Discovery Part 2

Last week one of our co-authors (Pascale Coignet) wrote about the need to set aside time for discovery. So, what does discovery look like? To no surprise of seasoned Lean practitioners, we go to the real place where customer value is created and study the work (Genchi Genbutsu) to better understand what is happening and why it is happening. This real place could be the production facility, the customer service department, a product development team or where the customer uses the products or service that you happen to produce for them. 

The question is, what do you see when you stop and look at an operation? It can of course be awkward at first, watching other people work, but once you get past that awkwardness, what do you see, and can you see what is not there?

At first, we often describe what we see in a superficial manner. It′s a mess, the guy is just standing there, the machine broke down, someone is having trouble answering a customer complaint. You might think to yourself; they must try harder, or as Bill Hicks put it, at least pretend that they are working, clean up the mess! etc. However, If we look closer, we can maybe see someone performing value added or non-value added tasks on a product. This someone might be stretching, or rushing, while doing their work or they might be struggling with the computer system (while the customer is on the phone, maybe complaining about something they themselves have no control over). Regardless, the first step should be to challenge yourself to look deeper. What are they actually doing, what is the flow of human motion while they are carrying out their work, why are they doing it this way? Are we forcing them to do unnecessary movements, clicking multiple times on the computer, going in and out of different windows in the ERP system, or even different programs to find the information they need? can we see unevenness, sometimes rushing, sometimes waiting, or overburden, handling too many customers or performing to many operations at the same time?  What waste can you see if you compare what you see to how the ideal of a continuous seamless and smooth value adding process would look like? 

Learning to see what is really happening , what is missing, and developing a hypothesis of why it is happening or why it is missing is a skill. As Pascale pointed out, we need to set aside time for discovery, and the higher up we sit in the company, the more time we need to spend discovering. However, like any other skill it can be acquired through practice. Some will have more of a knack for it than others, that is natural, but it doesn′t mean that you cannot become good at it. Good at seeing what is right in front of us, and maybe most importantly, what is not there. 

A starting point could be to see if you can observe some of the seven wastes, as they typically reveal underlying issues:

• Overproduction suggests a lack of flexibility
• Defects suggest we lack engineering understand of material, components or processes
• Waiting suggest we lack understanding of takt-time
• Transporting suggest we hold large inventories by speciality (This is especially true in information work where the inventory is immaterial)
• Movement indicates a lack of ownership to the workplace
• Over-processing suggest we lack an understanding of what is critical to quality
• Inventory on hand suggest a lack understanding the importance of relationships with suppliers.

If you look closely enough and every part of the organization becomes visible in one operation. Be it in service or in manufacturing. Do you want to understand employee engagement? You don′t have to look at the employee satisfaction survey, you can look at the workplace organization and listen to the informal conversation taking place around you. Do you care about your employees or do you make them suffer through every operation and every customer complaint?

Look closely and you can see the results of your company′s decisions in Purchasing, in HR, in Supply-chain management and in sales, in real life. Learn to see and discover what you don′t know to start fix your system.

Check out The Lean Sensei and start practicing.