Find opportunities for improvement
Now that you know where you’re trying to go, shave away waste to get there more efficiently.
First, you have to understand the current steps in a given process.
“You can think of it in terms of getting ready for work in the morning,” says Morey, explaining his 18-minute routine: shave, shower, dress and head out the door.
If you wake up, head downstairs for coffee, climb back upstairs for a shower, walk outside to get the paper then back upstairs to brush your teeth, think about how you could simplify the process.
“Identify … any activity that you’re performing that doesn’t directly add value to the process or require you to perform this activity to get the overall done job,” Morey says.
In lean, that’s illustrated with a value stream map.
“On a piece of paper, you simply make a map of all of the major activities that need to be performed in order to achieve some process output,” Morey says. “Then once you create that value stream map, you start to look at, ‘Well, how much does it cost me to perform this step?’ You can measure it either in terms of dollars, if that’s the appropriate measure. Typically, we’ll measure it in terms of time.
“When you map things out and you map the actual flow of information and you map the actual flow of a product or service, it looks like spaghetti — things are just shooting out all over the place.”
Waste may not be obvious in day-to-day operations, but when you look at an illustration of the entire process, you can spot it in those offshoots that jut out instead of pointing toward the goal.
Of course, employees at the functional level should be involved in this process because they know it best. Dialogue with them about the issues that they see.
“You can take a look at, ‘What are customers asking for that we can’t provide? What are the things that cause us the most problems?’” Morey says. “If you start asking those questions, I find that, generally, the intuition within the organization is very strong. The people know what the weaknesses are and if you ask the right questions, they’ll give you the answers.
“They might not necessarily understand the root cause of the problem, but they can certainly point to the symptoms or to the performance indicators that will lead you to where the problems are.”
Those employees can also explain why certain steps in the process exist — or if they’re even necessary.
“You’re saying, ‘Why do you have to go from this person to get something from this other person who sits on the other side of the building and then that information goes to a third person who’s sitting over here only to get back to you?’” Morey says. “And they say, ‘Well, that’s the way we’ve always done it.’ When you hear that answer, you know that it’s the easiest thing in the world to change.”
