The COO Series - Part 5 - Motion

Every move they make, every step they take - you pay for it.

Think about it. You pay your people to add value to the customer, but the layout and design of your facility and processes might require them to move about more than necessary.

Your business is not a gym where employees get paid to get their “steps in for the day”.

Your customer won’t pay for those steps, so why are you??

Excessive motion, turning, bending, walking, and entering data into multiple systems are waste, and ALL WASTE IS LOST PROFIT.

Are the tools, supplies, and information your people need to add value located right in front of them when needed? If not, you are losing money.?

Are workspaces and file depositories cluttered causing extra clicks, are they searching for materials, digging into files and email chains to try and find information? All of these are wastes of motion. Where transportation is macro, motion is micro.

Wasted motion is not just a waste of energy and money it also can cause injury fatigue and frustration.

On a recent engagement, I noticed that the output of employees continued to fall as the shift progressed. We took a hard look at the workspace and realized the lack of fatigue mats, turning and bending to get tools, work tables that were not at proper heights were contributing to fatigue that continued to get worse throughout the day.

We created a sample optimized workspace, sent two team members to that area, and asked them to work in this new setup and give us feedback. On their first full day, they output more work than the other 8 workers using the previous method. Best of all at the end of the day those two were not fatigued and were still working at the same level they were at the start of the shift. By using this new method (and including employee feedback on how to improve even more) we sustained a 548% increase in the output of that company with 20% less manpower. This might seem like an extreme example but it is closer to the norm than you might expect.

Repetitive motion is the enemy, not just for manufacturing workers but for any job, it's mundane, fatiguing, and unnecessary. Finding ways to improve workspaces means better outputs and happier people.

The default value chain looks like this - Input / Throughput / Output / Outcome

The inputs are the things we need to build what it is we sell.

Throughput is the work we do with those things in order to create a product or service.

Output is what we sell to our customers (our product or service).

Outcome is what the customer experiences from the product and how we service after the sale.

Most "Motion" is found in the throughput aspect of our business. Throughput is where many businesses' financials get murky, they are well aware of what materials cost, they know what they sell the widgets for but they struggle to know exactly what it costs to get Inputs to Outcomes. They can see the macro on the P&L but they can't accurately break that aspect down, instead, they look at throughput Cost of Labor (COL) as a bucket, i.e. something like 20% of revenue goes to Cost of Labor.

The market determines Input costs and can affect your Output price. Labor too is affected by market forces, but, labor costs are variable in that they can be actively reduced and controlled through efficiency or can run away when people are fatigued and frustrated. Where Input and Output costs are known ahead of time, Labor occurs in real-time and can be affected in real-time.

KPI's, incentives, and good management can affect the Cost of Labor and improve it overall, but these are energy-based solutions (requiring time, money, and physical energy) a change to a layout and reducing unnecessary motion is a change in approach and one that can pay off in spades.

A better approach to motion means that even the most inefficient process or person will by the nature of the change, improve, regardless of their experience, effort, or attitude.

To address motion we need to think about our people in a fixed space, the one they occupy when they are creating value.

If that is a customer service person then we know that the time they spend at their desk answering calls or responding to inquiries is the location in which they generate value. Thus any time they are taken away from that location is time that is not "work" but "waste".

Of course, there are times it is necessary to leave that workspace for meetings or training but the unnecessary motions are what we are after. Leaving their space to get files, checking the status of an order, getting something from the printer. Or if they work in manufacturing going after a missing part, a supply, a material, the next work order. All these things take away from the actual value-added work we perform and are wasteful. Although they might seem insignificant they add up and when multiplied by the number of people you have they equate to hundreds of lost hours. Hours that you have been told need to be filled with new hires. Yet, those hours can be recovered through a focus on optimized workspaces and workflows.

When is the last time you optimized your layout for efficient use of your resources? If you haven't there is no time like the present.

Serial Entrepreneur, connector, and content creator, Derrick Mains has authored three books on Lean Management pitched, produced, and starred in the Crackle Original Docuseries “Riding Phat” and helped build (as President and COO) one of the most notable brands to come out of Arizona in the last decade, Phat Scooters.

Derrick applies his experience and unique perspective in his consulting work with Playbook Systems where he works with companies to improve their operational inefficiencies and improve their bottom line. ?