How To Save 30 Minutes Every Hour

As I get older, I have realized the one thing I can’t make more of is time. We can make more sheet metal parts, more money, more capacity, but we can’t make more time.  That is until I saw this fantastic video from Jeremy Sullivan at the Lean Workshop forwarded by Lesa Nichols, my lean mentor.  Lesa has been helping ETM re-think lean manufacturing for years, but finally this video helped me see more about information flow.

Like most of us, you work in an office, flooded with emails, meetings, paperwork and phone calls – not a factory floor with machines, WIP, and production schedules. How can our lean manufacturing efforts help you with your information overflow?  How can we help you save 30 minutes every hour as Jeremy mentions?

Lesa, and the folks from the Lean Enterprise Institute, have helped me see that there are 2 value streams in every operation – material flows and information flows. Most often manufacturing companies work on material flows because it is so easy to see the waste in transportation, storage, overproduction, etc.  With information, particularly digital information, it is harder to see the wasted time in sending too many emails or having too many meetings, the queue times waiting for information or the over documentation that might be occurring.

To help reveal the information waste, I’d like to take Jeremy’s example from the video and re-interpret it for information flow. Think of a report that you and your team generate.  It could be a production report, or a financial report or a market report.  It could be a report you generate alone or one that you generate with other team members.  In a typical scenario, you break the work to do the report into several pieces.  Maybe you assign some of the pieces to others.  Maybe this is even a weekly report where everyone knows their roles.

In traditional batch mode, you collect all the information for the first part of the report, then all the information for the second part, then all the information for the third part and continue until the report is complete to draw your conclusions. Using Jeremy’s batch example, each bit of information takes one minute and passed through 5 steps before the final report is done or 50 minutes for the report.  What would it look like if we took 1 piece of information and passed it along to be processed before waiting for all the other pieces to be completed?  Using Jeremy’s model, the 50 minute report would take only 14 minutes to prepare.

But it can’t work that way! My argument is that we don’t think that way but it can work that way.  From a very early age we are taught to break a complex problem into pieces and solve each piece to solve the complex problem.  Then we need help and add more people to our problem solving team.  Some of them aren’t available immediately, so we wait.  Some others are available, but overwhelmed with requests so they process information slower than others.  And still others don’t hear your requests correctly and solve the wrong problem!  All of a sudden our “14 minute solution” now is a “50 minute solution” or to put it another way, we now have batch information processing.

What if you got the team together in a room, turned off the distractions and passed one piece of information to the next for “processing”, who passed it to the next, and so on until the report is completed? Everyone would be available so there would be no stalled information.  The overwhelmed folks would stand out as soon as they worked on the first piece of information so we could get them help.  The folks that heard the request wrong could be corrected on the first piece, not at the end of the report.  Most importantly, everyone would feel connected to the team, knowing everyone was committed to the quality of the report as well as the pace of producing that report. What if?

from ETM Manufacturing http://etmmfg.com/3644