The COO Series - Part 3 - How Counting Steps Can Lead to a Leaner Business
This article is one of eight focused on areas where we can find waste in our business and remove that waste to create more manpower (reducing the time it takes for our existing staff to get things done).
"Transportation" is any material or product that moves from one place to another without adding value. This definition encompasses both external movements, to and from your facility, or facilities, or to the end location where the product is consumed (both digitally and physically) and even includes movement within your building itself. Transportation of any item or data consumes resources. Even the digital displacement of electrons as I type this article is a form of transportation. Time, energy, and money are spent in the movement of anything so moving things less saves those resources so they can be committed to other things.
When looking for waste in this area I like to think of transportation as any action that doesn't create value for customers.
"Motion" is another area of waste (that we will address in a later article) but motion is more focused on the actual movement of the physical body when it is in a fixed position (bending, twisting). Transportation is measured by a movement on a map (of your location or the area you service your customers) or even the movement of a mouse while searching for something.
Process mapping can be enlightening when it comes to transportation (and it is a key part of the next seven areas of focus), physically drawing out every single little step on a whiteboard and a spaghetti diagram, and really drilling into each detailed step, looking for redundancy and waste.
Just following the steps of mapping tends to immediately improve the process as the old saying goes what gets measured gets managed.
Here are the steps to follow ...
Make sure that those who perform the tasks are involved in the mapping - maps made by executives are usually the least accurate depiction of reality (I have a slide in one of my workshops that shows the seven steps that a CEO told me were involved in getting a price estimate - the actual process was 52 steps).
The best place to start is at the beginning - a customer order is received (follow it from beginning to end), a call is made to customer service (follow it through to resolution), a product is being built (watch the process from materials being compiled to the time it is shipped).
When analyzing what areas you can improve DO NOT look for big items that require a ton of resources, look for small repetitive things. The big items will have a big impact, but the cost and time that would need to be committed to those things are likely too large to address at this point (you are already short resources - diverting them to a big project is not a wise move). Focus on small things, small things will result in an immediate improvement and will instantly impact the people you work with, reducing their redundancy and making their process smoother. There is also a psychological aspect here of small wins. Piling up small wins will energize you and your team and drive you to continue to make improvements. Many people are considering moving jobs right now, one way to combat this is to make your team feel like they are part of something bigger, that the old way of doing things, the boring way, is on its way out and they have been an intricate part of the improvement.
Just a warning, this mapping of your processes can be difficult for many leaders. I guarantee the amount of waste in your process is far more than you ever imagined. I have seen leaders lose faith in themselves in going through this process (I had a CEO that insisted he should resign after seeing how inefficient his highly profitable company was). I have seen leaders so upset with how bad it is they wanted to fire their entire management team and start over. Hence you must preface this entire process with the understanding that processes are like snowballs rolling downhill - it is the natural state of a process to pick up more and more debris as things move forward. It is not the fault of the people or even the managers it's the fault of the American approach to business (forward at all costs) and never stepping back and thinking through the methods and processes we take to get the work done.
One tip I have if you have a process where people are moving around, gathering items, moving product etc. is to use a step tracking tool to see the amount of improvement (there are hundreds of these on Amazon under $25) measure the before and after and publicize the improvement. I had a client whose call center people walked an average of 16,000 steps a day gathering information, finding files, asking questions. After we revised the process we were able to reduce those steps to 1,500 a day a massive improvement and one that meant we were no longer paying for those 15,100 extra steps each day.
Next time we will talk about inventory and how the changing landscape of the supply chain has changed the rules of inventory.
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. ?