Is there any principle more core to the heart of lean than relentlessly focusing on the customer? How many companies have strayed from customer focus as their strategic North Star? Who cannot tell at least one story of poor customer service, irritating chatboxes, painful refund processes, inept after-sales services and the rest? Surveys confirm every year that billions are lost in poor customer services. Losing sight of the customer has certainly allowed many former tenants of a trade to expose themselves to major disruptions of the type shown in the video on clean disruption by Tony Seba, that shows how cars replaced horses in New York in the course of 13 years. Both short and long term enduring lean success are rooted in a customer-focused lean strategy.

The following collection of short pieces argues persuasively for elevating your customer focus as the heart of lean strategy. Rose shares a great illustration of how you may drain your resources changing things that on the surface seem critical, but in your customers’ world, make zero difference. Lucy reflects on the vital components of a lean strategy, starting with a customer focused CEO and vertical and horizontal alignment.

Sandrine reminds us of the dangers of “big company disease” and how Value Analysis – Value Engineering (VA-VE) can help those companies affected by the symptoms. Neglecting the customer can expose your company to missing out on key short and long term changes in the market. Catherine asks whether any company be lean without being customer obsessed, and provides real life examples showing how customer obsession is a necessary condition to sustainable growth.

Jean relates customer focus to its effect on our P&L and Balance Sheet, through what she describes as the 5 economic levers. Anne Lise challenges us to confirm whether you really have customers on your mind; and warns against the risk of optimizing your own processes rather than boosting value for the customer.

And Cécile concludes the review with 3 simple lean markers: do the right thing and do it right, sell one – make one, and stay in touch.

Read the full Lean Post article here.

A recurring bone of contention between different schools of thought about performance measurement in the improvement world is the debate about quantitative versus qualitative analysis. Mark Graban’s recent book Measures of Success is an example of the quantitative approach, and this article by France Bergeron about Belts vs Lean represents the opposing view.

To be sure, “Belts vs Lean” is not quite the same as quantitative vs qualitative. “Belts” is a term that has come to signify the technical expertise to design and do rigorous experiments using statistical analysis. A common critique from this perspective is that the simpler method of interpreting trends on green and red bar charts against target is an unscientific, and therefore unreliable, approach to understanding the data.

However, there is more to this than meets the eye.

The graph below was one of the first graphs the team in the diabetic outpatients’ clinic at Groote Schuur hospital put on their visual board. They are in their first year of their journey to implement a Daily Management System.

The team set the target at not more than 20 patients per clinic per day because there were always more patients than they could cope with and many patients ended up on a long waiting list. In addition, the computerised booking system was set to allow only 20 patients per clinic per day.

Clearly this was a defensive target that came from the perspective of the team’s concerns about the pressures they were working under. As facilitators supporting the diabetics team in their journey we were troubled by this target that did not reflect the patient’s perspective who as the customer of the process were entitled to a more timeous service. However, we were aware of the difficult circumstances that the staff were working in and did not think that the time was right to address the issue with them.

Then one day the following graph appeared on their board. At first sight the immediate question is what is going on here? Did they lose the plot about which side of the target line should be red?

 

What actually happened is that the team decided that despite the pressures on them they needed to change their target to servicing at least 30 patients a day to improve their service delivery. That necessitated the change in colour from red to green because they had to exceed 30 patients per day to achieve target.

This might seem like a minor technical issue, but actually it represents a huge shift in mindset. The first principle of Lean Thinking is to focus on creating value for your customers. What this graph shows is that this team made that mind-shift. Quantitative analysis of graphs can tell us many interesting things, but sometimes the story that the graph by itself cannot tell us is way more important.

The Cynefin framework (see below) helps us to cope with the different kinds of problems that we need to manage in this volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous world that we live and work in. It seems to me that quantitative statistical analysis works best in the complicated quadrant where technical expertise is necessary to uncover the causal relationship. Unfortunately, the technical expertise required intimidates many people and demotivates them from trying to use it. However, a simple way of depicting a trend against a target with red and green bars can go beyond known solutions. Merely by moving people to experiment with improvement actions it can precipitate unexpected complex effects such as a change in mindset.

So for what it is worth, my take on this bone of contention is that the most useful approach to use is the one that is most appropriate to the people and the circumstances where it is used. The simplest method of visualising their data was the best method for the diabetic clinic team, because it facilitated their engagement and led to a deep insight into a foundational principle of Lean Management.

The good news is that the recent publication of “Four Types of Problems” by Art Smalley contains a wealth of information about how to use A3 thinking for the different levels of problems we encounter. I have no doubt that it will become an invaluable resource as lean practitioners graduate from A3 problem-solving at an operational level to tackle systemic and strategic problems at higher levels of management.

Please let us know your thoughts on the topic and what works for you.

Warm regards,

Anton Grütter
Director, Lean Institute Africa

P.S. The Lean Management Development Programme in Cape Town starts on 18 February. Book now.

An initiative to improve staff efficiency and reduce patient waiting times in Gauteng has proved to be a success.

In 2015 the Lean Institute was asked to implement the principles of ‘lean management’ at four of Gauteng’s largest hospitals.

http://www.capetalk.co.za/articles/307345/gauteng-hospital-waiting-times-down-thanks-to-lean-initiative

Cape Town’s Groote Schuur Hospital, a catalytic converter manufacturer and a well-known car sales dealer have one essential thing in common. They have all managed to radically improve efficiency across their operations over the past few years.

In the newsletter I wrote for Lean Institute Africa in 2015 I reflected on the growth in my understanding of lean as a result of attending the Lean Global Network meeting that year. I interviewed some of the delegates at this meeting and asked what they understood lean to be. My conversation with Joe Lee from Lean Enterprise China left me with many nuggets that I still reflect on to this date. One of the things that stood out was when he described lean as a “natural human approach to life”. He said: “Lean is just a name of a method… the objective of lean is to solve the problem between our capability and the customer need…it’s a lifestyle not a special thing.” He told me that people are solving problems daily in their lives, but at many organisations they are expected to leave this ability at the front door. I was challenged to look at how a structured lean approach could be helpful in my personal life, and what I could learn from it.

My lean lifestyle experiment began by chance one morning when I discovered I’d overslept and had just 15 minutes to shower, dress and pack for work. This may not be a problem for some people, but for me it was an issue, as I would usually spend over 30 minutes getting ready on typical work mornings. I quickly formulated a plan of how to fit the activities into that time and went on to execute the plan. Although I missed my target time by 5 minutes that morning, this experience inspired me to continue this 15 minute challenge on a daily basis for several months. Below are some of the lessons that I learned from this experiment.

1. To initiate change you need clear purpose (or burning platform) and to sustain change you need alignment with personal values

On the morning when I started this challenge my burning platform was clear and I knew I had to do things differently since I did not have as much time to get ready as I would normally use. I left the house after about 20 minutes and although I was outside the target it showed me that I was capable of using less time than I normally would have used.

Over the following days and weeks I applied lean thinking to this exercise, and this led to continuous reduction of time. As the experiment progressed I got closer to the 15 minute target, but despite this improvement I started to lose the energy and enthusiasm for the exercise. The dominant challenge to the exercise was the voice that said: “Yes you improved and know that you can reach the 15 minute target, but there is no crisis anymore, so why should I continue with this exercise?” At this point I realised that I needed to find a reason beyond the fun of the challenge and my initial motivation at seeing the improvement. I was able to make the challenge meaningful when I realised it can support two things that I value – more time for pressing snooze on my alarm (more sleep!), while simultaneously arriving on time for work. Finding how the challenge enables me to achieve things that I value helped me to continue with the experiment.

2. Improvement comes from understanding value and studying the work

It is not unusual that when people talk about lean the first thing they mention is elimination of waste, but in my experience it is not easy to identify waste without first understanding purpose and value. In this exercise my purpose was to be physically clean, be dressed in freshly laundered clothes, and to have all the items I need for work in my bag within 15 minutes of getting out of bed. Any activity not creating this target condition could be classified as waste, or necessary-but-not value-adding. I was fascinated to see there’s a relationship between some wastes, and also how some waste creates other waste.

In this regard, I first noticed that before getting out of the shower I spent some time washing soap off the shower walls. This was not a value-adding activity since it did not contribute to my purpose. I then realised that this was a consequence of another waste: I was applying excess soap to the sponge. I therefore had a combination and interaction of:

• waste of material
• waste of overproduction and
• waste of over-processing.
  This changed when I reduced the amount of soap I put on the sponge and I therefore no longer cleaned the shower walls.

I also noticed that during the process of getting ready in the mornings, I made numerous trips between the bathroom and bedroom. As a countermeasure, I decided to bring some of the clothes I planned to wear that day into the bathroom which reduced my trips between the two points.

3. It is very easy to get distracted – you need to create an environment that focuses you on the actual work and the target condition

I divided the work into separate activities and set milestone targets in line with the main target condition. The total challenge time of 15 minutes is not a long time, and the longest activity within the total challenge was limited to a goal of 6-7 minutes. I soon learned that despite my good intentions I could not hold my concentration on the work. In the first minute I could be focusing on the work and without realising, my attention would soon drift away. I would only find out that I exceeded my milestone target after the goal time had already lapsed.

To help me focus, I realised that if I placed a clock in the bathroom I would receive constant feedback on how I was performing against the set goal, and this feedback could refocus me on the target. In this case the feedback helped me to assess my actual performance versus the target and enabled me to take corrective action to regain progress quickly. What also became clear was that this feedback needed to be visual, current and easy to understand at a glance. This experience demonstrated the value and power of visual management in any environment.

4. If you don’t record performance and standard procedures you are not effectively building on previous knowledge, which means every day is like starting all over again

I must admit that although I looked to use this exercise to experience lean as a lifestyle and at home, it had some limits. I was not motivated to advance to the level where I record standards which answer questions like: Which hand should I use? How many times do I need to repeat the action? For how long do I need to perform the action? When should I check for quality?

There is a saying that says: “The shortest pencil is longer than the longest memory,” and yet for this experiment I decided to stick with my memory. I realised that each day was like starting again, since I could not remember the exact steps and actions that I’d taken previously. Recording information enables us to experiment efficiently. When you have a record of actions and results you are able to build reusable knowledge as you confirm or disconfirm your hypothesis each time you make a prediction and change.

My biggest lesson from this challenge was that lean thinking starts with understanding value and how value is created. Everything, including the tools we use or develop, should follow from the purpose at hand. On the basis of my experience I conclude that lean is a lifestyle. Will you give it a try? Or, have you also experimented with lean at home? If you’ve got some lean-at-home experiments to share, please let me know!

Kind regards,

Tshepo Thobejane
Lean Institute Africa Associate
(See more about Tshepo on our website.)

 

 

For more on Lean Lifestyle, check out the videos below:

Kitchen Kaizen (10min) published by Gemba Academy

Kata at Home with Jeremiah Davis (21min) published by Mike Rother