It’s Just Cloth on a Stick, Right?

“Observing and commenting, it is a piece of cake.

Experiencing and sharing, that is a piece of work.”

― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

Part 1 - What if your process is too easy to improve?

If you have ever been to a convention or trade show you might have noticed a bit of standardization among the smaller booths. These are the exhibitors that are using the standard look established by the show and often consist of a ten-foot square piece of carpet and an eight-foot-tall panel of drapery behind the booth. Beyond those basics, exhibitors add signs, chairs, tables, displays, or any number of other customizations.

When you think about the number of times that a company has to set up carpeting and drape for booths, you can imagine that standardization would be important. But you might also be thinking: How much standardization can a company put into the carpet and drape? I mean, isn’t it pretty easy to lay down a single piece of carpet and put some cloth on a stick? That was exactly what my team thought when we took on this project.

Now, on the surface, the drape is pretty much exactly what it appears to be, and the components are universal across trade show companies. A single ten-foot section starts at the bottom with two metal plates that sit flat on the floor. Each plate has a pin that is either in the middle of the plate or near one edge (more on why later). Sitting over each pin is an eight-foot-high aluminum pole. Suspended between those poles is a telescoping rod that holds between three and five panels of drapery. The drape has a pocket that the telescoping rod runs through to hold it up. See the diagram below and note that all ten elements are easily understood even if you’ve never worked a trade show.

So how much variation could this process possibly have? With only ten pieces that are all very easily understood, it seems very likely that anyone could assemble this structure with no training at all. Obviously, there is no reason to visit the Gemba, or map this process, right? Clearly, if you were to watch teams from across the world execute this simple task, the time to complete would likely be similar, and the methods used nearly identical.

At this point, I encourage you to pause for a few moments and think critically about the processes that it might take (hint, there are more than one), to build this extremely simple display. Think about the workers, the environment, and any potential variations in the product. I will tell you that the colors do change from one show to the next, but other than that, all of the other parts are, for the most part, completely the same. When you are ready, read on and see how close your estimates turned out to be.

Part 2 - Multiple Processes

In order for the drape to be efficiently installed behind each booth, several steps must happen in a very distinct order. Since the drape colors are specific to the overall event and there are many colors to choose from, it wouldn’t make much sense to send all of the possible colors to the show. Instead, the drape is pre-strung on the telescoping rod in a warehouse where the inventory of all colors is stored. These rods are hung on a rolling cart that is sent to the show for installation.

So our first Gemba is the warehouse team that pre-strings the drape and places it on the cart. Our second Gemba is the team that hangs the rods behind each booth. Our third Gemba is the team that removes the drape once the event is over. And our final Gemba team takes the drape back off of the rod and places it back in storage. Already our simple little process looks a bit more than what we may have thought at first glance.

Part 3 - Our first Gemba Walks

When we first started looking at these processes, we began in the warehouse. Continuous improvement was not new to the company, so the team had some idea as to why we might be there. But as we emphasized in the first section, building trust was our first and only goal. We were not interested in improving the process, only understanding it and helping to find areas where we might make it a bit easier for the workers.

There are several schools of thought on which direction we should follow when looking at several processes in a single value stream. Some suggest starting from the customer and working backward. Some from the order and following it through to the end. But in our case, this value stream formed a loop with all of the elements running a full cycle from warehouse order, to show installation, to customer use, to show removal, to warehouse storage, only to start again with a new warehouse order.

And since two of our processes happened in the warehouse, and two happened at the show, it seemed to make the most sense to cover as much as we could in each area before moving on to the next. So in the warehouse, we watched the process that the team used to pre-string the drape onto the rods and hang them on the cart. We also watched the process used when removing the drape and placing it back into storage. Here is where the process began to become more than simply “putting cloth on a stick”.

If you consider that drape must be stored in some fashion, the process to prepare a single color for stringing must entail taking the drape from storage. The stored drape is folded, so there must be an unfolding step. The unfolded drape takes up room, and rods often have more than one color as shown in the example. And the worker has to do something with the rod as they move from one color to the next. If it is carried, fatigue after a full shift might come into play. If it is not carried, how can it be held so that each new panel of drape can be added? When you reverse this process at the end and take the drape off of the rod to store it, where do you store each color before it is re-folded? Where do the rods go once all of the drape has been removed?

While observing the Gemba for the pre-string and unstring processes we also had Replacements as defined in Chapters 6 & 7. The workers had to perform their job with observers in their area, asking questions. We also did not have an order for multi-color drape, so we had to Replace our drape order to see that process. The team did not need to unstring any drape that day so they simply described the process to us (all of the process steps were replacements in that case). 

When we finished our first two walks in the warehouse, we followed the newly strung drape to the show to see how it was hung and removed. Surely these steps would be far easier since the variation was only in the colors and how it was strung, right? To make it even easier, we found out that another team was responsible for the bases and uprights, so our process was simply to put the rods of drape on the poles before the show, and then remove them after the show. What could be easier?

Again our focus was solely on building trust and finding ways to make the job easier for the workers. The first thing that the workers told us was that it makes a very big difference where the drape is installed on the show floor. When the show is moving in, large freight doors at the back of the hall are left wide open to allow forklifts to bring in supplies and freight for the exhibitors. With these doors open, the drape that is closest to the doors must not be hung to the floor or it may be affected by breezes or wind coming in through the open doors. So the install process is different when installing near the doors as opposed to deeper into the show.

Another significant challenge is that the upright poles are eight feet high. So the hanging process for most workers involved extending the telescoping rod, pulling the upright out of the base, hooking the rod onto the upright, and then lifting it back into place. But some of the tallest workers could hang the rod of drape without this extra step. Once the rod was in place, the drape was fanned out if they were far enough from the doors, or looped over the rod at the top if they were in a breezy area. Again, taller workers found this easier.

When we got to the removal process, we were again surprised by more variations. In order to store the rod back into the rolling rack, the telescoping rod had to be retracted. This entailed sliding all of the drape to one end to find the retracting button. If the drape was pushed to the fatter end this was easy, but if it was toward the thinner end, it had to be shifted before it could be retracted. If the install team installed all of the rods facing the same way, the sequence was faster than if the team had to feel for which end was which each time.

How much of this variation had you envisioned before you read our findings? While there was some new information, such as the open doors, most of our findings were based on the knowledge we already had about the product. But I will give you another chance to discover even more variation because for our second pass we went to another city and watched a completely different team. Do you think it was the same?

Part 4 - Our Second Gemba Walks

Now that we had completed our first walks, we decided to see the same process as it was performed by a completely different team. Our expectation was that the process would, for the most part, be the same, since the product that was supplied to our customers was, for the most part, the same. We again started in the warehouse, but quickly realized that we had underestimated the complexity of “cloth on a stick”.

The second team had more space in the warehouse as well as more of the rolling carts of drape. While shows could choose any color drape they wanted, this team discovered that some colors were more common than others. Most of their drape stayed on the rods, so they saved time on shows that used these colors. But for shows that wanted a multi-color drape pattern as shown in our example, they pulled each rod, removed some of the drape, and replaced it with the new colors. That took significantly longer.

When we observed the installation process, we found that the install team was concerned that the stitched seams on the drape pockets were not on the same side for every pole in a rack because the drape had been reused several times. They also experienced more wrinkled drape because they spent more time in the racks. During the removal process, we actually found that they used two processes. The first was similar to the first city, where rods were simply removed and placed in the rolling rack. The second was the process they used when the drape was mixed colors or a non-standard color. They spent more time pulling the drape off of the rods and piling it into the bottom of the racks.

Looping back to the warehouse to see them remove the drape was different as the drape sometimes came on rods and other times came piled in the bottom. The warehouse team also used a different folding method for the drape they did store.

After our second visit, we went to a third city. By now, you might realize that we found even more differences than the first two cities. We found more differences at the fourth city as well. The process that we thought was so simple that it couldn’t possibly have many variations looked completely different once we changed out the teams doing the work.

Part 5 - Conclusion

So how much variation had you predicted after seeing the objective that the teams needed to complete? Was it more or less than what we had found? And how many teams do you think we would have to observe before we discovered all of the likely variations used for this one, fairly simple product? Over the next several chapters we will look at variations between observations and propose a model that we might use to describe several similar process maps combined.

Fin

Chapter 9 is complete with 2,162 words bringing my total to 16,210 words of my 50,000 word total (32%) - Though I am now writing a day behind.