| In This Issue: |
| Message from Laura |
| Feature Article: Lean Processes and DOWNTIME |
| Educational Resources |
| Time Tips and Traps |
| Ask the Expert |
| Laura's Blog |
| Hot Links |
| Words of Wisdom |
| Laura in the NEWS |
| Book Laura |
| Where in the World is Laura? |
| Subscription and Contact Information |
| Reprint Information |
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A holistic approach to increasing your get-up and go, from the productivity expert whose previous books showed people how to Find More Time and Leave the Office Earlier. If you want to be productive but are just too tired all the time, you need to read this book! Laura Stack combines invaluable insights and practical advice in this guide to becoming more energetic and more productive in every area of life. Stack describes the factors that contribute to low energy (the "energy bandits") and explains how to reduce their effects and build up or renew sources of positive force (with "energy boosters"). Available now from Amazon.com and at better bookstores everywhere. |
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 Find More Time. You can't add more hours to the day, but Laura will help you make the most of the time you have and get things done. Available now from Amazon.com.
Leave the Office Earlier,  Laura shows you how you CAN get more done than you ever thought possible and still get home to your real life sooner.Available now from Amazon.com.
More of The Productivity Pro's Resources |
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| Featured Educational Resource from The Productivity Pro® |
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| Words of Wisdom |
"Talent without discipline is like an octopus on roller skates. There's plenty of movement, but you never know if it's going to be forward, backwards, or sideways. "
Writer, H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
"A corporation is a living organism; it has to continue to shed its skin. Methods have to change. Focus has to change. Values have to change. The sum total of those changes is transformation." -- Andrew Grove, American businessman and engineer.
"The most dangerous kind of waste is the waste we do not recognize." -- Shigeo Shingo, Japanese industrial engineer
"Finished goods are products that we have made that no one wants." -- Tom Greenwood, Director of the University of Tennessee Lean Enterprise Forum
"Costs do not exist to be calculated. Costs exist to be reduced." - Taiichi Ohno, Japanese engineer (one of the founders of lean manufacturing)
"I say an hour lost at a bottleneck is an hour out of the entire system. I say an hour saved at a non-bottleneck is worthless. Bottlenecks govern both throughput and inventory." -- Eliyahu M. Goldratt, The Goal |
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| Hot Links |
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Workers Agree: Company Culture Matters
Stupid Policies Holding You Back? 4 Tips for Hacking Work
Tips from the Trenches - Time Management Apps
7 Handy iPhone Apps for Managing Employee Time
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| Laura in the News! |
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Where in the World
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These are all private client engagements with Laura Stack. At this time, Laura does not offer open enrollment seminars to the general public. If you're interested in bringing Laura to your organization to present a training seminar for your employees on the day prior or the day after one of these engagements below, please contact John Stack for special "piggyback" pricing.
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| Feature Article: |
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Lean Processes and DOWNTIME
While it hasn't always been practiced with any great rigor, the concept of waste reduction has long been a part of American business tradition. Ben Franklin's common- sense reminders of "waste not, want not," and "a penny saved is a penny earned" have been well taken by such luminaries as Henry Ford, who introduced the modern assembly line, and the founders of time-and-motion studies and scientific management, Frank Gilbreth and Frederick Winslow Taylor. By the 1970s, Japanese industrial engineers had integrated all these concepts and more into a framework that eventually came to be known as lean manufacturing. Mostly derived from the Toyota Production System (TPS) and guided by industrial engineers Taiichi Ohno and Shigeo Shingo, lean manufacturing is based on the idea of preserving (or increasing) value with less work. In the parlance of lean manufacturing, anything that doesn't increase value in the eye of the customer must be considered waste, and every effort should be made to eliminate that waste.
It's easy to see how this mindset can be generalized to any systematic business process, and indeed it has. In recent years, businesses of all types have begun to implement lean processes, often simply referred to as "Lean." Eight forms of waste have been defined and targeted: seven from the original TPS system, and one added by American experts as the concept became more obvious to and accepted by mainstream business. Numerous acronyms for these Eight Wastes have been proposed as aids to memory, but the one that seems to have caught on best is DOWNTIME. It's simple, straightforward, and appropriate. Here's what each of the letters stands for:
Defects
Overproduction
Waiting
Non-utilized/underutilized talent
Transportation
Inventory
Motion
Excess Processing
Systematic elimination of these wastes can result in faster processes, lower costs, higher quality, happier workers and, most importantly, happier customers. In this article, we'll take a look at each of the DOWNTIME wastes in detail.
D is for Defects: mistakes that require additional time, resources, and money to fix. In a manufacturing process, a defect might involve a defective part that has to be remade; in a white-collar job, it might include erroneous paperwork that needs to be redone. Defects tend to be the result of:
Poor quality control
Poor repair
Poor documentation
Lack of standards
Weak or missing processes
A misunderstanding of customer needs
Poor inventory control
Poor design
Undocumented design changes
Completely eradicating any form of waste is impossible, but defects can certainly be limited by the application of standardized work plans, more stringent quality control at all levels, a full understanding of work requirements and customer needs, and simple job aids such as checklists.
The O in DOWNTIME stands for Overproduction. In some organizations, workers just blindly keep producing, even when those who receive their output either aren't ready for it or don't need it. Basically, what you end up with is too much stuff, too early, that the customer doesn't necessarily want. This is especially common in manufacturing, but it can occur in any workplace situation in which there's a bottleneck. Overproduction may occur due to:
Just-in-case production
Unclear customer needs
Producing to a forecast
Long set-up times
Attempts to avoid long set-up times
Poorly applied automation
The solution to overproduction is to establish a reasonable work flow for the benefit of the customer, which in this case is whoever acts as the downstream consumer of what you produce: your client, another organization within the company, the general public, or whatever the case may be. Be sure that there are well-established procedures in place for every process in your organization, and if necessary, implement new processes to keep work from backing up behind particular bottlenecks in the organization.
Speaking of bottlenecks, one of the worst in any organization is Waiting, the third letter in DOWNTIME. This is actual downtime, which occurs whenever work has to stop for some reason: because the next person in line is overwhelmed, because something broke down, because you're waiting for approval, or because you've run out of something. Causes of waiting can also include:
Mismatched production rates
Very long set-up times
Poor shop layout
Insufficient staffing
Work absences
Poor communications
Whatever the cause, workers have to sit around twiddling their thumbs while waiting for the bottleneck to be cleared. There are many ways to handle this, though some may run up against other waste reduction efforts; one of the more obvious is the need to provide adequate staffing to handle the workload at the bottlenecks, which some managers may target as a source of monetary waste. Otherwise, efforts to push decision-making ability to lower levels, better quality control to ensure the reliability of necessary machinery and systems, better supply control, and employee cross-training to prevent bottlenecking during absences can all serve to limit this form of waste.
The concept of Non-utilized/underutilized talent, while not included in the original Japanese list of the seven wastes, is an integral part of the American concept of DOWNTIME. Rather than being transparent to the system, people themselves have been plugged into the equation, in the sense that poor utilization of existing talents, ideas, abilities, and skill sets is a waste as real as using ten pounds of iron when five will do. This type of waste can be caused by a myriad of things, not least:
Lack of teamwork
Lack of training
Poor communications
Management's refusal to include employees in problem-solving
Narrowly defined jobs and expectations
Poor management in general
If the above list sounds oddly familiar, it should: many of these failings are the same ones that result in a lack of employee engagement, which can hamstring any organization's productivity. Failing to eliminate these lapses will result in a lessened ability to tap into the human resources available to you, which makes it difficult to effectively attack the other seven DOWNTIME wastes. You know the solution: empower your employees, rectify any lacks in their training, and stop micromanaging. Basically, you have to treat experienced people as process experts who know what they're doing, not as interchangeable spare parts in your system. Don't just tell them what to do: ask them to think, too.
Our Fifth Deadly Waste is Transportation: waste caused by moving things around. This is less of a problem in a business office than in a manufacturing plant, since most of what white collar workers "transport" can be sent by email these days. Otherwise, too much transportation tends to increase costs, wastes time, increases the likelihood of product damage and deterioration, and can result in poor communication. In general, transportation waste can be caused by:
Poor plant/office layout
Excessive or unnecessary handling
Misaligned process flow
Poorly-designed systems
Unnecessary steps in system processes
Like most DOWNTIME wastes, transportation issues can be defeated by common-sense efforts such as simplifying processes, repairing physical layouts, handling products less often, and making distances between steps as short as possible. In an office situation, simply providing enough printers and other equipment for everyone can limit transportation waste.
Next up is Inventory, another item more important in manufacturing that in the standard office environment, but still something you must be aware of. The actual issue here is having too much inventory. The industrial methodologies that spawned the concept of Lean are based on the practice of Just-In-Time production, in which products are made only when they're needed, not based on a forecast. A good example is a restaurant that cooks your food only when you order it, as opposed to one that has a series of entrees ready to pop in a microwave. While the former takes a while, it produces only when there's a demand, so waste is minimal and the product is fresher. The latter may get your food to you more quickly, but it's not as fresh--and often, they have a lot of entrees left over at the end of the day.
Otherwise, excess Inventory may be caused by:
Overproduction
Poor layout
Mismatched production speeds
Unreliable suppliers
Long set-up times
Misunderstood customer needs
Basically, eliminating excess inventory involves adjusting the workflow and adopting the J-I-T process, which can be adapted to office environments as well as manufacturing. Remember, all you really need to do is produce enough to satisfy your downstream customer.
Next up is excess Motion, because simply having to move around too much can slow you down significantly. Here's a classic example: an industrial engineer once observed that bricklayers often worked from piles of loose bricks placed at foot level, so that every time a worker reached for a brick, they had to bend all the way down to the ground. Putting the bricks on a platform at waist level sped up the bricklayers by as much as three times. Get the picture? The more you have to move around reaching for that file or trotting back and forth between your desk and the printer, the more time gets wasted. Typical causes of excessive motion include:
Poor workstation/shop layout
Poor housekeeping
Shared tools and machines
Workstation congestion
Isolated operations
Lack of standards
Poor process design and controls
Click here to read the remainder of the article.
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| Time Tips and Traps |
If you decide to implement lean processes in your organization, please keep one thing firmly in mind: it won't be easy. No substantive change ever is, especially when it involves more than one or two people. However, if you can make your organization a lean, mean, profitable business machine, it'll be worth all the hard work.
Implementing lean processes, whether in manufacturing or any other field, isn't a simple matter of visiting a few websites and buying a book here and there (though that's a good place to start). Commitment to the concept must extend to the application of substantial resources, particularly money and time. Ironically, from the Lean perspective, spending your resources this way may seem wasteful. However, you have to take the long view here: you're not going to become perfectly Lean instantly. You're going to have to spend some resources to clean up your existing wasteful practices before you can start saving resources going forward.
So once you've decided on the Lean path, don't stint on the reorganization and training that you and your people need to apply the requisite principles. If necessary, bring in experts who can train your people one-on-one--carefully selected experts, of course, people who can provide the biggest bang for your buck. With their help, train a cadre of personnel who can help others learn to apply these principles. Along the way, visit other companies or organizations who have successfully implemented lean processes, and apply everything you learn to your own organization.
Be willing to invest in Lean, keep pushing, and don't give up. The change won't happen overnight, and there will be some battles you won't win--but that's true of implementing anything. The secret is to keep pushing yourself and your team to slice the wastes out of your processes--no matter how hard it is, and no matter how long it takes to get there. | |
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Laura Stack, MBA, CSP
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| Letters to the Editor |
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Hi Laura,
Just wanted to let you know that I read your book (SuperCompetent: The Six Keys to Perform at Your Productive Best) on the plane home yesterday and today I implemented a new policy in my company that now everyone is required to produce a "Priority List" of tasks and goals that they have and send it into an email account that I set up today.
My plan is to batch all of my incoming tasks that I need to disperse throughout the day and quickly review each of my employees priority lists first thing in the morning. This is great in so many ways. One, they don't have to ever wonder what their next task is and can always just get right to work. Two, I am notified inside of one day if I have an employee is running out of things to do. Three, if anyone has trouble producing a list, I immediately know that they are not producing.
The concept of output versus time spent was not new to me, but I definitely had let some things slip around the office a bit. Your book was a great reminder and inspired this change to demanding task and priority lists from everybody.
All that good stuff from one simple idea and none of it compares to the biggest positive change that I can already feel in my core after one day.
When I was reading your book, it dawned on me how often I wait to assign tasks. In my business there are constantly medium and low urgency tasks that arise. I had been spending too much time and mental energy holding these tasks in my head and waiting for the "right time." When a low priority task comes in that needs to be handled by a top programmer who is steadily in the flow of solving a 1A priority or urgent task, I don't want him to even know that there has been a request.
Now with updated task lists on each employee, I can assign the task to the employee and place it wherever it needs to go in the order of priority as requests and needs arise. I will never again interrupt the flow of production to ask an employee to put something on their list. Now I just do it for them.
Just wanted to write a quick thank you for the book, it was a great read and turned out to be very helpful.
Thanks again,
Christian Jorn
Jorn and Price Marketing Inc.
211 SW 4th Ave. Suite 1
Gainesville FL 32601
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