June 2021 – Glenn Sommerville

In this second article in the Leading Problem Solving in Non-Manufacturing Series, we’ll discuss the application of TIM WOODS in non-manufacturing areas.

No matter what our team does or is responsible for, we all have an ultimate customer. They may not be the traditional customer but rather other internal departments or company stakeholders. So whether in manufacturing or non-manufacturing, it’s important to first consider how our customer defines value. At HPL, we believe all customers, internal or external, value the following when it comes to the product or service they are expecting of us:

they want it NOW
they want it Perfect
they want it Waste Free
and they want an Exceptional Experience

Therefore anything that detracts from these 4 values or attributes can be looked upon as a waste and is certainly undesirable. As leaders then, our role is to engage our teams in identifying and waging war against anything that negatively impacts our abilities to meet and exceed our customer expectations. This then is a starting point for a form of problem solving for all leaders and their teams. In order to identify these wastes or problems, we need to “teach our eyes to see” the various forms of waste. That’s where the acronym TIM WOODS comes into play, whether in manufacturing or non-manufacturing.

Let’s address a myth that TIM WOODS is not applicable to non-manufacturing by taking a look at just a few examples of the 8 forms of waste in non-manufacturing environments.

Transportation – excessive movement of people, information, or materials.

In non-manufacturing areas there are typically huge opportunities to reduce “transportation” wastes. Examples could be associated with numerous or multi-level approvals requiring multiple emails to different people, multiple in-person reviews/presentations obtaining multi-level or departmental approvals, and transferring files, data, reports between people or departments. Walking to conference rooms or from building to building to attend meetings.

Inventory – excessive storage and delay of information or products.

It’s important here to consider inventory as more than just raw materials or finished goods, and think about excessive storage of information of physical or electronic in nature. Examples of inventory of this nature could be excessive filing cabinets with years of no longer necessary documents, inbox with hundreds or thousands of unread/unresponded emails (yes you!), having to maintain multiple copies or versions of electronic documents in multiple locations, or issuing the same data in various formats.

Motion – any motion that does not add value to the product or process.

Many of the examples of waste described above, also result in creating unnecessary or unproductive motion, such as walking around the office to find necessary information, obtaining clarification for tasks, locating shared tools or equipment are some common examples. It could also be motion from poorly laid out office spaces or even having to make too many ‘clicks’ on a webpage to get the necessary information for the task at hand or multi-level file directories to open a file.

Waiting – long periods of inactivity for people, information, machinery, or materials.

This form of waste is definitely applicable to non-manufacturing and is commonly experienced in “waiting” for approvals, responses, or information from others. What should be a quick approval can often take days if not weeks to receive. This waiting could be a result of a poor process, lower priority to the requesting person, missing necessary information, poor organizational skills, people on vacation or out of the office etc. Waiting slows things down, decreases efficiency, and increases the opportunity for errors and omissions.

Over Production – producing more/sooner than the internal or external customer needs.

Over production in non-manufacturing includes things such as creating reports that are not used, the tracking and collection of data that is no longer analyzed or used for any purpose, printing more documents than are distributed at a meeting, or lengthy emails or presentations that provide unnecessary information and don’t really add value.

Over Processing – using the wrong set of tools, procedures or systems.

Similar to ‘waiting’, over processing is all too common in non-manufacturing. Over processing shows up in the form of large distribution lists which include many unnecessary people, unnecessarily being added to the ‘cc’ line of an email, abuse of the ‘reply all’ feature, or unnecessary or lengthy meetings. Also having team members with high or advanced skills doing routine work or tasks is also over processing.

Defects – frequent errors in paperwork or product quality problems.

Often passed off as normal “human error” in non-manufacturing, there are many defects created. These can include data entry errors within systems when manually entered, software coding errors, missing information, none functional links, missing attachments, incorrect tolerances or dimensional errors within designs.

Skill – lack of training, application, development, engagement.

Beyond the necessary skills required to perform any type of task, areas can also include on-boarding of new hires as they learn their way around and adapt to the new culture, new skills required with the introduction of new IT systems or tools, new automation, routine software updates with a change to features, or as simple but frustrating as a new photocopier or printer.

These examples indicate that TIM WOODS clearly applies to non-manufacturing environments just as much as it does in manufacturing. These wastes not only decrease efficiencies but many of these are what frustrate our teams.

Why:

Improve efficiencies and effectiveness of the team
Increase team engagement
Make tasks easier to complete
Reduce rework and downstream problems
Meet / exceed ‘customer’ expectations and experience

WIFM:

Reduced frustrations and distractions
Less pressure and stress
Increased job satisfaction
Improved team work with peers

Next is to get some quick wins, ideally on things that cause them the biggest frustrations or create undesirable work or tasks. Lead the team to identify the top 1-3 priorities and then implement problem solving methodologies to breakdown the problems, identify root cause, and implement countermeasures. Select priorities that the team can directly control so that a quick win can be realized. Doesn’t have to be easy necessarily, but it should be an area within your or the teams’ direct responsibility to make change. This is to avoid delays or problems obtaining approvals or agreement from other leaders/department if it is not a priority to them.

As the leader, you need to let the team come up with the countermeasures and to implement them. Your job is to coach them along the way on problem solving, remove barriers experienced along the way, and provide necessary resources. You also should provide a framework in which they can problem solve. For example time frame for implementation, budget, tools, resources, etc, to help avoid the team coming back with a proposed solution that you will not be able to support. Of course, you also have to provide encouragement along the way, and recognition and celebration for achievements, including when counter measures don’t work as expected.

It may take some time, but following these steps is proven to build engagement, improve problem solving skills and capabilities, and increase job satisfaction. The momentum builds and once moving, there will be no stopping it!

In the next article in this series, we’ll discuss how you can put TIM WOODS to practice in a non-manufacturing area by ‘teaching your eyes to see’.

If you missed the first article in the series, ‘Leading Problem Solving in Non-Manufacturing Space – 1 Second Understanding“, you can read it here.

Contact me:

For additional information on High Performance Leaders Inc., click here. Or follow on LinkedIn.

You can email me with any questions at glennsommerville@hotmail.com, find me on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/glennsommervilleL2R/, or on Twitter at https://twitter.com/gsommervilleL2R.

If you are enjoying my posts and find the information useful, please “Follow” me by entering your email in the follow box on the right-hand menu of my website www.glennsommerville.com

Leadership, Personal Development

Lunch & Lead Series – Protect the Core – Increase the capacity of your team

June 16, 2021 Glenn Sommerville

High Performance Leaders is hosting our next FREE 50 minute Lunch & Lead Series event on Friday, June 25 at 12:05PM EST / 9:05AM PST on the topic of “Protect the Core – Increase the capacity of your team”.

Register Now!

We are consistently hearing from leaders that they are concerned for their teams with the amount of distractions and unplanned work they are experiencing. Teams and leaders are becoming overwhelmed with what they have on their plates. At this Lunch & Lead Series we will provide some tips and techniques leaders can use to help protect their teams giving them more capacity to focus on their top priorities.

Register now and on June 25 at 12:05 PM EST / 9:05 AM PST, grab your lunch (or breakfast as the case may be) and join us for this Lunch & Lead Series!

We hope you can make it and look forward to connecting with each other!

Leadership, Problem Solving, Visual Controls

Leading Problem Solving Series – 1 Second Understanding in Non-manufacturing

June 9, 2021 Glenn Sommerville

We had a great turn-out and received very positive feedback at our last Lunch & Lead Series on the topic of “Leading Problem Solving”, however, we also received some comments that it was difficult for those in non-manufacturing spaces to relate to how they can lead problem solving in their area. Over the next few posts, we’ll cover off the topics from the Lunch and Lead Series but with a non-manufacturing focus.

If you missed the Lunch & Lead Series, it is available free at our on-line content site here as a “course” but don’t let the terminology fool you, it is just the video recording of the event, divided up into smaller duration “lectures” that correspond to each of the agenda items. Go check it out…

The first topic was the establishment of standards that within a very short period of time, as in a few seconds, anyone can determine if something is normal or abnormal. As in manufacturing, visualization of some standards in non-manufacturing areas are relatively easy. These are the things that when out of standard negatively impact the team’s ability to do their work.

Examples could include a common reference library of regulations, policies, or other documented information. Being able to quickly find what you’re looking for or identifying any that may have been misplaced can prove very helpful, save time, and reduce frustrations. In the virtual world, similar standards are useful for organizing digital storage by establishing standard file structures and nomenclature.

Other examples could be as simple of establishing standards around team supplies, tooling, or equipment.

In non-manufacturing areas the challenge often is that the “work” and “work flow” is not overly visible. For example, an engineering project is comprised of various tasks that engineers need to complete. The challenge here is that often with development type work, the engineers are dealing with a lot of unknowns or because it maybe the first time creating “something” there are no standards for it. In these cases, you want to establish standards around the work flow, provide a framework of generally accepted principles or benchmarks, and provide clear escalation mechanisms when things are not going as expected or planned. An effective way to visualize these is through a visual control board.

In the first example we will use a technical team that is responsible for completing some type of project type work. This could be product design, tooling or test equipment design, or construction/fabrication.

The layout of the board would be done in such a manner as to indicate the tasks that need to be completed by whom within a “standard” period of time. These standards could be industry standards, standard times as determined by the organization, benchmarks, or in the case of creative/innovative never been done before work, best guess estimations or established service level agreements (SLAs). It can also be with reference to the project milestones. Often, there is a strong reluctance to do this because of the “unknowness” of how long it should take to complete these tasks, however, referencing to the milestones allows for faster visibility of potential project delays or impacts. This should not be used to place blame or put undue pressure on those involved, but rather, provide the opportunity for escalation that can lead to additional resources, rescheduling of downstream tasks, and/or important communication of the status of the project to critical stakeholders.

Typically this would be visualized by day for a 1 to 2 week window for each person assigned to the project within a specific team. The board can be either physical or virtual board as long as the task assignments by day by week can be displayed. Each day the board is reviewed by those working on the tasks and their next level up leader. At the daily review, abnormalities to the standards would be very visible indicating a task is behind or that there has been some kind of difficulty or risk associated with it identified.

A pareto of issues can be created and built each day to help the team focus on the biggest issues that impact their work. Often in these types of situations, unplanned work plays a key role and has a significant impact on the teams ability to complete their project(s). Using a different colour sticky in this case to indicate unplanned work is very visual and can easily be tracked in the pareto as an issue. The leader can then assist the team in quickly resolving the issue through problem solving. The problem solving should not occur at the meeting, but rather a commitment made between the appropriate stakeholders as to what the next steps are and by when.

In the second example we’ll review a procurement situation. Typically a procurement team’s work flow is within a computer system. However, critical information is also usually available within those same systems. Again using a visual board and placing critical reports on them with visualization of abnormalities to standards is a good approach. For example, perhaps there are SLAs as to how long it should take for a purchase order (PO) to be placed. An aging report or having each buyer indicate which of their purchase requisitions (PR) are out of that standard helps to visualize purchasing abnormalities. Unfortunately, too often, we can experience payment problems to our vendors and then get ourselves into trouble when they refuse to continue to ship. Then talk about abnormal work to clear that up! Perhaps a metric that shows outstanding payment aging would be beneficial to avoid such situations. Again the abnormalities can be tracked in a form of a pareto for deeper analysis and problem solving. The point is to identify the aspects of the teams workflow that can or is having the biggest impact on their ability to effectively do their job or on the organization.

A third example is for a sales and marketing team. They can visualize their work flow on a visual board and meet daily to review. They could visualize main proposal work content and status. Discuss new risks that arise that may pose a threat to winning the project, as well as visualizing the probability of a win and the financial status of the sales plan vs actual. They can also capture lessons learned to improve their quoting and proposal process to drive continuous improvement, as well as to quickly identify abnormalities or issues that could impact a proposal so that problem solving is quickly initiated and/or escalated.

Although non-manufacturing work tasks are less naturally physically visible, the same principles apply.

You need to establish the standards the team is to follow, make them visible in some manner usually through a visual board, and then there needs to be some form of controls in place to manage and problem solve through the abnormalities.

Controls could include variance to SLAs, escalation mechanisms, layered process audits to confirm standards and identify areas needing focus, for example.

In the next post, we’ll discuss how TIM WOODS can apply to non-manufacturing areas.

Contact me:

For additional information on High Performance Leaders Inc., click here. Or follow on LinkedIn.

You can email me with any questions at glennsommerville@hotmail.com, find me on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/glennsommervilleL2R/, or on Twitter at https://twitter.com/gsommervilleL2R.

If you are enjoying my posts and find the information useful, please “Follow” me by entering your email in the follow box on the right-hand menu of my website www.glennsommerville.com