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visit MIT OpenCourseWare at ocw.mit.edu. HUGH MCMANUS: Earl introduced
to you the concept of Lean and made the assertion
that lean isn't so much a collection of tools as
a way of thinking about things. So what we're going
to do now, actually, in two parts, one
before lunch, one after, is introduce you to the basics
of that way of thinking. So that's why we call
this module Lean Thinking. What we're going to do first
is talk about processes. And if Lean thinking has one
really important component, if you walk away from here
with one idea in your head, it's to think about
work as a process which can be improved, so we're going
to spend a little bit of time thinking about
what is a process, how can we think about
processes, how can we map processes, how can we create
visual representations of them, and how we can think about
value in that context. We're going to look at
the fundamental Lean principles of Womack and
Jones, which are essentially how can we think about
improving the process in kind of an organized way. And then we're going to
walk through a set of tools which, over the course of
the next couple of days, we will dive deeper into. For now, with the
exception of mapping, which we're actually going
to do in some detail, we'll walk through
the tools relatively quickly just to sort of give
you an introduction to them. Again, those will be reinforced
as the course goes on. So what do we mean by a process? Simply put, it's an action
or a series of actions that transforms something. We have an input, some
kind of process that transforms it into an output. If we want to expand the
definition a little bit more, we can also think about
where the inputs come from. A manufacturing-derived
terminology is suppliers. That's actually
kind of dangerous because in a service
thing, that may actually be the customer
that has a request, or it may be somebody else. It may not necessarily be a
supplier in the material sense. But there is a place where
the inputs come from, a set of defined inputs, instead
of defined transformations, and the outputs
go to a customer. So let's talk about a
customer a little bit. What happens to the
outputs of a process? They go to a customer. Again, just like
supplier, the terminology, we've got to be careful
not to get too hung up on. Customer may be customer in the
sort of retail sense, somebody who buys something. Or it may be somebody else who
gets value out of the process. So external customers are
really that retail customer. The customer is
the people who pay for the process to take place. They may or may not
be the end user. There are plenty of examples
in the aerospace business, for the engineering
side of the room, of customers, for example,
government acquisition, the people who buy things are
not the people who use them. So there's even
there a distinction between the purchasing customer
and the end user customer. In addition, in many
complex processes, you may actually be working
for an internal customer. So a given step in a
more complicated process may actually be
working for somebody inside the organization. A classic case of that
in aerospace engineering operations. Sometimes you do engineering
for outside customers. Most of the time you
do it for customers within your organization. In the health care side,
there's an awful lot of service provision
which are not directly affecting the patient but
that are necessary, say, to keep the hospital going. So thinking about customers
with a little bit of nuance is necessary. The other thing that we want
to make sure we don't get too caught up in the
words is the fact that our customers
also often provide some of the inputs to our process. So actually, in a classic
retail transaction, the customer has a need, which
is an input to our process, as well as being
the ones who receive the output of the process. So how do we
visualize a process? Very general question. A good method is
process mapping, is to try to get
our brains wrapped around what goes on
inside our work process through a simple map. There's a couple
of examples here. This one is close to my heart. This is an aerospace engineering
drawing release process. This is a before Lean. It's actually, from
an engineering point of view, a simple process. But when you map it out in
the sort of legacy state, it doesn't look so simple. In fact, it looks
very confusing. And this is near
and dear to my heart because I spent 10 years
working in that box. You can't read it. That's stress analysis. And notice that's the one
that all the lines come in and out of. So the task actually turned
out to be very simple there, but the interactions with
the rest of the process were very confusing in
the old, pre-Lean state. Here, interestingly,
is a before picture, and Earl can probably comment
on this a little more, for heart attack treatment. This one doesn't look too
bad compared to that one. It's sort of more
or less linear. There seems to be
some sort of steps, probably involving different
people working on the patient. But apparently
that was pre-Lean. So apparently that
process could be improved. AUDIENCE: Problem with that
process was it took too long. HUGH MCMANUS: OK,
too many steps. So it's organized here. We can see a pretty clear path. But lots and lots of steps. So took too long. That's easy to understand. This one, yeah, more complex set
of problems with that process. In any case, the
point here is not to is not to go too deep on
the individual processes, but to get the point across that
in order to improve a process, you have to understand it, and
that one good way to understand it is visually, and
maps help us with that. So here's an example. It's not even a
very good example, but it's an intuitive example. Most people would understand it. I want a hot dog. Or my kids want a hot dog. That's usually what
happens on the weekends. Dad, can we have a hot dog? So my customer, the
kids, order a hot dog. So they're providing
input to the process as well as being
the output customer. They're kind of in a loop there. So then the question
is, do I have hot dogs? So I go look in the pantry. Why the hot dogs
are in the pantry I've still not figured out. They should probably
be in the refrigerator. Apparently this is not
a perfected process, but that's OK. And if there is hot dogs
in the pantry, I'm all set. If there's not, I have
to go to the store. So there's a little
bit of a decision here. Here's another supplier,
which is the store. If I have everything I
need, I cook the hot dog, I put it in the bun. I give it to the kids. We're all set. There's a little bit of an
extra sort of tail end loop here, which is I
got to clean up. And if I'm smart about
it, I'll actually save myself some front
end work by putting hot dogs on the shopping
list if I used them all up. Not the greatest not
the greatest process map, but it's one
everyone can understand. You could probably
do better, and we're going to give you an
opportunity to do exactly that. We're going to do a little
bit more complicated process. It's not just kids
ordering from me. But it's not that
much more complicated, and it does, in fact,
involve fixing hot dogs. In your blue folder you have
a little story about Sasha and Andy's hot dog stand,
and the stuff in the front give you an introduction
to Sasha and Andy, who have a hot dog stand. And they're doing fine,
but they find that they are a little bit swamped. They have more customers
than they can deal with, and they want to
improve their process. So we're going to
help them do that. And so we're going to help them
do that with a direct exercise here. Read the sheet here. For you, their
process is actually already been broken down. If you were doing this with
your own process from start, you'd have to do the little
exercise of figuring out what are the steps,
what are the inputs and outputs to the steps. Don't even worry about the data
yet, just the first column. That's the steps that they take. That's been done for you,
and we're going to map this. So give you a second
to look at that. Think about the steps,
their inputs and outputs. And then we're going
to create a map using the post-it notes which are out
on the table with the sharpies. For each of the process
elements, make a post-it. And this is not supposed
to be complicated. The first one is,
let's see, take order. So let's make it easy. Take order. Who takes the order? Sasha takes the order. We could add that information,
or we could use color. Perhaps this color
implies Sasha. And we'll put that on our
thing, and we're using a sticky. Why? We can move it around
because a priori, we're not really sure how
these things should be arranged to make the most sense. Let's think about inputs and
outputs who gives the input? Customer, OK. So there's another one. So we might want to do
something like that. And you get the picture. We're not going to do
the whole thing for you. You're going to do it. Get the stickies. Arrange them on the board. Don't start drawing
lines yet because that would kind of ruin the point
of having the stickies there. When you think you have
everything puzzled out, there might be some other
details that are necessary. One of them is that there
might be waiting or inventory. There may be places
where the process waits. And the traditional symbol
for that is a triangle. We don't have any
triangle-shaped stickies, so we are going to use
something like this. Perhaps there is a
line of customers. So there's kind of an inventory
waiting box in front of them. I don't know. I'm making this
up as I go along. And perhaps a decision has
to be made at that point. Do we take the order or
tell them no, I'm sorry, we don't sell that? Decisions are diamonds. You can do a diamond by just
putting a square sideways. When all that is done, then
it's time to draw the lines. You can actually even
make that temporary and use stickies with arrows
on them, or use string. I've participated in
exercises where you do that. That's getting a
little bit too clever. It gets a bit messy. Best thing to do is
arrange everything on the board with the stickies. When you think you got
everything lined up, then draw lines to show
how the process is flowing. This is a speed exercise. You only have 10 minutes,
so get with your groups. Here are the basic mapping
symbols, triangle, rectangle, diamond. Don't worry about issues yet. We're going to get to that. Map out this process. [INTERPOSING VOICES] HUGH MCMANUS: So time's up. I think everybody's
got something that approximates a map here. And don't worry,
you'll get that chance to play with it more
in the near future. So let's see what we have. Let's have the
folks in the back, who have a map that
looks kind of different, let us know what they have. AUDIENCE: So we had the
[INAUDIBLE] colors as well, and it starts at the upper
left and goes down here. We don't actually
have the process line, but essentially the time
next to each post-it referred to how long that
is suggested to take. And then we have this
loop-interlook process here where Andy will need to prepare
the hot dog, and potentially multiple hot dogs. And coming up here,
Sasha checking the order and completing that process,
as well as ending with a 10-minute-per-hour
makes sense. HUGH MCMANUS: And
you've got sort of a different
physical arrangement. Comes down and
then back up again, which is sort of enforced by
the geometry of that board. So that's fine. And I guess because maybe
you didn't have time to finish with the lines, it's
a little bit less clear kind of what the rework is. It looks a little more linear. That's fine. And I don't think we're
going to go through. It looks like everybody
else also did a nice job. The point, though, is not to
go through each individual one and give you a grade. The point actually is that
I think all of these maps are successful in
visually representing the process and some of
its difficulties, the fact that it is fairly long, that
it has reworks and decisions, that it has weights and times. Those are all captured. And there's no real right
answer because that's the point of our next slide. It's a 2D visualization. It's something that's actually
taking place in 3D space. Plus there's time issues. There's issues of
these processes that are not on the main loop. You can't basically
get everything into a two-dimensional map. You do the best you can. You use it as a way of
communicating the process. So capturing and communicating
the key features of the process is what you want to do. One thing that you do
have to be careful of, and this exercise is actually
fairly carefully designed this way, you have to capture-- I actually shouldn't say
avoid unneeded details. You have to capture the
right level of detail. If we just said,
make the hot dog, we'd miss all of this
interesting stuff. On the other hand, if we went
through--and some people did, and that's OK because I didn't
tell you not to-- went through the individual, OK, take the
order, chat with the customer, take the money. At some level of detail we
might actually want to do that. At the level of detail
of this whole process, if we get into those
individual things, it gets too complicated. so most folks did capture that
level of detail about right. So I think we've all
succeeded in doing the key thing,
which is capturing the features of the process. We're going to come
back to these maps. But for now, that's
it for processes. Like I said, if there's one
thing you take away from here, it's thinking about
work as processes because once you think of
something as a process, you can understand and improve
it, often fairly intuitively. Often it really is application
of common sense to the process to make it better. So a little bit of
a transition now. We're going to get into the
five Lean thinking fundamentals. Earl introduced you a little
earlier to the origins of Lean, how it came out of a study
of Japanese practices by Jim Womack and his team. And Womack and Jones
wrote a book in 1995, where they basically
took the base, the ideas, the concepts of
the Japanese system and captured them not
so much as a system, but as a way of transforming
existing processes into better ones. They said, let's
take these principles and figure out how
they can be used to take existing processes,
which are maybe not so great, and transform them
into better ones. And that's kind of
the essence of Lean as practiced in North
America and Europe, at least. And here they are. Here are the
fundamental principles. First of all, specify value. Understand what we want to
accomplish because if we don't do that, we can't
really think clearly about any of the other steps. So what is the value
of our hot dog stand? What is the value
of a hot dog stand? Hot dogs, right? Hot dogs for customers, warm,
safe, no diseases or bugs. You can think of a couple
of the quality issues. You can think of
some nuance to it. But basically, we
want to make hot dogs. Identify the value stream. We've sort of done that. If we think about the process
and take a process map, but a rather specific
kind of process map, which is a process map that
follows the value added product
through the process, and then think about how
value is added to that product as it moves through the process,
that's a value stream map. We're pretty close on this. We figured out the
value is the hot dog, and we're following the
hot dog pretty much. We're following a hot
dog order through there. So all of ours are
approaching value stream. Not all process maps are. We could have followed
Sasha around, right? What does that person do? That's not a value stream map. It's a process map. It's following that
person's work process. But value stream map
follows the product, the value added product. Make value flow. Saw a couple of maps earlier. There was that engineering map. Didn't look like a lot
of flow in that map. The lines are all
over the place. The heart attack map was better. At least there was
some coherent patient comes in to patient is
resolved, in some way. So there was a potential
there for flow, at least. But Earl was saying
that in the old state, it wasn't really being
achieved because there was too many steps. It was too slow. So what we would like
to do is have value flow through the value stream
as continuously as possible, not necessarily as
fast as possible, a low speed. Usually processes
are too slow, so it's reasonable to say we would
like it to flow quickly through the process. Then we get a little
bit more sophisticated, and by the end of
the class, we'll get to what this concept means. It may not be
intuitive right away. If we have a system
that flows and creates value for the customer,
there's the potential that we can allow the customers
to pull value from that system. Like Lean, that's a
slightly fraught word. What does that mean,
especially when we're pulling on something
that flows or pulling on water? I don't know, the metaphor's
getting kind of messed up. But the idea here is that
essentially if the system flows continuously and creates
value, from the customer's point of view, when they
want something, they get it. They can come up to the hot dog
stand, say, I want a hot dog. The hot dog comes. They're happy. And this act of satisfying
the customer actually controls the process all the
way back to the lowest levels. The customer gets their hot dog. We essentially
have a process that doesn't require a whole
lot of decision making that isn't complicated,
that flows, that creates the hot dogs, that orders the
buns, that cleans up the grill, whatever. The whole system is set up
so that the customer desire activates the system to satisfy
that desire in a way that's continuous and easy
and creates value with the minimum of waste. And finally,
pursuing perfection. If we can do all
of this, we're not done because we can
always do better. Earl mentioned the F18,
how they identified them as a Lean enterprise. And the first thing they
said is, that's not true. We have so much more to do. Right attitude. They knew that they
weren't perfect. An external observer
said you're pretty good. But they knew that
they weren't perfect. They were, in fact,
pursuing perfection. So this is a continuous process. All right. So we're going to spend
the rest of both this unit, and then after lunch, the
second unit, essentially walking through these
concepts, going a little deeper and also giving you some tools
on each one of these levels. First thing we're going
to talk about is value. This one is fraught. It's fairly easy
to define value-- not always. You have to be a little
bit careful- But? It's fairly easy
to define the value of the output of a process. We want hot dogs. That's our value. When we start looking
in more detail, what's the value of the
individual process steps? Is cooking the hot dog valuable? I hope so, assuming
you want it cooked. But is cleaning
the grill valuable? Maybe. We have to think about
that a little harder. And in a real workplace,
this can get very difficult, especially if you
start attaching personal self-worth issues. If you're told you
are non-value added, what does that do
to your morale? And it's not just
a morale issue. It's also a motivation issue. When we first started applying
Lean to product development activities, we got things
completely up and down the scale from people arguing
that their work was valuable because they knew it was without
really any context to what it did for the customer, all
the way to the other side, where we had some
Lean experts come in and say, well, analysis isn't
valuable because it doesn't add anything directly to the
customer, which, as an analyst, I sort of had problems with. It took me a while to figure
out exactly what the problem was with that. But people that were too
eager to essentially say that activities, and
by implication, people were non-value added. The point is that you
have to think about it. So there's some guides on here. We can think about value as
like cooking the hot dog, things that directly transform material
or information in the direction of the customer's desire and
done correctly, no mistakes. That's unambiguously valuable. The other end's kind of easy to
think about, too, pure waste. Consumes resources
but creates no value. So waiting. Inventory, stuff that's
just sitting around. Mistakes. Reworking things in a
creative sense can be good. But if it's because you're
fixing a mistake, no value there. Things like that. And then in the middle,
there may be things that we know don't really add
value but we simply have to do. There may be setup
and tear down issues with our current technologies. There may be the necessity
to do project coordination. We may have to satisfy
regulations or laws. So there may be things
that we got to do. Like I said, t the
individual task level, that's not necessarily
an easy thing, and here's a great example. Does inspection add value? A couple of little
brainteasers here. Inspect those. Everybody got them, maybe? Yeah. This one's funny. One of my colleagues
in the back, we have a mark-up
copy of our slides because we are always doing
continuous improvement. She found one of these
double word things. See the two V's? She found a double word error. It wasn't even a line jumper. They were right next to
each other on a slide we've been using for five years. So people are not
very good at this. People are not very good
at inspecting in quality. So is it value added or not? And you could have a
lively argument about. We're not now. Actually, anybody
have any ideas? What's your gut feeling
about inspection? Value added or not? AUDIENCE: It depends on
where it is in the process. HUGH MCMANUS: Depends on
where it is in the process. Very good. Very good answer, actually,
nice general answer. But a very good answer. Yeah. aren't are very
good at inspecting. And inspecting in quality is
actually known not to work. On the other hand, you
might have to do that. If something is
super safety critical and it's just really hard
to do right the first time, you might have to inspect it. Also, continuous inspection
of the work process is known to be quite valuable. Inspecting in quality
at the end of something that should go right the
first time, probably not. And unfortunately a lot
of traditional, especially manufacturing-type processes
lean on that a little too heavily. So context dependent,
an interesting case where you have to be
careful that you don't assume something either way. Inspection is non-value added. No, no, no, it's
super safety critical. We got to do it. I don't want to fly
in an airplane that hasn't been inspected. But inspecting something that's
coming off a line that you're making a million of, given
that you know inspection doesn't work very well as a
quality method, not so good. So that's value. We're going to do a
little exercise in that before the day is over,
before this class is over. Identifying value stream. What is the value stream? It's the end- to-end
activities that take place to deliver value. Said this already against
that first slide, starting with the raw material or
the initial information, ending with the
customer, or user. From the beginning to
the end, the material, the product flows is often a
backwards flow of information. Customer needs, schedules,
inventory information, et cetera. So is the main flow of the
value from raw material or raw information to something
the customer wants, often a backwards flow of information. What moves in a value stream? Manufacturing, it's easy. Stuff. In design and
services, less easy. Some kind of information flows. I call it the help line. I have a question. I want an answer. It's all information. It's not physical. It makes it a little bit harder
to track, a little bit harder to think about. But there is a
flow of information that is satisfying the customer. In human services, medical,
for example, it may be people. It may be the actual customer
flowing through the system. And that could be in medicine. It could also be great
Lean company, Disneyland. They process people
and make them happy. But they think of it
very much as a process. So there's a flow of people
coming in sad and grumpy and going out sad, grumpy, and
hot and poor, at least in my-- no, I joke. They have a good time. And the process is
set up so they do. So thinking about value streams
the definition of the value stream is the set
of activities that adds value to the work product
to satisfy the customer. So the first order analysis
of the value stream is to look for things that
don't do that, look for waste. This is called waste hunting,
and it's actually a lot of fun because it's easy. Most processes, once
you've defined them, it's very easy to
find wasteful steps. May be a little harder
to get rid of them, but it's really
easy to find them. And waste comes in a couple
of different flavors. We're actually going
to be talking mostly about muda, about
just looking at stuff that doesn't add value. So cleaning the grill or
waiting or throwing away the unused hot dogs at the
end of the day, or stuff that just is clearly not valuable. Something to keep in the
back of your mind, though-- and we'll come
back to this later, especially the
health care folks, you're going to get a good
dose of this tomorrow-- are issues that can cause muda. And there's some Japanese
words associated with this that don't have good translations. So we like to use the
Japanese muri, overburden or unreasonableness. Essentially, there's
somebody in the process that too much is being asked of. Telling them to work harder
doesn't do very much good. This can be people. It can be machines. We've got to run
this machine 24/7. How good is that process? How long is it going to work? It's going to work until
the machine breaks, and then it's not going
to work at all anymore. So being unreasonable,
overburdening things tends to spawn muda waste. Even more dynamic as is mura,
unevenness, instability. Again, there aren't
particularly good translations. But the idea here is that
if the process is uneven, if it's irregular or
fluctuating, it can't flow. Again, our metaphor there, our
sort of fluid flow metaphor, if the stream is turbulent,
if it has back flows, if it has backwaters where
it's not flowing, it has fast parts where it
is flowing, if it's uneven, it's not going to be
an efficient process. And so these are
also kinds of wastes that one should look for. And often, these are the
root causes of the musa, of the obvious waste. Here are seven or eight mudas. These are sort of classic,
right out of Toyota and Womack. There are lots of
lists like this. In fact, most fields-- if you're
in health care, engineering, whatever, you look
up the latest book, they'll have a list like this. It won't be the same because
everybody likes to make up lists for their own field. That's fine, actually. These actually are
kind of fundamental. You can translate these
into almost any field. But if you want to make up
your own, that's good, too. The whole point
is to categorize. Categorizing waste
makes it easier to spot. So things like waiting. That's pretty fundamental. Stuff that's not moving,
people that aren't working, it's a waste. Moving stuff around. Moving employees or moving
the material or information. This is essentially movement
of the value added stuff. This is movement
of the resources, the employees, and the stuff
necessary to do the work. Either of those is a waste. If your stuff is moving around,
it's not being worked on, and that costs
money or something. It costs people's time. It costs money to
move around inventory. Stuff that's sitting. It's kind of the
converse of waiting. People are waiting,
stuff is waiting. Producing too much. It's efficient to produce
large batches of things. That's still true even
in our Lean world. However, if you don't
need them, it's a waste. It's tempting, in Earl's
analogy, to buy what's on sale, but if it goes bad, that's
a waste, having too much. Defects, always bad. Doing more work than you need
to affect the transformation. Engineers are great at that. There's some question about
whether our health care system over processes these things. That's a controversy, but all
of these things don't add value. And they're fairly easy to spot. Unused employee
creativity is often added as the eighth waste. Essentially, it's
missed opportunities. It may be just missed work. But if they're just not
working, that's waiting. But if they're working
at a sort of mental level that's beneath them, if
you're losing opportunities to take advantage of the
employee's creativity and capability, that,
too, is a waste. Here's a really simple example
of unnecessary movement from the health care world. This is called a
spaghetti chart. It's actually a kind
of process chart. It's not a value stream map. It's completely different. You have a physical layout
that's a hospital floor. And you trace something. It could be the patient. It could be the nurse. In this case it's the
nurse doing their work. And this nurse is
all over the place just because things
are badly arranged. To get the work
done, she actually ends up walking 1250 feet
to do something trivial. Hopefully the patient is going
from the elevator to the room, but the nurse, to get
the patient checked in, has to run all over the
place to do their job. So it's a great visual way
of finding waste of movement. And here's some tools at this
value stream level to help. One of them is called kitting. This is kind of the
active version of 5S. If we need to move materials
to the place of work, why don't we move
them laid out the way they're going to be used? So here's a aerospace example. We had a beautiful picture that
we didn't have copyright for, so now we have a bad diagram. But if you have a complicated
mechanical assembly that uses lots of tubes
and wires, why not just deliver all the tubes
and wires you need in a box where they're laid out nice
and easy for the workers to get them? Likewise for a
medical procedure, having everything laid out nice
and neat is a good practice. Not new, right? I mean, a good OR
doctor is going to have a tray that
looks like that. But why isn't that
standard practice? Why isn't that just
done everywhere? Mistake proofing. Mistakes in a process are waste. And relying on people to
fix mistakes is dicey. People are good at some things,
but not so good at others. And one of the things
they're not so good is getting things right on
a really consistent basis over many, many repeats. So why not make the process
itself mistake-proof? This is a great example. It makes me feel much better
about being in a hospital. This is vacuum, and
this is oxygen. Now some things you want to hook up
to vacuum, and some things you want to hook up to oxygen.
And those look the same. And in fact, the
business end is the same. The coupler is the same. Obviously, hooking
the breather up to vacuum or the sort of
waste disposal thing up to pure oxygen that will light
it on fire, not a good idea. So there's a little stud so
that when you hook the thing up, it won't go into the wrong one. Very simple, very effective. That basic idea applies across
an amazing number of fields. Make it so you can't
hook it up wrong. There's a possibly apocryphal
story about airplanes. A lot of airplanes
these days fly by wire. Most of the controls go
through electronic components. They use the same couplers
because it's cheaper that way, so it's perfectly
possible to hook up the right-hand controls to
the left wing and vice versa. That's news, right? No, it's not possible anymore. That is something that has been
mistake-proofed, fortunately, long ago. Mistake-proofing the process. Checklist. This is a no brainer. But there's a great book
out in the medical field called Checklist
Revolution because it's revolutionary to use checklists. This, as a patient,
scares the heck out of me because in the aerospace
field, commercial airliners are astonishingly safe. They're probably the
safest complicated thing any civilization has
ever come up with. I'm sure they are, in fact. And one of the
reasons is that they are completely anal
retentive about checklists. Maintenance people do it. The pilots do it. Everybody operates off of lists. So you're not relying
on fallible human memory to make sure that the flaps
work before you take off. There's actually
a famous accident where they didn't bother
to do the checklist. And the flaps were not
working, and they took off, and it didn't work out so well. So very simple way of making
sure that complex processes are actually executed
correctly by fallible people. OK. We're going to do a quick
exercise in waste walking. I have handed out some dots. And we're going
to look at our map and decide if each one of
the steps and decisions-- don't bother with the
weights because we're pretty sure those are
non-value added-- but the steps and decisions, for sure. Are they value added, green? Do something for the customer. Are they necessary waste? We got to do them,
but they don't really help the customer, but
maybe the health board or whatever would be unhappy
if we didn't do them. Or are they pure waste? Are they something we
should try to get rid of? And There's no right answer,
and we're only going to take about five minutes. But we want you to, as a
group, think about these issues against the process map
that you've already done there. Here is your guide
of wastes, if that's helpful to your discussion. Take about five minutes,
and that will actually conclude our exercise. But don't go away. We'll have a couple words
before we let you go to lunch. [INTERPOSING VOICES] HUGH MCMANUS:
Everybody's had a chance to at least argue about this. A lot of times the value
isn't so much in the answer. It's in the debating. Trying to find out,
maybe you never do decide whether
it's valuable or not, but you do understand
the issues. So let's have one
group that hadn't done it before, maybe you folks. Tell us your conclusions
against your map there. So you're on camera. Do a good job here
of explaining to us the value and non-value
added that you guys found for the processes. AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
customer, we figured that, well,
it's not essential. People expect it to happen. [INAUDIBLE] people get happy. Packing order on the board
and getting the order we [INAUDIBLE] yellow. We think obviously
was not value added. Then decision, when
you add dots, again, it doesn't add value
to the customer, but it needs to be done. [INAUDIBLE] the
order all the way was is quite straightforward
that adds value. And then after that, checking
the order is one of those-- I guess it doesn't add
value to me as a customer. But if it's not
done [INAUDIBLE],, I'll be very happy. Adding beverage adds value. [INAUDIBLE] customer
[INAUDIBLE].. Ideally customer would
have just been [INAUDIBLE] waste time [INAUDIBLE] come up. And delivering order
obviously adds value. The rest of the general things
like setting up the work area, cleaning, service,
stuff like that, is all regulatory requirements
and necessary evils. HUGH MCMANUS: OK. See if we get any compare and
contrast with, say, this group. You guys didn't read
the report, did you? What do you guys have here? AUDIENCE: So we have taking
the order, collecting money, it's all very important. Tracking order is something that
doesn't really add value to it, or putting it on the board. Then of course,
getting the order, making it, cooking the hot
dogs, that's all important. Checking if the
order is complete doesn't really add value. But we need to do that
so that you know what you're giving to the customer. Of course you have to give them
their beverage and [INAUDIBLE] their order. And then setting up and cleaning
the back area where you're working, that's not really
value added to the customer because they're not
interacting with that space. But the place where they
put on the condiments is important because it's
part of their simple process. HUGH MCMANUS: OK,
so that's good. So we see some of the
possibilities here. The thing that I
noticed that actually is often one of the
more controversial ones that you had different. You guys called it customer
relations and gave it a green. And those folks chat with
customer and gave it a yellow. And some people give it a red. Now there's a red over there. There's a yellow
to red over there. Right. So there's some
judgment calls in there. And if this was a real
exercise, what would we need to make that call before
we told Sasha, no, sit down. Stop talking to the customers. No talking. Before we made that
call, what would we need? AUDIENCE: They ask the
customer what they value. HUGH MCMANUS: OK. Ask the customer. AUDIENCE: I was going to say you
could kind of do the analysis and see your profit over
time versus chattering. HUGH MCMANUS: See
the chat versus, OK, we can get some data. AUDIENCE: Decide what our
mission is as a company. HUGH MCMANUS: There we go. Yeah. Are we all about
customer service, or are we just about hot
dogs and nothing else? Are we the hot dog Nazis? We're just not nice to people
but have great hot dogs. Yeah, there's a bunch of there's
a bunch of different factors that aren't on this
piece of paper. That's the key thing. If we're sitting in
our classroom here, we can't know these things. Here's another Japanese word. We have to go to the gemba,
which is the actual place. That's the literal translation
of gemba, the actual place where the work happens. And this is another
basic idea in Lean. We have to go to the place
where the work happens. Sadly, we can't go
visit Sasha and Andy because they're imaginary. Unfortunately, we also
can't visit our shoe factory because of schedule and
budget constraints this year. But after we come
back from lunch, Earl will be taking us
through a video factory tour so we can see real
work in action.
