Lean Corporate Mindset: What Does It Take?

So you’ve started to come to terms with the fact that you need to integrate lean thinking into your organization. That’s certainly a great thing, but it’s not something that you just snap your fingers and see the results you’ll have to put some actual effort into it. Developing the right lean corporate mindset will take some time, but once you’re there, you’ll start seeing patterns that you didn’t suspect existed before. It’s a life-changing journey that will leave you much better prepared in the end.

An Attention to Detail

You’ll have to develop a strong attention to detail there’s no way around that. Part of being a successful lean leader is the ability to spot minor issues in the organization and address them on a fundamental level. You’ll need to be able to tell when there are minor inconsistencies in the way certain things work, or when they deviate from their norms. This won’t always be immediately obvious, mind you in some cases, you’ll have to spend a lot of time looking for the answers to those questions. But if you start paying attention to the small details that matter, you’re going to have an easier time seeing the big picture as well.

Constantly Looking Forward

Another part of being a good lean leader is the ability to constantly look forward in everything you do. This is easier said than done, mind you it requires a fundamental change in the way you’re approaching problems in your work. Sometimes, leaders are inclined to keep doing things the same way because it’s worked without problems so far. And while that’s sometimes an appropriate approach, that’s not always the case. You’ll sometimes have to take the more difficult approach of implementing something new and risky.

Integrating New Improvements Rapidly

Which brings us to the next important point. You’ll need to develop the ability for integrating new solutions into your workflow quickly and effortlessly, with minimal hassle. Since you’ll constantly be dealing with new developments on the market, it makes sense to develop a sense for how they can be integrated into your work more easily. While each such project is unique and will require its own approach, there are some things that will be common factors from one to the next, and you’re going to start noticing those patterns sooner or later.

Learning from Past Mistakes

Everyone makes mistakes. But what truly separates competent leaders from the rest is their ability to learn from their own mistakes and integrate that knowledge into their future work. This requires the ability to take a critical look at your own results, which not everyone has but it’s an important quality for any lean leader nevertheless. You’ll also have to develop some system for keeping track of those mistakes and organizing them in a way that allows you to easily go through your history and see what you’ve done in the past. Modern technology can make this quite easy, so it’s in your best interest to investigate how that’s done.

Exchanging Knowledge and Experience

Don’t forget that lean and Six Sigma were built to a large extent on the idea of constantly exchanging knowledge and experience between specialists in those fields. This means that you should do your best to contribute to that system as well. Pay attention to the needs of other organizations, and try to be in constant dialog with them. You never know when someone might propose something that you’ve never thought of before, completely changing your perspective on your current work.

On that note, use the internet to its full potential as well. It’s full of useful resources that can come in great handy when you want to get up to speed with the latest developments in the fields of lean and Six Sigma. It also allows you to contribute your own knowledge and easily exchange ideas with others.

Conclusion

The main thing about being a successful lean leader is the motivation to constantly move forward and explore new grounds. This is something that every leader should have, sure but when it comes to lean, it’s a fundamental requirement to implementing lean principles in your organization’s workflow in the first place. And you should start your journey in educating yourself on that topic as early as possible.

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How to Control Innovation in Your Organization

Being innovative is directly linked to an organization’s ability to survive in a rapidly developing market. At the same time, it comes with many implications that are not immediately obvious, and it can be quite difficult to keep everything in check. You need solid experience and a determined approach. Above all though, you need to understand the implications of innovation on each aspect of your company’s work, and know how to properly control what’s going on.

Not Everything New Is Worth Adopting

The first thing you should realize is that just because something is innovative, doesn’t mean that you should necessarily adopt it. Various new technologies and methodologies end up being short-lived fads as people discover their weaknesses. And if you invest too much in the wrong innovation, it can cost you a lot. You need to maintain an optimal approach to this, and always keep the company’s wellbeing as a top priority.

Ongoing Market Research and Analysis

Researching the market on a regular basis is one of the best ways to avoid surprises. You should know what trends are currently popular, and what you might expect in the coming months/years. Modern technology offers plenty of solutions for gathering detailed information about the market and running it through complex analytical systems too. It’s a good idea to take advantage of that as much as you can.

Have a Fallback Plan

Even if you plan ahead as much as possible though, sometimes things are still going to go wrong. You can’t predict every single factor that will come in play when implementing new technologies into your organization. What you can do, however, is ensure that you have a fallback plan that you can use in case things get really bad. You should ideally have some way of recovering from a situation that has cost you a lot of time and money without impacting the overall performance of the organization.

Sure, that’s easier said than done. But it’s important that you get a grip on these concepts as quickly as possible, because no company can survive for a long time without a good backup plan for all of its major changes.

Coordinate with Other Companies

Try to align what you’re doing with your partners on the market as well. Even your competitors may be useful sources of information in the right circumstances. You need to make sure that anything you’re doing is not too much out of line for the market as a whole. Sure, sometimes this is not necessarily a bad thing. If you know what you’re doing, you may have an ace up your sleeve that other companies haven’t considered at all.

But in most cases, you should check your actions at every step and ensure that you’re not straying too far from the average market norms. Otherwise you’re going to run into a lot of trouble later on when it comes to building partnerships.

Get Constant Internal Feedback

Last but not least, remember the importance of adequate internal feedback. People within your organization will have a thing or two to say about the way you’re integrating new technologies and promoting innovation. They will also have some comments about the technologies themselves. Sometimes, a new solution might clash significantly with the way things work at the company, leading to serious dissatisfaction among your employees.

You need to be on top of those issues whenever they happen and make it clear to everyone in your organization that you have their best interests in mind, and that your actions are motivated by a desire to improve the company as a whole. Have some viable communication channels open and keep checking up on them to ensure that you’re not missing anything important.

If you do this right, innovation can lead to huge improvements in your organization. Handle it wrongly though, and it can do more harm than good. Many people underestimate the potential negative effects of implementing innovative approaches in their organizations. You should never fall for that trap, and always ensure that you have a good overview of the big picture. And if you see a need to backtrack, then you should take seize any opportunity available that can get the job done with a minimal impact on the company.

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Six Sigma works very well when you’re operating in the manufacturing environment, as it was designed to be a viable tool in that field in the first place. Things tend to get more complicated to the point of being messy when you move into the transactional environment however, where you need to rely on a completely different approach from the ground up.

Don’t worry though Six Sigma can still work perfectly well in the transactional environment, but you have to adjust your approach accordingly. There are various intricate details that you’ll want to observe, starting from the data collection practices used in your organization. As long as you put some thought into the process and already have a strong intuition for proper Six Sigma practices, you should be able to see great results from your efforts.

How Are You Collecting Data?

Six Sigma relies heavily on having access to lots of data related to your current operations. This can be a greater challenge in the transactional environment though, where data collection tends to be less organized as a whole. It mostly boils down to where the data is being collected from, and how it’s aggregated.

If you rely on your workers to report the current status of their duties, this can quickly lead to major issues, especially when it comes to data related to performance measurements. You can’t expect to get an adequate overview of how things are running if everyone reports their own progress.

Modern technology can be quite helpful in overcoming this, as you’ll find a good number of solutions designed to help you collect and organize data. Not only that, but various tools on the market can make that data more accessible for you as well, allowing you to easily search through everything you’ve gathered to find the relevant points.

Managing Waste More Efficiently

Waste is a very negative word when it comes to Six Sigma, and learning to avoid it is in the foundation of every proper Six Sigma expert’s knowledge. There are many sources of waste in the transactional environment that you’ll need to be aware of, and it’s not just about data collection in this case. Things like communication can be very problematic in these environments, and can lead to the generation of significant volumes of waste.

If your departments have to spend a lot of time back and forward on simple topics that should normally be resolved easily, you already have a major source of waste. On the other hand, some companies try to overcome this problem by rushing the communication of their workers. As you’re probably guessing, this is not any better as it can still lead to waste, just in a different area of your operations.

Wasted effort is actually not an uncommon problem when you’re dealing in the transactional environment, and it’s one of the most critical points to address when applying the Six Sigma methodology to this area. And as long as you have good systems in place for collecting and aggregating data as we described above, you should be able to avoid that to a great degree.

Conclusion

Six Sigma can work very well in the transactional environment, despite being intended for other fields of work originally. There is a lot to gain from properly applying Six Sigma practices to this area, but you also have to be careful to ensure that you’re not creating waste in other, unexpected places. As long as you take good care of the data collection and retention systems in use in your organization, you should be able to easily avoid any trouble.

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The use of Six Sigma in the manufacturing environment is well established and has been studied in detail. Many approaches have been developed over time, and today this is a solid field that keeps building on what’s already been done. On the other hand, the transactional environment seems to be understood much more poorly by lean experts, leading to a severe lack of expertise in this area of the market.

There are various challenges in the transactional environment that are unique to it alone. For example, most processes tend to be flexible rather than following a rigid structure, and their flow is altered by various decisions along the way. On the other hand, collecting information is a more difficult task as there are typically fewer reliable sources to gather it from, and it mostly boils down to self-reporting.

It’s clear that an expert working in the transactional environment must have a fundamental understanding of the full range of tools available at their disposal, and understand how each of them can help them perform better in this kind of working environment.

Data Collection and Aggregation

It’s very important to have a good way to collect all the relevant data to the current processes, and to aggregate it in a way that makes it easily accessible to everyone who should have access to it.

Modern technology offers a wide range of tools for data collection, aggregation and retention, and you should look into integrating systems like that in your workflow on a fundamental level. Don’t rely on self-reporting for critical points, this can only lead to problems in the long run if a discrepancy is discovered.

It’s also important to make sure that data is pruned over time, and not just focus on retaining as much of it as possible. One common problem in many organizations operating in the transactional environment is that they eventually get flooded with irrelevant data and find it hard to make a viable decision.

Visualization

Another critical aspect for working in the transactional environment includes the ability to use visualization tools and techniques, and understanding the flows behind them. These are not just useful for high-level leadership, but it can benefit employees at lower ranks within the organization too. When everyone can clearly see how a process flows and what the steps required to complete it are, people tend to make better decisions at each step of those processes.

And this matters because, as we described above, the transactional environment often features a good number of processes which get executed in different ways depending on current conditions, and sometimes this can be quite unpredictable. When everyone has a good way of visualizing what’s going on, decisions can be made in a way that gives predictable results.

Decision-Making Aligned with Current Processes

If you’re going to be effective in a transactional environment, you’ll need to ensure that any decisions taken in the course of executing a process are aligned with the long-term goals of that process. Using tools and enacting processes that emphasize sound decision-making will ultimately help drive forward an organization towards success. This is a point that can often be hard to get across in organizations with old preexisting processes, but it’s important to get it through, because improper decisions can quickly stack up and detract from the current efforts of the organization.

But from the perspective of a low-level employee, it can sometimes make sense to take a decision that ultimately drags the project down. This often comes down to saving time on a personal level, or even across a whole department, and while it’s clearly not beneficial to anyone, it still happens quite often.

Conclusion

The transactional environment presents many unique challenges that are not found in any other working environments. Those who’re already experienced applying lean principles to the manufacturing environment will have to adjust to the many intricate aspects of the field. The good news is that lean is actually very compatible with this style of work, you just need to have the right approach, and know what the best tools available for this purpose are.

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Six Sigma has evolved quite a lot since its inception, and today it’s an extremely powerful methodology that can bring a lot to the table for most organizations on the market. It’s a shame that it’s not being utilized more actively at the moment, but that will probably change in due time as people start to realize the important implications. What will happen until then though, and how will Six Sigma look in the future? This is a question that many experts in the field have been bringing up lately, and it’s definitely an interesting point to discuss.

Increased Use of Modern Technology

We’re already seeing some great applications for modern technological advancements in the field of Six Sigma, but this is likely just the tip of the iceberg. Many experts believe that we’ve yet to realize the true potential of what modern computers can do to help us optimize processes in our organizations, and the next few years might see an explosive development in this area.

It’s now possible to capture, analyze and aggregate data at much faster rates than before. At the same time, a larger number of processes can be observed, and with a greater accuracy. This all leads to a reduction in human error, and therefore significantly less waste generated during the whole process.

More Data to Work With

As a consequence of the above, we will also have access to much more data to work with in optimizing our processes. This is one of the critical factors in ensuring that your optimizations are successful, but sometimes it’s simply not possible to collect all the data that you need on your own.

In the future, the connected nature of the world will mean that we’ll have easy access to all kinds of data relevant to the work of different organizations. People are already building huge databases that serve different industries, and this trend will likely continue at an accelerated rate.

Of course, it’s important to ensure that we can also do something useful with all this data, instead of just piling up one big mess that nobody can navigate. But with the help of modern analytical tools, this can probably become quite easy and even manageable by people with less experience than would normally be required.

Easier Defect Detection Capabilities

And when we put all of these factors together, it becomes much easier to keep the quality of your production line in check, and ensure that defects are kept to a minimum. This is one of the main points of Six Sigma in general, and we’re likely going to see it developed much better in the next few years.

There are already some serious shifts towards putting more effort to minimize defects at all stages of production, and companies have started to realize how harmful this particular type of waste is. Sustainable development is becoming a more and more central topic in the work of many companies, and that’s certainly a good thing for the market as a whole.

There is much more that can be done though, especially if we have access to more information about the way different defects tend to manifest themselves in various industries. And with the way things currently are, it’s only a matter of time at this point. We’re already collecting the information, we just need to get enough of it and organize it in a way that anyone can go through it and get something useful. This will take some combined effort, but the final result will be well worth it.

Conclusion

Six Sigma has gone through a huge evolution, and it’s likely going to grow even more in the next few years. It’s an enormous field full of opportunities for those who want to optimize the workflow of their organizations and reduce waste as much as possible, and modern technology has made it even better in many ways.

We’re likely just scratching the surface of what’s possible in this regard though, so anyone interested in how Six Sigma can transform their organization should pay attention to developments in the field in the next few years there will likely be a lot to see and learn, judging by the current trends.

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Small mistakes can often lead to huge problems in the service industry, and it’s critical to maintain a high level of quality and attention to detail with every client. It should therefore be no surprise that poka-yoke is such a popular methodology in that area, and there are plenty of examples of successfully using it to reduce the error of human mistakes in the work of service professionals, leading to huge improvements in the operations of those companies over a longer term.

Simplifying Smaller Tasks

Small details tend to be the most problematic part of working in the service industry, as they can often lead to the biggest and most commonly repeated mistakes among professionals. It’s therefore important to ensure that the need for human interaction in performing those tasks is kept to an absolute minimum, and that there are sufficient safeguards in place to verify the results of each step and ensure that the job is done correctly.

For example, when servicing people as a cashier or server, it’s not rare to make small mistakes in counting change or preparing it for the customer. Implementing a system that automates this or at least verifies the result of the worker’s execution can therefore remove this problem, or in most cases at least reduce it significantly.

Many restaurants have adopted digital systems for their waiters for this exact reason. By simply ticking off everything on a touchscreen and reading the list from a similar device at the kitchen, the likelihood of getting an order wrong is eliminated. The same process is then repeated when loading the server’s tray, ensuring that there is no possibility of messing anything up at any step of the way.

Keeping Things in Check Behind the Scenes

It’s also important to ensure that your workers have to do a minimal amount of preparational work behind the scenes, as that can also be prone to mistakes and can lead to dissatisfaction among users, even though they don’t see exactly what the problem is. Make sure that whenever someone has to step behind the lines to get something, it’s prepared for them in a way that’s automated as much as possible. Also, get your workers to cross-check each other’s work in those areas in order to avoid making mistakes in front of the customer later on.

Modern technology can be very helpful in this part of the job too. Efficient communication is vital when you want to make sure that everything is running smoothly and with a minimal chance for operator error. To this end, you should supply your workers with devices to keep each other in touch with regards to their current task and plans, and to be able to signal everyone in case something goes wrong.

Of course, don’t overdo it in this regard, and remember that technology and the way you use it in poka-yoke is supposed to make things simpler, not more complicated. If you add too many safeguards, especially ones that require manual user input, this might make things more challenging for your workers, defeating the whole purpose of implementing poka-yoke in the first place.

Conclusion

Poke-yoke can be a very effective tool in the service industry, and it can help you make sure that mistakes are kept to a minimal level among your workers. This can not only make everyone’s jobs easier and lighter, but it can also work very well in improving the impressions of your customers, and making them see your service in the best light possible. After all, impressions are pretty much everything in this industry, and leaving a wrong one tends to have lasting implications.

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The problem of errors in laboratory work is still a prevalent one in research fields, even though a lot of work is being done to address it. There are various steps that can be taken to minimize the risk of your data sets becoming polluted with incorrect results and other similar types of failure, and using lean methodologies is by far one of the best things you could do for your laboratory. Lean recognizes certain sets of issues which are integral to the work of a typical lab, and it can help you easily overcome those problems and stabilize the output of your research.

Reducing Waste

Anyone already familiar with lean can probably guess what the number one issue that you should be trying to avoid is waste. In the context of laboratory work, waste can be defined in various ways, but time wasted waiting around for inventory is perhaps the most common problem. Laboratories typically need to ensure the safety of their operating procedures, and sometimes this means requiring their workers to go through some complicated steps in order to get access to certain resources.

Recognizing these cases and eliminating the unnecessary steps in these procedures is a great way to boost productivity and ensure that less time is wasted idling around. Of course, make sure that you don’t go overboard and actually retain the aspects of these procedures which promote the safety of your workers. However, in many cases, these old processes can be revised and simplified, especially with the help of modern technology. It’s not rare that you might be operating on a checklist that was developed years ago when certain advancements didn’t exist yet.

More Efficient Inventory Organization

Another common problem that you will want to pay close attention to is overstocking. This is also somewhat relevant to the issue we described above, as it can lead to increased delays when a worker is trying to procure certain materials. But even without considering that aspect, it’s still a problematic situation because it can promote the generation of even more waste in the future. Being careful with the way you’re handling the storage of materials and ensuring that you don’t order too much is very important.

This relies on having a good overview of your current operations, and this is not always possible. If your lab is running on outdated practices for data collection and retention, it might be time to revise them and get some new systems in place. Without the ability to properly track your inventory and the flow of resources through the laboratory, you will not be able to handle restocking very efficiently. And that, in turn, will lead to a lot of waste being generated in the long run.

Overstocking can also be a problem from a safety standpoint, although this depends on what exactly your laboratory handles in the first place. When it comes to hazardous materials though, it’s obviously always better to be safe than sorry. In some cases, this might mean creating some extra waste in the form of waiting times, as we described earlier, but in this case it’s justified.

Reorganizing Your Physical Space 

Another issue which many laboratories don’t pay attention to until it becomes too problematic is the physical layout of the working area. Unnecessary travel times and transportation delays can be a big source of issues in a normal laboratory, and you should pay attention to the way resources are moving through the place. This includes people as well, and it’s a good idea to consult the lab workers and get their opinion on the way they are able to navigate their working space. You will find that many guides related to lean focus a lot on the importance of a sensible physical layout, and for a good reason. Sometimes a simple change can lead to some unexpectedly pronounced results across the board you never know!

Conclusion

Lean has a huge potential to improve the work done by laboratory workers, and to ensure that the amount of errors that come up in their results is kept to an absolute minimum. There is a lot that can be done in the average laboratory to improve its performance, and lean is the perfect tool for that job.

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Working with integrated projects can be a great boost to the productivity of an organization, especially one that deals with multiple talents across many different fields. In those cases, it’s often necessary to align expertise of various different types, which can be very challenging through traditional project organization methods. An integrated project is one that properly integrates the experience of everyone on board in an equal capacity, enabling the organization to reduce waste and improve the efficiency of executing those projects.

The main point is that the goals and interests of the team as a whole should be aligned to each member’s individual experience and objectives. Of course, the system still envisions some sort of hierarchy which drives the process, putting a key designer at the top and so on.

An important distinction between integrated projects and other types of delivery methods is the way in which the results are aligned to the project’s leadership. In most traditional project delivery methodologies, it’s common to see a leadership figure consolidating the different points of view, while in integrated projects, this is brought down to the level of the team itself.

Collaborating on the Same Level

This ultimately means that it’s up to those team members to resolve conflict and align their points of view, something which can end up a bit of a challenge when those team members have experiences in multiple different fields that don’t share too much with each other. That makes it important to ensure that those team members share efforts in equal capacity during the construction process, allowing them to not only identify points of conflict for later resolution, but also providing each team member with an alternative point of view that brings them closer to the others.

A key part of an integrated project are agreements between participants that align them on their roles. It’s important to create rigid relationships where both parties know what to expect from each other, and it’s also important to ensure that those relationships are aligned with each other. These agreements can be developed on multiple different levels for example, they can happen on a project level, or on the other hand, all the way down to agreements between individual contributors.

The important point is that these agreements are kept open and are brought up for discussion between the members of the team, so that any issues with alignment can be resolved early on before the project has moved into a more critical phase.

Sharing Risks and Responsibilities Alike

Another important point to keep in mind is that integrated projects are about sharing all aspects of the project development not just responsibilities but risks as well. This sometimes means that a party might end up bearing responsibility for a failure that is not directly relevant to their expertise, and the way this will work will depend on the agreements we mentioned above and how they are outlined. This makes it even more important to ensure that all team members are properly aligned on what they want to do with the project and what they expect the final outcome to be, because this also forces them to consider the important aspect of how they are going to share the responsibility for each risk involved.

Conclusion

An integrated project has many benefits as a delivery method, and it can be very easy to work with as long as you keep some basic fundamental points in mind. As long as everyone is properly aligned on their tasks and the risks involved in their work, and you make proper use of modern technology to organize the project even better, you should see some pretty good results at the end of the delivery phase.

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Statistical Process Control (SPC) is a commonly used technique for identifying faults in your production line, and ensuring that the final product is within acceptable quality boundaries. As the name suggests, it relies heavily on statistical methodologies to give you an adequate overview of the current state of your production facilities, and when applied correctly, it can be a very powerful tool for maximizing your output and reducing various kinds of waste. Unsurprisingly, it’s commonly used in lean organizations.

Data Collection

It all starts with gathering all the data that you’ll need in your statistical analysis, and nowadays you have plenty of options for that thanks to modern technology. It’s quite easy to fit your whole production facility with tiny sensors that capture all sorts of important data, and then funnel that into a node that either collects and aggregates the data, or processes it immediately.

Keep in mind that you can go quite far with data collection, and you must always be careful to not overextend your investment in this part of the business. This will not only result in wasted money, but it will also overburden your actual analysis process and make it much more complicated than it needs to be. And that alone can be a huge detriment to the quality of the analysis, therefore it’s crucial to minimize the data collection process as much as your current situation allows you to.

Setting Appropriate Control Limits

Control limits are one of the most important concepts in SPC, and it’s critical that they are set at appropriate levels to minimize incorrect results. This will take a certain amount of experience with your own specific field and the type of product your company makes, and you may also need intricate knowledge of the machines used in the whole process. Sometimes the manufacturers of different production machines may provide you with readily available data for those limits, but more often you’ll have to determine them yourself for your specific use case.

The point of these limits is that no production process is perfect, and there will always be some variation in the output. In many cases though, these variations can be acceptable as they don’t degrade the quality of the final product. Once you’ve set the right limits, you’ll be able to see the important outliers in your production data more easily.

And sometimes, you’ll have to redefine those limits along the way not just when you’ve changed something about the production process, but also when the market itself goes through some changes and forces you to adapt. In some cases this might even mean relaxing the quality control requirements slightly in order to momentarily improve the output capacity of the facility, but care should be taken with this approach to avoid overdoing it.

Reevaluating Your SPC Implementation

Sooner or later you will need to make some changes to the way you’re running your SPC, typically as the company grows and its requirements shift to a new direction. It’s important to regularly reevaluate the way you’re collecting and processing your data, and you should do your best to get your colleagues’ input on this as well. People on other levels of the organization may be able to see certain details that are not as obvious to you, and getting as much feedback as possible on your SPC can be extremely valuable.

Of course, you should also be careful to not overdo this, and if your current analysis produces good results in terms of product quality, then you should focus your efforts on another area of the organization. But never lose focus of the current state of your SPC.

Conclusion

SPC can be a very powerful technique when applied correctly, but it’s not a fire and forget solution. In fact, it’s quite the opposite and can be somewhat demanding in terms of maintenance and attention, but the final results are more than worth it. The impact of a proper SPC implementation on your organization can be incredible, and it’s one of the first steps you should take if you’re having problems with the consistency of your output, or its overall quality.

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It’s easy to collect information about the way your organization is running, especially nowadays with the help of modern technology. And yet, collecting too much data without actively thinking about what exactly it represents, can quickly lead to problems with productivity and more. You have to know how to identify the data points that really matter and focus on them exclusively, and that’s the whole reasoning behind the idea of KPIs or Key Performance Indicators.

Identifying the KPIs of Your Organization

Simply put, a KPI is a factor that holds a lot of weight in determining the current status of your organization. It’s highly dependent on the specific type of work that your company does, and every organization needs to develop its own set of KPIs, even between two companies in the same industry. Correctly identifying those points and focusing on them in your data collection and analysis is an important first step to ensuring that your organization is managed in a lean way.

The most basic example of a KPI is the output rate of the production facility. How many products are you putting out each day? What about each week or month? Collect that data and have it available in an easily accessible way, and soon enough you’ll start to see some patterns opening up in front of you.

Another good point for analysis is the downtime of different components of the organization. This includes both people, machines, tools, and entire departments. If a certain part of the company is spending a lot of time in wait, this could indicate an underlying issue that’s not immediately visible through other KPIs.

Working with an Up-To-Date List

As the organization evolves and grows, the list of its KPIs will change, sometimes frequently. It’s important to keep evaluating the current operations of the company and keep the list up to date, otherwise you’re not only going to miss out on some potential improvements, but you may very likely end up in a situation where you’re working against the benefit of the organization without even knowing it.

Sometimes old KPIs will become obsolete and irrelevant as the company’s operations are changing, and that’s fine. You don’t have to keep every point on the list forever, and in fact, this will probably start to be a bit detrimental to your ability to make sense of all this information at some point. And on that note, you should definitely think about the way you’re using modern technology and how you can utilize it to better evaluate the data you’ve collected.

Harnessing the Potential of Modern Technology

When you’re working with a lot of data, most of which is numbers, you can benefit a lot from using a modern digital solution to wrangle all of those bits. A well-designed database schema, for example, can allow you to easily locate the critical pieces of data that you need in your research, and it can help you aggregate the data you’ve collected through your operations as well.

You can also use modern gadgets all around the production floor to ensure that you’re tracking the performance of all machines and workers correctly, although it can take some time to set that system up correctly, and it can be expensive too, depending on the size of your organization and the way your operations are structured. If you’re in doubt, get a consultation from an expert with a lot of experience in this area and let them set up this aspect of the organization for you, as a mistake can end up being quite costly.

Conclusion

Understanding KPIs and how to analyze them correctly can have a huge impact on the way you’re running your organization. When you know exactly what you can expect from each action you’re taking, and know how it should impact the whole system of the organization, this can help you be much more confident in developing the company and pushing it forward with each new choice you’re making. But, as we said above, it’s also quite important to ensure that your KPIs are always kept up to date, as otherwise you may start making wrong decisions without even realizing it at some point.

The post How Can KPIs Drive Progress in Your Organization? appeared first on 6sigma.

Call centers are among the most dynamic types of organizations, and the environment in a place like this can be hectic. They require a lot of precise management in order to ensure a smooth, uninterrupted operation, and of course, to deliver good value to the customer in the end.

Bad handling of customer service is one of the most common complaints among consumers these days, and this is valid for pretty much every industry, so running a good call center can help you stand out from the competition quite a lot. Here are five strategies to improve operations at a call center.

1. Reduce waste in waiting times

Start with the most common complaint long waiting times. This can often be addressed in many unexpected ways when one starts to look at it as the waste it really is. Try to identify where bottlenecks occur, and figure out the root cause for those problems.

Are people often calling with issues that require support from level 2 and beyond, but they have to go through a tedious procedure on level 1 first? Maybe it’s time to introduce a dedicated section for high-level support requests.

Do your employees spend a lot of time looking up information in their manuals? Look for a better solution on the market, one that organizes and prioritizes the material so they always have the most relevant bits right in front of them.

2. Keep all results properly tracked and organized

This leads us to another good point call centers workers are often forced to juggle a lot of information on a regular basis, and they can sometimes get lost in the mess. This gets even more complicated once you throw the results from each support call on top of the pile, and you will want to spend some time thinking about how you can better organize all the data that’s being collected, and make it more accessible for those who need it.

This, in turn, often comes down to knowing how to make good use of modern technological tools, and choosing the appropriate solutions for your own business.

3. Use modern technology more adequately

The modern tech market is full of programs and even physical tools that can help simplify the workflow in a typical call center tremendously. Things like databases, smart communication devices, automated phone menus and more, can greatly improve the capability of the call center to process complex requests, and you should make it a point to use them as often as possible to ensure that your workers are always being assisted as much as the current situation allows for.

If you’re not sure what to invest in, consult an expert familiar with the field and get their input it’s even better if you have someone like that on your regular payroll if you’re serious about your call center business.

4. Physically rearrange the work space

Sometimes this can produce surprisingly good results, and it’s a solution that many call center managers ignore until too late in their work. A call center doesn’t just rely on workers sitting at their desks all day long, and sometimes people need to move around to get certain tasks resolved, especially when there is a lot of information being shared across the department on a regular basis. With that in mind, try to ensure that the physical movements necessary to do the job are kept to a minimum, and use lean charts to draw up a representation of the current layout of the space in order to figure out where problems might be developing.

5. Perform training sessions across levels

It’s important to keep all your employees up to date on the current trends in their work, and lean especially relies on the concept of training between employees in order to drive the whole organization forward. To that end, you can help by setting up some regular sessions where people will feel more confident in sharing their knowledge, and especially focus on propagating information from higher levels down to the lower ones.

Conclusion

A call center can improve its operations tremendously by relying on lean principles, and an experienced leader should recognize those opportunities and seize them as soon as possible. Once you’ve transformed the company with the help of lean methodologies, you’ll likely see a huge change in the attitude of your customers and the responses you’re getting from them.

The post 5 Lean Strategies to Improve Operations at a Call Center appeared first on 6sigma.

Lean is constantly evolving, and even though it’s a relatively new concept, it’s already gone through lots of different iterations and phases. Today, it can be found in many industries, practically anywhere you can identify a specific process and systematically break it down into components that can then be optimized.

It’s interesting to think about the face of lean in the future how are the current trends going to evolve, and what can we expect a few years, or even decades, down the road? Even those who actively practice and apply lean to their work seem to disagree on some aspects of that, and of course nobody can predict the future for sure.

Rapid Iteration

One of the fundamental aspects of lean is to always build on your current success and strive for even more, and we’ve been seeing this notion developing more and more in the direction of increasing the speed. Companies are iterating their improvements in shorter and shorter cycles, resulting in a scene that can seem a bit chaotic to an outside observer.

It makes sense though as long as your organization can keep up with the pace, it’s definitely not a bad idea to always look for opportunities to make your improvement cycles faster and faster. That way, you can quickly discard ideas that obviously don’t work, while focusing more on the ones that are showing potential. It can take some time before you’re able to tell the two apart, but once you’ve reached that point, it’s relatively easy to structure your organization’s improvement sessions.

A Lean Community

Another interesting aspect of lean is the community that has evolved around it. Both lean and Six Sigma have attracted large crowds of followers, and they actively share their thoughts and ideas on the current state of affairs, proposing improvements and talking about their experiences.

Those who’ve participated in those discussions know their usefulness, and it doesn’t take long to realize that engaging the lean community is one of the best ways to ensure that you’ll be able to progress fast through the ranks. This is not supposed to be a solitary venture, even if you’re the only leader in your organization!

With that in mind, the widespread adoption of the internet and instant communication technologies has made this scene even more amazing, with various online communities that have evolved around this subject. We can only imagine the state the global lean community will be in a decade from now, and the sooner you join that discussion, the more you’ll be able to benefit from it in the long run.

A Technologically Advanced Future

Another interesting observation is that lean blends naturally with modern technology, and we’ve seen some great improvements realized with the help of advanced computing systems. It’s probably no coincidence that the tech industry is one of the fastest adopters of lean methodologies, and things will likely keep moving in that direction even more clearly later on.

There is an interesting cycle in this area. Software developers have a natural predisposition to optimize their processes, and it should therefore come as no surprise that they were so quick to adopt lean and use it actively. But at the same time, we’ve also seen some great additions to the knowledge pool coming from that direction, and it looks like people who write software for a living and do it in a lean style tend to contribute a lot to the development of the scene as a whole.

Conclusion

Lean methodologies have gone through a lot, and their evolution is likely going to pick up the pace in the near future. If you’re still not exploring the benefits of applying lean to your organization, now is a good time to jump on board of that trend. That’s not to say that it will be too late in the future, but you’ll definitely be able to reap some much greater benefits if you start thinking about making your organization lean as early as possible. And if you decide to contribute to the community as well, that’s going to put you in an even better position in the long run once the scene starts to stabilize and revolve around some people.

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One of the fundamental concepts of lean is continuous improvement the organization must always strive for advancement. However, implementing this is far from easy, and some companies tend to fall for some relatively common mistakes that can be easily avoided with some forethought. If you want to make sure that you’re always moving forward in your efforts for continuous improvement, one of the most important points is that you’re always using fresh data.

This matters for multiple reasons, and the importance of the concept should be obvious to anyone with sufficient experience in the lean field. If you can’t trust the data you’re working with, you simply can’t make an adequate decision for the future. This is a simple enough concept but what if you’re working with data which is technically new, but not actually adjusted to a recent event on the market?

Know the Critical Factors in Your Data

There are multiple factors that go into determining how fresh your data is, and most of those will be highly individual for your particular company. Working with lean methodologies properly will require you to first take a careful look at the way you’re conducting your day to day operations, and figuring out what data points are critical for the regular decision-making process.

You must also make the data collection process a standardized one. You have to be sure that the data was gathered the same way every time, otherwise you’re going to encounter deviations that aren’t the result of any real problems with the input itself, but are rather indicative of problems with your data collection process.

Modern technology can be very helpful in ensuring that you’re always working with up-to-date data. Use Excel sheets as much as you can throughout the organization, and make sure that they’re interconnected and pull fresh data from live sources whenever possible. Also, automate as much as you can from those processes and leave little to the hands of actual humans, as that’s where most of the mistakes tend to happen.

Keep Track of the Past

Keeping an archive of your old data sets is just as important as gathering new, fresh ones. You must always be able to compare your latest findings with as much historic data as possible, not just from the last several months but beyond that as well. Ideally, you should have records dating back to the establishment of the company, but of course that’s not always feasible depending on when the company was founded, and when it adopted lean methodologies in its operations.

It’s also important that you can access the data you need in this large archive, especially as time goes by and it grows in size correspondingly. This is where modern technology can come into play, as it can facilitate that process quite a lot from start to finish. You can easily digitize your entire archives and streamline the procedure for accessing them and searching through them. In some organizations, this change can result in significant improvements in the overall work of the organization.

Once you know you can trust the data you’re working with, you’ll see a shift in the attitude of the whole company. It makes a huge difference to be certain in the validity of your work, and to know that you’re basing your every decision on information that’s not only up to date, but also compared against old records for extra validity.

And if this is all a significant change in the way you’ve been doing things so far, be prepared to see some results almost immediately. Patterns will start to arise that you never even suspected could exist within your company’s records, and you’ll be able to move much more confidently towards the future.

Conclusion

It might take some time to see all processes in your company converted in a way that allows you to work with fresh data, but it will be a huge transformation that brings many other changes with it. Once your organization has adjusted to the new situation, you’ll see yourself making more informed decisions in every aspect of your work, and moving more steadily towards the ultimate goal of constant improvement. Of course, that also assumes that the rest of your organization is run in a lean way as well.

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