IMPROVING PROCESSES -- AGAIN
Recently I was conferring with a young man, Greg, who was responsible for managing a number of warehouses around the country. He was talking about a problem he has. At each of his warehouses they start the day by doing a process he calls Down Stocking. This includes restocking the primary stock picking locations from overhead stock storage bins, clearing trash from the aisles, and straightening and organizing stock on the shelves.
He told me this chore currently takes two hours. Unfortunately since it takes so long, the workers get interrupted to begin shipping and receiving product. And as a result, many days the job never gets done, and there is a general downward spiral in the appearance and efficiency of the warehouse. He was looking for a solution.
I introduced him to the concept of rapid cycle improvement about which I have written before in this article. Since it really works, I thought you wouldn’t mind hearing about it again.
It is a simple process. All you need to do is consider an issue or process that needs to be improved and ask the 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?)
You continue around this cycle of three questions as often and as rapidly as you can until you are satisfied that the process you are improving is as good as it needs to be for the moment. As you will see from this example, in three cycles, three days time, major improvement was accomplished. Here is Greg’s experience.
CYCLE 1
1. We want to reduce the time it takes to Down Stock.
2. We will measure the results in minutes.
3. The first idea we will try is to provide rolling ladders for each of our sixteen product aisles. (They previously only had 11, so ladders had to be shared.)
Results: The warehousemen were able to complete the Down Stocking in 95 minutes.
CYCLE 2
1. We want to reduce the time it takes to Down Stock.
2. We will measure the results in minutes.
3. Have warehousemen work in pairs.
Results: Each team completed one aisle per pair in one hour. We observed that the workers spent a lot of time just talking and the efficiency was worse than working alone.
CYCLE 3
1. We want to reduce the time it takes to Down Stock.
2. We will measure the results in minutes.
3. Have the warehousemen work alone and only restock the lower shelves when they are 50 percent empty. This usually represents a 60 day supply.
Results: The entire warehouse Down Stocking was completed in 45 minutes.
This represents a savings of 11/4 hours per worker per day, 20 man-hours per day (possibly some overtime hours), 100 man-hours per week, 5200 man-hours per year in this warehouse alone. If you multiply this times the number of warehouses Greg manages, it becomes very significant for his company. And remember this resulted from only three ideas tried in three days time. Imagine what you can do with this improvement concept if you have several improvement ramps going at the same time.
There are a few tricks or cautions to keep in mind before starting rapid cycle improvement.
One final thought you might be saying, any dummy would realize the inefficiency of keeping all of the picking bins absolutely full every day. Why would they have ever started doing that? The answer is, who knows, but they were doing it. Why is a 60 day supply in the picking bins a right amount? It probably isn’t, but it is much better than keeping them full. What if we could get to the lean concept of just filling the bins when they need to be filled?
Just keep going around the cycle and choose the ideas that
make things better!