Maybe She's Born with It -- Maybe It's Modeling

Welcome to Model Monday!

Model Monday is a weekly series where we break down scenarios in different industries, organizations, and departments and explain how you can build a simulation of them in Process Playground.

This week's Model Monday prompt ????????

Change Orders for Residential Home Building: Understanding the "Best Case Scenario" to experiment with improving the change order process.

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0?? - This model has two items: Change Orders and Meetings

1?? - Generate Change Orders. Set the distribution to match how many Change Orders are created in real life.?

2?? - Split off the percentage of Change Orders that need further discussion with other parties. This percentage should be based on real data.

3?? - Use multiple Servers in an Activity Block to simulate discussing multiple change orders simultaneously. In this model, we're accounting for the back-and-forth time to resolve with other parties as this single Activity Block rather than modeling each individual reply. Simplifications like this can help maintain an accurate model with fewer blocks, but be sure that your choices are backed by data.

4?? - Set the meeting schedule. A Meeting item is created in this demand block to simulate a daily meeting to resolve multiple change order issues simultaneously. The option "No Demand at Start Time" is checked in order to wait to create the first Meeting.

5?? - Split off a percentage of Change Orders that need to be escalated to a meeting. These Change Orders will wait in the Flexibatch until a Meeting item arrives.

6?? - Use the Flexibatch block to "set the agenda" for the meeting. This Flexibatch block requires exactly 1 Meeting item before it will allow the batch to continue. With its maximum EUs set to 9999, the Flexibatch will collect the incoming Change Orders until the Meeting item arrives. Then, the entire batch will continue.

7?? - Unbatch the Flexibatch Item. To ensure that our Change Orders are properly separated from the Meeting, we're putting a Queue here with Unbatch All checked. This will unbatch the Flexibatch item that comes in and do nothing if Change Orders flow through.

8?? - Turn Off "Allow All Items" in each Exit Block and add Meeting to one and Change Orders to the other. This will divert each of those item types into their proper Exits.

This model allows you to experiment with how different policies might affect the speed at which the Change Orders make it through to implementation. For example, how might you reduce the number of Change Orders that need to be discussed? Or, how might you reduce the time spent consulting with other parties? Can new steps be added to reduce the meeting times?

Whether for use in a Lean Six Sigma project or to support training by creating 'virtual Gemba' models for students to work with, process modeling has become an integral part of the continuous improvement world.

Models expand the boundaries of possible improvements by allowing studying and testing more expansive changes than small, incremental ones without much investment.

Test before you invest! ?? Learn more about what Process Playground can do for you!

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