performance is to provide timely feedback to its employees and managers on how they are doing relative to their goals.  The tool most often cited is called the “Balanced Scorecard”

To build a balanced scorecard, the organization determines its Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and then begins measuring them against a desired standard.

For instance, in a potato chip sorting facility, one KPI might be number of green chips discovered by the packaging facility, which would indicate that the potato chip sorters had a point of failure.green-chip_5

Each chip might be considered a single point of failure, and if they process 1 million chips per day, we would say perhaps that no more than 30 green chips per day can be discovered at the packing facility.

In a 20th century style factory, each day, the number of green chips is counted at the packaging facility and reported back to the sorting facility.  In some cases, the packaging facility may grow weary of writing daily green chip reports, and they may switch to a weekly or monthly reporting model.

The reports are then compared to the number of potato chips produced that day and a metric is developed.

Here are some imperfections in the 20th century method that we can definitely wipe out with the tools we have been given over the past two decades.

1. The delay in reporting means that the sorting facility is basing its grades on data that has aged a day, a week or even a month.  It loses relevance the older it becomes.

2. There are five potato chip sorters, and we are grading them as a team.  If one of the five is a slacker, he may drag down the overall number.  The lead sorter may need to step up and take ownership for poor performance by her colleague.

3. The model measures performance, but it does not “heal” performance.  In other words, the only way to improve performance is to grade the chip sorters and ask them to figure out how to improve the grade themselves.

4. This will inevitably lead to “grade grubbing” – it’s not our fault, and we want you to exclude this population of green chips because they all came from Montana instead of Idaho, and there were thirty-thousand green chips in the batch (although the true number may be quite a bit lower, it’s not measured).  And besides, it’s not fair that you give me a bad grade just because Bill is slacking off on the job and taking coffee breaks at unscheduled hours, and, and and…

potatosortHere is a different way to approach the situation, based on 21st century principles:

1. There is an auto-detector for green chips now.  We install one upstream and one downstream from the sorters.

2. The first auto detector reports the number of chips before it gets to the sorters, and the second auto detector reports the number of green chips that are in the batch after passing past the five sorters.

3. A tolerance level is set for the second counter.  If it detects a number that lies outside of expected performance, it will automatically route the batch back through to be sorted again.

4. The team is graded on the number of recounts required, which slows down production, but increases product quality exponentially.

5. As the sorters get better at finding the green chips, you re-set the tolerance level for the second counter to a higher standard.

6. The scorecard is generated instantly, so that a manager with a dashboard can see within seconds when a batch of Montana green chips is coming down the line, and send it off the line to determine if the whole batch should be rejected.

7. The employees cannot grub for grades, because all the relevant information behind the KPI is now being measured and can be double checked.

8. Unreasonable workflows of thirty thousand green chips are treated as exceptions before they hit the sorting facility.

9. Feedback to the workers is instantaneous as well.  If a manager sees three regular batches in a row being sent back for a second sort, he will know that there is something wrong in the sorting, and can effect corrective action immediately.  “Bill is drunk at work again”

10. The reporting burden at the packaging facility is reduced or eliminated altogether.  They need only report by phone or IM when an unreasonable number of green chips arrives, which will lead to an immediate corrective action at the sorting facility.

I dedicate this blog entry to my career services office at my undergraduate university, San Francisco State.  It was there that I first took one of those career tests.  There was a book that gave lengthy lists of what were the ideal jobs for people with my particular dimensions of traits.  On a lark, I decided to look up the jobs that were perfect for someone with a diametrically opposed set of dimensions.  The highest result was “Potato Chip Sorter.”

“Nobody likes a Kobe”

03 Tuesday Sep 2013

Posted by in Business, Business Process Improvement

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The other day, one of my harshest critics at work accused me of being a “Kobe.”  I don’t give people a chance to do their jobs, I just fix stuff and move on.

Yep.  That’s why my boss sends me in.  I wasn’t stepping all over this person’s toes because they were doing a great job.  I was doing it to correct a situation that had gone horribly wrong and needed acts of heroism and bravery to rescue the accounts at jeopardy.  Allowing that person to do their job is what had happened prior to the disaster.  It was no longer the time for cooperative teamwork and offering people a chance to “fix it themselves.”  They had been given the chance for several months and failed.

My boss has stated many times that I am his “fix-it guy.”  When there is a shitstorm on the horizon, or more commonly, it has hit the fan, he sends me in to do damage control, cleanup, and process improvement. In b-school, we make sure we take the time to offer everyone a chance to participate, make optimum use of their skills, and gain all the advantages of “teamwork.”  Writing a paper or presentation is a democratic process.

In the world of business, there are real dollars at stake.  There are jobs to be lost, accounts threatening to take their business elsewhere.  It is a cutthroat environment that calls for different types of plays besides the “let’s play fair and give everyone a turn” course of action.

I stewed for a long time after hearing this comment “No one likes a Kobe.”  My first thought was – “Well no one likes a David Shula, either.” A bad leader is probably a bit worse than a star player.  And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that coaches definitely like to have a Kobe in their back pocket.  My boss knows I’m a Kobe, and he pulls me off the bench whenever the game is in jeopardy to allow me to bring the team to victory when we are behind.

In fact, the CEO, the COO and the CFO all speak very highly of me, even if I am not particularly well liked among the rank and file managers.

To the rank and file, I say – if you see me coming, you better believe it means you or your department has screwed up.  I’m not here because you are an awesome manager doing a fantastic job despite miserable odds.  I’m there in your department because processes for which you are responsible have broken down and need to be re-engineered to accommodate whatever natural business evolution took place.  You either didn’t have the imagination and creativity needed to find a way to handle the new business processes, or you were just so set in your ways that you figured you could ignore the change and get away with it.

Nope, I don’t think you should like a Kobe if you are a middle manager.  But if you are a CEO, you should see how important the Kobe’s in your organization are, and make sure you keep deploying them as needed to repair the problems caused by the 2nd rate players.

These are your “internal consultants” and they cost quite a bit less than hiring a consulting firm.  When you identify them, make sure you know how to use them.  They’re a veritable Swiss Army knife of problem solving and process repair.  They will take your organization several light years forward with a few quick strokes.

Someone who appreciated me overheard the Kobe comment, and waited until the critic left the room to give me a compliment to offset the insult.  They said “you’re the Wolf.”  They were referring to Harvey Keitel’s character in Pulp Fiction, Winston Wolfe, who is sent in to clean up when a hit goes awry.  That seemed a little more appropriate.  I don’t like basketball anyway – but that should be obvious, since I used an NFL metaphor to counter a basketball insult.  To me, it’s all just “sports.”

The myth of first-mover advantage – illustrated

17 Saturday Aug 2013

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magicmesh

The glory of Magic Mesh

When studying strategy, we often learn about the concept of core advantages – those traits a business has that protect it from competition. One such trait, which is only temporary, is called “first-mover advantage.” Because a business is the very first to do something, it has an opportunity, if it moves quickly, to lock in a loyal customer base and corner the market.

In truth, there are tremendous disadvantages to being the first, or even the second to enter a business. Look at social media. How many of you go to visit your Friendster account to see how it’s doing? Have you “outgrown” myspace? Facebook studied the mistakes of its competitors, and it was like a free laboratory for them to develop something better.

In my own life, I had an experience of benefiting from the mistakes my early adopter friends made. For over a year, I have wanted a “Magic Mesh” screen door as seen on TV. We need ventilation in the house, but living where I do, there are wasps, flies, mosquitoes, june bugs, crickets and other critters that treat an open door as an invitation to join my family. We also have a dog, Miss Patsy, who would be flummoxed by a built-in screen door.

A good friend of mine is the first to buy something in every instance. He had a magic mesh as soon as it was available in stores. I went to visit his house, and when I experienced the “magic” of the magnets, I was hooked. But he said to me “This sucks. It keeps falling down, and I had to nail it in place.” I was so disappointed.

I visited another friend who had two of them in boxes, waiting to return them to the store. “They don’t work, they fall down – the velcro is no good.” But I wanted a “Magic Mesh” so badly, and the magnets were really, really great. They completely solved a problem that nothing else out there could solve.

This week, I was shopping at Target, and I saw the magic mesh in the TV Only section of the store. I sighed and picked it up. Immediately, I noticed two things.

First, the box said “New and Improved.” Second, the price had dropped from 19.95 to 14.95. Knowing all that I did, and feeling completely forewarned yet forearmed, I bought the magical screen door and brought it home.

Today, I opened the box and read the instructions VERY CAREFULLY. There was a lot of verbiage about how to ensure your Magic Mesh stays in place. There were three steps that I know my other friends probably did not take, because they probably weren’t in the set of instructions they got.

1. It told me to find the center of the door and mark it. I finally got to use my “center-finding” yardstick that ended up in my tool collection from parts unknown.

2. It said, in bold print, that you must hold each piece of sticky velcro pressed against the door frame for 30 seconds before letting go. I did that.

3. Lastly, it now comes with a little box of matching decorative tacks. It showed where to place each, and stressed that they must be nailed into the door frame, not the wall next to the door frame.

So far, so good. The dog figured out instantly how to use the screen door, and we will have a cool breeze blowing through the house tonight, if the weather cooperates.

Even before I discovered the “improvements” – I had vowed to further leverage this great piece of genius with my staple gun – so if the “new and improved” model still turns out to have issues staying in place, I will simply staple gun it until it can’t come down.

I watched others struggle and fail before moving in to use what I know is a fundamentally great product. Businesses need to remember this when their research budgets are cut – it’s cheaper to study a competitor or make use of existing technologies to gain advantage than it is to develop something completely brand new.

That’s not to say that creativity is a waste of time – it isn’t. But you can be just as creative improving something as you are when inventing it from scratch.

You cannot offshore janitors

10 Saturday Aug 2013

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I recently shopped at my favorite bargain store and needed to use the bathroom. I groaned inwardly because I know this chain has terrible restrooms. Nature’s call was urgent, and the checkout line was long, so I decided to chance it.  What awaited me was the filthiest first world bathroom I had ever encountered.

Tiles were missing, and a steady leak from the toilet had caused a feces-fed mildew to form at the edge of the grout. Behind the toilet was an improvised heroin cooker made from a soda can. The wall was stained with poop, blood, and a variety of other bodily fluids that belonged in our sewage treatment plant. Lying in a heap near the sink is the broken frame of a vanity much like the one for sale just outside the door.

I am sad to say that despite the horrific antechamber of squalor and its many dire warnings to the contrary, I still had to evacuate or otherwise steal some Depends from the gerontology aisle, so I braved the brown stream that led to the water closet.  The seat was “smeared” with a dry mixture of medical waste, and there were no “ass gaskets.”  Inside me, a demon churned and gurgled to be set free.

Cursing the store and the corporate ghouls who had slashed restroom budgets, I lifted the seat to reveal a somewhat cleaner surface beneath.  I wiped it down with the one-ply sandpaper provided and perched on the cold porcelain to finish my business.

As I exited the restroom, I saw a fifth generation xerox of a restroom log, with one indecipherable signature and a date 6 months prior.

How did such a small piece of hell come into existence?

I have an MBA, so let’s go over the chain of events thus far from a business perspective.

1. A well meaning but fearfully misguided consultant comes up with a brilliant plan to cut costs and pass on savings to customers: lay off the janitorial crew and motivate the employees to take charge of the restroom.

2. A limited budget is granted, allowing the managers to pull inventory off the shelves and stock the bathrooms with soaps, furnish with floor inventory, and all they need to do is check the bathroom throughout the day and clean as needed.

3. It works…for about a week until the first serious bathroom boo-boo happens.  Suddenly, the enthusiasm is lost, and the cashiers announce to the manager “I’m sorry, but you don’t pay me enough to do this kind of work.”  The manager is left to fend for herself.

4. The manager asks for permission to hire a company to come clean up the mess and she is told sternly that this is not in the budget.

5. The manager agrees with her employees, and they leave the bathroom alone for six months.

6. A customer has irritable bowel and has no choice but to subject himself to the sorrow and squalor of the unisex cesspool.

Suddenly, I understood what my mother meant when she said “someone needs to write a letter.”  Of course back then we were dirt poor and could not really afford to waste time and money on composing and mailing a letter…but now we are in the internet age.

Here is where I think there may be a generation gap.  A millennial would go directly to social media and let their complaint fall on the eyes and minds of their social circle…but I’m old school.  I went to the website and persistently dug into their corporate “About Us” page until I found the holy grail, the feedback form.

I did not attack the store, I went straight for upper management, because I know the problem lies with them.  I explained my experience to them in colorful, restrained language.  I also gave my theory as to what was the root cause.  I stressed that this was not the only bathroom of its kind, and the store should not be held accountable for a sinister corporate scheme that backfired all over the customer.

And that was it.  I directed my frustration at the people who needed most to hear it, and asked the Universe to take care of the rest.

Flash forward to today, when I finally got off of my overweight ass and decided to finally get around to starting my blog.  As I was trying to decide where to begin, my phone rang, with a local number I did not recognize – which I always find exciting.

Hello?

Hello, is this Mr. (mispronounces my name)?

Yes it is.

Hello sir, I am Playa del Toro, the store manager for the [store name] on Sepulveda Boulevard, how are you today?

(Let’s pause to point out that I am no fan of confrontation, and my first instinct was to make static noises and hang up, but there was something in the tone of her voice that led me to believe I should see this call through.)

Hi Playa, I’ll bet you’re calling about my comment.

Yes I am.  I am so sorry you had such a bad experience in my store.

(This was touching because her tone was not false – she sincerely meant it.)

Me too, I love shopping there, and I wish there was something you could do about the bathroom situation.

Well, that’s why I am calling…to thank you.

(Disbelief) Really?

Yes, because of your letter, I was able to persuade corporate to let us hire a weekly deep cleaning crew, and we have a budget to replace the tile as well.

…We continued our pleasantries and I hung up the phone, suddenly realizing what my blog is going to be about.  This is a blog about persistently pursuing improvement in the world.  The store is a great store, and it deserves to be a fully welcoming place to its customers.  I took a small but focused action as a customer, not even as an employee, and I created the change I want to see.

Now let’s go out into the world and become agents for positive change.  Let’s improve things in tiny ways everywhere we go.  Pick up a cigarette butt that isn’t yours and toss it in the trash.  Thank someone for doing a good job who probably never hears it. And if you need inspiration, come back and read on.

I have been in the process improvement field for years and years, so I have a wealth of stories to share…so if nothing happens this week, there’s always twenty years worth of work experience to share.  Thank you, dear reader.  You will become the change you want to see.

If I get a chance, I will go back and take a picture of the new bathroom.