Examples of Progress

Examples of Progress

It really isn’t all that difficult to make real improvement. Here is all you have to do.

Spend a little time training people to understand what a system and processes are.
Pick a problem process and standardize it
Learn about and practice some continuous improvement tools – in particular process behavior charts
Gather data from your standardized process
Brainstorm ways the process may be improved and try an idea
Gather the data and see if the idea made the process better
Keep testing ideas and adjusting the process until it is as good as it needs to be.

Simple, right? Below are some samples of improvements made by librarians. They made these improvements using teams of four people. They attended three training sessions and spent at most one hour per week working on their processes over three months. They all said that they were already over worked and that they didn’t know how they would find time to do anything more. But they did.

South Orange Public Library wanted to improve attendance at the programs they presented, and they wanted to improve their predictions of the number of people who would attend. When they started studying their process they had an average attendance of 29. Their average attendance now is 40. This is a 38% increase. Unfortunately because their attendance picked up so much, their predictions of attendance were off. They are not fretting, because the data they are gathering now will enable them to make better predictions in the future.

Long Branch Public Library studied how to decrease the time it took to handle inbound and outbound interlibrary loan items. When they started it took 5.1 minutes to handle each out going item and 1.7 minutes for each incoming item. Three months later their times were 2 minutes for outbound and 0.7 minutes for inbound items. The library handles approximately 100 outgoing items per day and 85 incoming items per day. When you do the math that calculates out to saving 1700 hours per year – nearly a full time job saved. They definitely now have time to invest in improving more processes.

Brookdale Community College worked on how to shorten the time from when a librarian needed a new library book until it was available for the student or professor. When they started they were averaging 54 days from the time a librarian placed a request until the item was available. As they were looking at their process, they began to see that their present situation was analogous to going through the toll booth on the New Jersey turnpike in the normal way. They wanted to use the E-ZPass method to get their books ordered much faster. After implementing several improvement ideas they brought their order to shelf time down to 24 days. Do you think the professors and students will be happier?

South Brunswick Public Library knew that it was taking too long to process new incoming items, and they felt that some categories of items were worse than others. So they studied their process and gathered some data. They were right. There was great variation across categories, and the processing times were pretty long.

Category	Average Processing Time - Days
Fiction	7.97
Non Fiction	18.19
Youth Materials	44.04
Average	18.24 (Based on total items in each category)

So they worked on their process and gathered more data. Here is the data from the improved process.

Category	Average Processing Time -Days
Fiction	11.03
Non Fiction	10.12
Youth Materials	10.33
Average	10.34 (Based on total items in each category)

They made significant improvement in two ways. They cut their average processing time almost in half going from 18.24 days to 10.34 days. They reduced the variation between categories dramatically. Note that the Fiction items actually take longer to process with the improved process, but the librarians thought that was a small price to pay in order to get the much bigger over all process improvement.

So what is the secret to such significant improvements? There really isn’t a secret. All you have to do is invest a little time and follow the steps outlined above. This approach is empowering, it builds teams, and it brings joy to work.

Give it a try!