IMPROVING PROCESSES

 

Several years ago I began an article for the IPE by asking the following two questions.

 

1. What improvements have been made in your organization within the last two years to benefit the customer or the business?

 

2. What improvements have been attempted but failed?

 

I then went on to suggest a simple but effective approach to making improvements. All you need to do is consider an issue or area that needs to be improved and ask that following questions.

 

1. What are we trying to accomplish? (What’s the problem?)

 

2. How will we know that a change is an improvement? (What can we measure to see if the change in the process made things better or worse?)

 

3. What changes can we make that will result in improvement? (What brainstormed ideas can we try?)

 

I now call this approach rapid cycle improvement and again want to encourage you to give it a try. To give you a little push, I thought it might be useful to give a few examples. Recently I have been teaching a course at the University of Indianapolis called Quality Management. As part of the course, students are asked to use the rapid cycle improvement method for one week to see how much improvement they can make. Here are a few examples of their work.

 

Toni is getting married and she found addressing all the invitations to be very tedious and time consuming. So she wanted to speed up the process of addressing and stuffing all the materials involved in sending invitations to her wedding. She and a friend started out just going at it in a straight forward way and found in a batch of 10 invitations it took an average of 5 minutes per invitation. In a second cycle they organized in a more assembly line approach and got the time for 10 invitations down to an average of 3.7 minutes. In a third cycle with further changes, the average time per invitation was 3 minutes. And in a fourth cycle she and her friend were able to get the time down to 2.7 minutes per invitation. So they almost cut the time in half  not bad for an evening’s work.

 

Alisia works for an international shopping center developer and in her office several people have the chore of entering some data into computers with regard to their properties. She found out that no one approached the task in the same way. So she asked her office mates if they would help her complete her assignment by all agreeing to do the job the same way. One day they would do it her way, the next someone else’s way, etc. What she wanted to do was lower the time it took to enter the data in the computer. In their normal approach (everyone doing it their own way) it took an average of 77 minutes to enter the data for 40 properties. In the first cycle of everyone doing it one way, it took 69 minutes. Using a second method it took 61 minutes. And in a third approach it took 77 minutes. So this group of office workers decided to adopt the method that saved 20% of their time.

 

Valerie works for a large insurance company. Part of her and several co-workers’ jobs involves qualifying agents across the country to sell their insurance. What Valerie found out first all was that no one did the job the same way  even though there was an extensive procedures manual written several years ago. Then she found out that her co-workers picked through the pile of incoming requests for the easy ones leaving the more difficult ones to accumulate and have a long turn around time. With these observations, she was able to convince her co-workers to run some experiments and change their process so all incoming requests would be treated the same, all workers would share in the easy and difficult cases, and that the turn around time for all requests would be shorter. In the course of one week, she was able to meet all of these objectives. They were able to almost double their productivity, going from an average of 54 completed cases per day to 96 per day, and everyone felt there was less stress.

 

Tonia is a manager of a local restaurant. She knows that cycle time between customers is very important to profitability. So she decided to study how her workers could shorten the time it took from one party leaving a dining table until the next one was seated at the table. She found that using one employee, doing 7 steps took 10 person-minutes. She tried two people doing 4 steps which resulted in 8 person-minutes (table back in service in 4 minutes instead of 10). In the third cycle she used 3 employees and was able to complete the job in 6 person-minutes (table back in service in 2 minutes). Over the course of an evening this translates into several more customers who can be served.

 

With these examples in mind, I hope some readers will see how they might serve their customers and their organizations better by giving this simple but powerful improvement method a try. Let us know your results.