As you stare across the piles or paper and clutter that marks your workspace in the office, you get a feeling of resigned frustration. You know that this collection of organized chaos cannot possible be the best way to work, but it makes total sense to you. Others may see it as a disorganized mess, but you see a well organized system. Only you can decipher the code of chaos. Well, today is the day to make a change! Clear the minefield of chaos and restore order and discipline to that space you call a desk.

Using the 5S Tool to Restore Order

Today is National Clean Off Your Desk Day. To regain control over your workspace, it is the day to take action. Experts agree that the average worker has on average 36 hours of work in those mountains of clutter on the workspace. Those same workers spend about three hours a week searching’ the chaos for specific things they need to get the job done. What a waste!

Now it’s time to take charge and organize the chaos and clutter. We cannot think of a better tool to help you take control than the 5S Tool used with Lean Six Sigma methodology.

5S Tool

Sort – The first step is to go through all the clutter and determine what must be retained at the worksite. Only essential files, paperwork and documents are allowed to remain. When you find something that doesn’t belong, return it to the correct person or department or simply get rid of it.

Straighten – Now all you have left at the workspace are essentials. You must now give each of these a single, proper place. You’ve heard the saying, A place for everything, and everything in its place. That’s exactly what we’re talking about. Be creative and organized in establishing places for things so that returning an item to where it belongs is natural or easy.

Scrub – To help maintain the order you’ve created, thoroughly clean everything remaining at the workspace. The time and money spent on polishing or cleaning, will be returned manyfold in a more positive attitude and with greater productivity.

Standardize – Make things in your workspace consistent with files and organizers. Model your workspace after the most organized person in your work area. Find out how they organize and work to duplicate their system. If everyone does the process the same way, things will become significantly more efficient.

Sustain – This final step means to put a schedule and system in place for maintaining and refreshing the 5S’d workspace. It is your responsible to maintain and sustain.

The Dawn of a New Day

Your workspace is now clutter free, organized and streamlined. It is like a new day. You feel more refreshed and confident. You get things done quicker, with more accuracy. It feels great to come to work and you are proud of your space. Success is about habits and the 5S tool allows you to have a habit that is easy to practice. Now, let’s get to work!

Get your free download of the 5S tool here.

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No matter how organized you are, the classic task or to-do list is a monster that has a mind of its own, and grows at an alarming rate. Isn’t it time to quit working for the monster, and start making the monster work for you?

Make the Task List Monster Work for You

Making the task list monster work for you, instead of being a slave to the monster is really simple. It takes organization and mindset. Nothing more, nothing less. So how do you take simplistic steps and slay the monster?

First, get your self organized. Clean up your your workflow and make your practices habit. Do them everyday and without a thought. Habits are powerful when they are done as second nature. Some prefer the pen and paper written list, others go digital. Whatever you choose, make sure that the platform of choice is simple, clear and easy to use. There are multitudes of platforms in the digital space that sync across all of your platforms. Do your research and pick one that makes your comfortable, then stick with it. Stop jumping from solution to solution! Almost any solution will work if you stick with it, and are disciplined in following it for a month.

The next step is straightforward logic. You probably work through a task list that is greater than 20 items. Every evening, you refine and prioritize that list for the next day. However, this is where the monster grows out of control! Instead of reducing a task list during the work week, your list tends to grow. This is called “inventory” and it is one of the 7 forms of waste! This leaves you with a strong feeling of being overwhelmed and out of control, and you spend a lot of time sorting through the list to decide which tasks are most important.

Simply, take control of the list! The idea is to have a task list with three items on it. Yes, we said three! Take that monster list, dig in and critically prioritize where you end up with the Top 3 tasks on your list everyday. These tasks are of highest priority that align with your business goals. Now, you can start each day with a clear, manageable focus on just exactly what needs to happen every day. If you’re afraid of losing all the other ideas and tasks you need to complete, find a place to store them for later retrieval.

Another key is to break down each task into a manageable task to move it forward. Don’t put down items like “write a book” or “clean out garage.” Instead, put down tasks like “create book outline” or “clean out one container in garage.” These tasks should not be on your to-do list for days and weeks, otherwise they are too daunting and need to be more specific.

Embracing the Top 3

At first, this is just not going to seem either logical or practical. It takes time to make the practice a habit, and see the effectiveness. However, if you practice the Top 3, you will quickly fall into a habit that gets results. That monster to-do list reduces into a manageable form that works for you! Get up in the morning and attack the Top 3 with gusto. As you complete the Top 3, go straight to working on other items that are presenting as opportunities. Your day is not done when the Top 3 are complete. It simply means that you achieved a significant goal. You feel successful and accomplished, which changes your mindset. Working on other items in your realm will then feel like icing on the cake, with a cherry on top. It’s a great feeling to have the monster working for you and seeing success!

What tips and tricks are working for you? Add your comments below…

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Using a Wrench to Drive a Nail

When you think about all of the Lean Six Sigma tools that are at your disposal, the question comes to mind …what’s in your toolkit? Getting a job done, whether simple or complex requires a certain know how and understanding of the mechanics required to accomplish the task. Unfortunately, many will just jump in to resolve a problem and grab the first tool at hand to get the job done. Each of us have seen it done many times before and might even be guilty of it. Using a wrench to drive a nail, or a hammer to fix just about any problem you might run up against – it’s a common thing. Push it, pull it or hit it hard enough, it just might fix the problem. These are just some examples of the wrong tool, being used for the right job. Business solutions, inspired by off-the-cuff thinking, using improvised tools that require a great deal of effort are applied in an overly simplistic manner to achieve results. These ‘quick fixes’ get some very short term results, but typically lead to long term problems which are significantly amplified by shoddy practices.

Professionals Use the Right Tools

The good news is Lean Six Sigma practitioners have a full array of tools available to them. These tools at your disposal are the ‘right tools’ for the ‘right job’ and produce results that are desired, in the most efficient manner possible. When Lean Six Sigma tools are applied by a professional, with the skills to apply them to the right situation, they achieve effective and timely results. Here is a list of the most important tools available to you:

1. The 5 Why’s – Moves you past the symptoms and gets to the root of the problem.
2. Fishbone Diagram – A tool that allows a ‘structured’ brainstorming process.
3. Histogram – Delivers a visual representation of collected data.
4. Regression Analysis – Allows determination that an input process is related to an output process.
5. Run Chart/Time Series – This tools shows trends and shifts.

Check out our list of FREE Lean Six Sigma templates >>>

Lean Six Sigma Tools Achieve Efficiency

Lean Six Sigma professionals have a vast array of tools at their disposal. The key is that you become proficient and comfortable working with those tools. You must develop an understanding of how they are used and what results you can expect when they are properly employed. Then, it takes practice! Use the tools and knowledge that you have in both simulated and real world situations. A professional carpenter can drive nails with amazing speed and consistency, as compared to the weekend warrior doing a self-help project at home. You have to be a skilled professional and be able to drive that nail home!

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5S is a versatile system commonly applied in various production environments in order to boost the productivity of the facility as a whole, and ensure that everyone is working together towards continuous improvement. It relies on a set of five principles Sort, Set in Order, Shine, Standardize, Sustain and every good leader should have at least some rudimentary familiarity with the system and know how to apply it to their own company’s work.

Using 5S on a More Individual Level

However, something that’s often missed by many leaders is the fact that 5S can have a huge potential when applied on a more personal level the system can work wonders in helping you organize your own tasks and projects in various ways. You can even use it to handle specific subtasks, such as the dreaded organizing of one’s emails.

It’s a common problem for many leaders, especially in larger companies you get so much mail on a regular basis that it becomes impossible to keep up with it and still do your regular job. At some point, you have to draw a line and decide which messages are truly important, which ones can wait, and which can be tossed straight in the trash. And as it turns out, 5S can be very useful in helping you sort out this huge mess.

How Does 5S Work with Emails?

Pretty much every aspect of 5S can be applied to the organizing of your emails if you abstract things enough. Sorting is the most obvious one make sure that you deal with irrelevant emails quickly and put them out of sight. You can also take this one step further and prepare folders for each type of email that you receive, and organize them there.

Setting your emails in order is a bit trickier, and it mostly depends on the email client you’re using. The important point is that you should have immediate, convenient access to every aspect of your email that you need. If you frequently need to send invoices, for example, you should prioritize that template above others.

Shining your email is basically dealing with junk as soon as it arrives, and also ensuring that you don’t leave anything unanswered for too long. Unanswered emails can pile up quite quickly, creating a lot of waste in your work when you have to drop what you’re doing and focus on them exclusively at some point, so it’s better to remove them from the process as quickly as possible.

Standardizing is where things get interesting. Most modern email clients have powerful functionality for sending pre-made templates, sorting your emails according to complex rules and filters, and much more. It’s up to you how you’re going to use these systems, but the important thing is that the final result is something that allows you to easily send and receive messages of certain types without having to think about the process too much.

Last but not least, it’s important to do all of this in a sustainable manner. It’s no good setting up complex filters if you end up ignoring them for your future emails because it’s too annoying for you to deal with the extra rules. Likewise, if you prepare templates but don’t use them, this is a waste of time and effort.

Conclusion

This might sound like it’s going overboard a bit, but any experienced manager will tell you that there’s no such thing as putting too much thought into the organization of your emails. As long as the final result is that you get to spend less time dealing with emails, and more time on your actual project-related tasks, your whole company is going to be more productive.

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The PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) cycle is one of the most commonly used tools for structuring the work of an organization nowadays, and it has found its way to numerous different industries and fields of work. And as it turns out, it’s particularly suitable for the work of healthcare professionals. With the right approach, the PDCA cycle can completely transform the work of a healthcare facility, and improve its productivity by a huge margin.

The Specific Benefits of PDCA in Healthcare

Healthcare is often a messy working environment, prone to human error and resource waste. It’s also a field that relies on continuous improvement and a constant reevaluation of the practices applied in day-to-day work, meaning that a system like the PDCA cycle can be very effective in ensuring that the work schedule followed by employees is always up to date with current patient demands and other relevant factors.

Hospital work tends to come in waves according to various environmental factors, and planning for those waves accordingly is a big step that can be taken to reduce the future workload over the course of a few weeks of the facility’s operation.

When the hospital/clinic has maintained meticulous, accurate records of their work over a large enough period, they should be able to apply various statistical analysis tools to predict when the next spike is going to be, and allocate resources to it preemptively.

Of course, this won’t always work out, as environmental factors tend to have a certain degree of randomness to them. That’s where the Do phase comes in, as it’s pretty much intended to be a playground for experimentation by the company’s leaders. In the above example, you can attempt to relieve a period of major workload by allocating a couple of extra physicians to one sector of the facility and arranging everyone’s schedules in a way that expects the extra load.

However, if it turns out that the action wasn’t necessary (during the Check phase), you can record the results of that experiment and keep them in mind in the future. Once you’ve collected enough samples and know with a great degree of accuracy how the workload in your facility changes over time, you can move on to the Act phase and apply the developed changes on a large scale across the facility.

Adapting and Extending PDCA for Your Facility’s Needs

Another great aspect of the PDCA cycle is that it is very flexible and can easily be adapted to a number of different environments with their own unique requirements. For example, you may need to split the verification step into a two-part process, or you may decide that you’re going to move to the Act phase by default for certain small-scale changes.

It can be argued that you won’t be working with PDCA in that case, or at least not the pure version of the system, but that shouldn’t be a problem by itself as long as you’ve been able to take something useful from PDCA and you can apply it successfully to your organization. After all, PDCA is meant to be a tool, and the purpose of a tool is to help you achieve a certain goal.

If you have to alter the tool to get the job done better, that doesn’t mean you’re doing anything wrong. Of course, you should verify your approach in the long run and ensure that you’re not making a fundamental mistake that was the reason for the original system to work as it did in the first place. But as long as you take care in this regard, you shouldn’t face any problems.

Conclusion

PDCA is going to be around for a long time, and it’s a system with a huge potential that can work wonders in healthcare environments specifically. It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution, despite its high degree of flexibility, but it’s also easily adaptable and it can be integrated it into your own facility with a little effort. And once the groundwork is complete, it’s very easy to benefit from the system in the long run.

The post Applying the PDCA Cycle in Healthcare: An Overview appeared first on 6sigma.

Even though standard operating procedures (or SOPs for short) tend to have a poor reputation in certain workplaces, they can actually be a very powerful tool for defining a set of sound rules and guidelines for the way everything in your company is done. If you’re striving for continuous improvement, defining a good set of SOPs should be one of the first things you do.

Of course, writing a good SOP is easier said than done, and it takes some getting used to before you’ll be able to produce material that truly makes sense. Once you get there though, you’ll find that the introduction of these policies as long as everyone observes them, of course will have a very positive impact on the way your business is run.

You Need a Consistent Level of Quality

Your company will never truly improve if you don’t maintain a good level of quality on a regular basis, and this can be hard to achieve if your operations are not clearly defined. Deviating from the optimal set of steps is one of the main reasons for inconsistent output quality, and preventing that can be as simple as making sure that all rules and regulations of the organization are clearly defined and written down in a concise way.

You may also need to set some procedures in place to verify the output quality more efficiently, and SOPs can help you out with that as well. When everyone knows exactly how to verify whether their results are good or not, there should be no excuses for poor performance.

The Organization Can Become More Flexible

A common misconception about SOPs is that they restrict creativity and make everything monotonous. Some organizations are afraid of implementing them due to the perception that they will make their operations less open to creative input, when the real situation is in fact quite the opposite. Once SOPs are in place, you’ll likely find that people are more inclined to share their input on the current state of affairs, and you’ll see more suggestions for improvements from all across the board.

Easier Integration of New Employees

Another common problem for companies following continuous improvement practices is that they often run into problems with a large influx of new employees once the organization starts to perform significantly better. This can sometimes be quite problematic, and it’s a problem that can significantly undermine the productivity of the company for a long time.

When your work is based on standard operating procedures, new employees will be able to get into their work much more easily, as they will have all their necessary training materials readily available. On the other hand, they will also be able to receive input from their peers more easily, as everyone will be on the same page with regards to how certain things should be done.

You will avoid the standard problem of everyone having their own idea of how something needs to work, and trying to argue with others over that. This, in turn, can provide a great boost to the morale of the organization, and create a much more relaxed working environment that promotes productivity.

Easier Tracking of Faults

And of course, when everything is standardized, finding the root cause of a particular problem tends to get much easier. You won’t have to play the dreaded guessing game trying to figure out why something came up, and instead you’ll just have to trace over the steps that were carried out and how they deviated from the standard procedure.

In this context, they can be a very powerful tool that can do a lot for your organization, and even if there is some negativity against it in your ranks at the moment, you should definitely consider implementing them.

Conclusion

Standard operating procedures are one of the best ways to boost the productivity of an organization and ensure that it’s always moving in the direction of continuous improvement. When applied correctly, they can completely transform the way processes are carried out, and ensure that your company will never fall off its optimal track at any point.

The post How Can Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) Help with Continuous Improvement Initiatives? appeared first on 6sigma.

Breaking Down Your Whole Organization into Modules

Divide and conquer is nothing new, and it’s a strategy used in many types of work. Its benefits are even stronger in a lean organization when applied correctly and learning how to identify the core components everything is made up of can be a great skill to have as a leader. Of course, as with many important parts of lean methodologies, it’s not as easy as it sounds to get it up to a good level.

Identifying the Core Pieces

As you’re probably guessing, the whole strategy relies on your ability to figure out what the core pieces of each component of your organization are. Note that this doesn’t always mean to keep breaking something down further and further until you can’t go any lower while this has its own benefits, we’re looking for a slightly different approach here.

What you’re trying to do is figure out how you can represent your organization as fundamental building blocks that interact with each other, where every piece has its own specific function. In other words, every piece transforms some resource into one that is more directly useful for your operations. The term resource is used very flexibly here, and it can sometimes mean more abstract things like productivity.

Thinking in Input/Output

This leads us to the next point it’s often useful to be able to see every part of your organization as its own workpiece, which takes some input ant produces some output. This is an extension of what we said above, and it can actually be a very powerful tool for organizing your company in general. However, it’s not always that easy to imagine each workpiece in your organization in such an abstract way.

If you’re finding it difficult to work with a specific component, it might be because you haven’t broken it down enough. This is often the case when you have to work with more than one type of output, especially when both are directed to different departments of your organization.

On the other hand, sometimes those more complex components can’t easily be decomposed like that because they are tightly interconnected and function as one complete piece. You’ll have to find a good balance between having enough abstraction in your model, and having a model that makes enough sense to work with in the first place. Which, as you’ll find out, is a skill that you’ll spend a lot of time building up, and you’ll always find room for improvement in.

Leave Room for Changes in the Future

Things might be in a good state right now, but it’s important to be able to break things down even further later on if the opportunity arises for it. As your company grows, what used to be one single small component might now be a large part of the whole infrastructure, but if your old model still treats it as one piece, this can lead to some obvious issues in the way the organization is being run.

As long as you’ve spent enough time thinking about the model in the first place, and you know what to expect from the company in terms of future growth, it shouldn’t be that difficult to plan ahead for those developments adequately. Sometimes you may need to revise your model significantly, depending on what direction your company starts to evolve in, but this doesn’t have to be such a problem if you have the right tools in place to keep that growth under control.

An interesting approach is to prepare room for placeholder components of the organization, parts which don’t exist yet but you’re sure will arrive on the scene sooner or later if things keep going according to plan. That way, when your company reaches that stage, you can just flip the switch and enable the new components, and resume working without any significant impact to the workflow.

Conclusion

Thinking about your organization as a collection of modules that interact with each other, rather than one big monolithic structure, is one of the best things you can do to pave the way for continuous improvement. That way, every time something comes up and the organization finds itself in a state of expansion, you’ll know exactly how to respond and what direction to take it in.

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It’s a fact that organic food doesn’t last like non-organic, and tends to be quite expensive at times. Whole Foods started off when the organic food market was much smaller and has ridden the wave of increasing demand ever since. They took advantage of a naturally-occurring monopoly and have dramatically increased their market presence for maximum profitablity. Today, we cover how the grocery store chain took the country by storm by offering unique, healthy products. And all with a dash of Six Sigma.

Minimal Interference and Flexible Management

Whole Foods is a customer-driven organization. Using Design for Six Sigma, they rely on feedback to help shape their business processes. As such, the customer’s voice is a primary metric for improvement, but just as important is the process data itself. The axis of their corporate structure is a single golden rule: minimal interference. Store managers, like Six Sigma practitioners, are change agents. The company ensures minimal corporate meddling, allowing managers to make changes for the good of their store. The needs of a busy urban branch do not reflect the needs of a small-town store. As such, both should be managed appropriately, according to their needs. Management flexibility of this kind grants them the freedom to source local produce as well as to operate under different hours.

The Customer Matters

As a customer-facing, retail-oriented corporation, Whole Foods relies on strong customer relationships. By collecting customer feedback at the store level, they can shed light on problems affecting quality, efficiency, and productivity.  Whole Foods stores provide a Customer Comments Wall for those wanting to offer feedback, encouraging customers to have their say. This level of customer engagement is highly beneficial, not just for the valuable feedback it provides, but also for the strong store-customer relationship it fosters. In short, it shows Whole Foods care about those frequenting their stores and purchasing their goods.

Each comments wall allows customers to leave both positive and negative comments. While it may seem simplistic, this approach helps to foster transparency, openness, and honesty between store and customer. Customers value and respond to this, as Whole Foods have shown. Providing a place to leave feedback lays the groundwork for a continuous improvement culture. One that drives improvement for the sake the customer, without end. Never forget. Any feedback, critical or otherwise, is extremely valuable. Even the smallest comment can help you make dramatic changes on the path toward Six Sigma.

Happy Employees = Happy Customers

Moreover, this openness also benefits Whole Food’s staff. All employees want to feel like they matter. They’re people, after all, not mindless automatons. They want to feel that their voices are heard and that they play an active role in the success of the company. Remember, the happier your employees, the happier your customers. If you can’t keep the first happy, the second will feel it.

The post Six Sigma Case Study: Whole Foods appeared first on 6sigma.

How Do We Use Machine Data Capture?

The types of machine data your computer systems collect will vary. It can range from the volume of satisfactory products to sell vs. rejected sub-standard ones to machine capacity effectiveness and utilization. Additionally, your systems should also monitor factors like machine cycles, production time, availability and reliability. Machine status is an equally critical component of MDC and denotes a whole spectrum of important production factors. These factors include primary and secondary time, breakdowns and maintenance, as well as service requirements.

But what happens to all this data? How do businesses use it? It’s simple. All your captured data travels through interfaces where your manufacturing execution system (MES) collects and collates it. Think of your MDC as the gold miner and the MES as the sieve through which they filter all the information they collect. The combined MDC data and MES findings allow you to use data effectively. Furthermore, your goal is to use your data to plan and push production in the direction you want it to go. That is, toward achieving optimum conditions. This allows for increased productivity and better results.

How Can Six Sigma Improve Data Collection?

You’re probably wondering, how does Six Sigma fit into the equation? Six Sigma improvement projects are an extremely reliable method for process improvement. It allows you to make the changes necessary for a strong data collection plan. Moreover, Six Sigma project leaders, usually Black Belts, employ DMAIC to define, measure, analyze, improve, and control data collection processes. There are several prerequisites you must meet for an effective data collection plan.

First, we have the pre-data collection steps. Ensure your project team defines your data collection goals. What data do you need? Equally, for what purpose will you use it? What insight will it offer and what do you wish to achieve through collecting it? Using tools like brainstorming, affinity diagrams, and root cause analysis can help generate answers to these questions.

The project team should then be able to agree on your plan’s methodology and operational definitions. Teamwork is always most effective here, and we recommend examining previous data to compare to the current. It’s essential that you determine whether past, present, and future data will factor into the data collection plan, plus what methodologies you are likely to use. Skipping this step will certainly deliver insufficient, if not deceptive, results. Finally, it is essential you ensure the repeatability, accuracy, stability, and reproducibility of your data collection and measurement. Once you have defined and planned your data collection process using the above data, you can then move forward. Black Belts can oversee implementation and to nudge it in the right direction, should you run into any obstacles.

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Digital vs Physical Kanban Boards

The physical vs. digital debate has been around since the internet was first conceived. If using Kanban cards to improve business efficiency, you can choose to use either a digital or physical board to speed up operational processes and encourage workplace productivity.

The decision to use either digital or physical boards should not be taken lightly. Although both work to track tasks in much the same manner, each have their own distinct set of advantages and disadvantages for business.

Here are some of the main things to consider when choosing between a digital or physical Kanban board.

Pros of Digital Kanban Boards

In today’s digital age, it makes sense to ensure that your business is up to date with all the latest technologies. So, if you’re using the Lean Six Sigma methodology, one of the most obvious ways to do this is with a digital or online Kanban board.

Digital Kanban boards can be made quickly using everyday software packages such as Microsoft Excel, or, you can download specialized software to design and keep track of Kanban cards, such as Trello, Kanban Tool, or Cardsmith. Since tasks can be easily updated in real-time online without the need to hunt around for board markers or sticky notes, choosing this option can create better efficiency for your business and significantly streamline tasks.

Another advantage to consider when opting for a digital Kanban board is that they can usually be accessed from anywhere, providing the user is connected to the internet. Using a cloud solution such as Google Drive, you can save your Kanban cards easily online where any employee with login credentials can easily get to them. This can help to improve workplace efficiency by giving employees access to progress data before the working day even begins. This works especially well when you have a remote team that cannot easily meet in person.

Cons of Digital Kanban Boards

There may be an assortment of great benefits to be had by using a digital Kanban board, however, that’s not to say they don’t come without their drawbacks. Since digital Kanban boards require a computer screen or device to be viewed on, they can often have your team squinting at the monitor. Additionally, it can be difficult to ensure the constant visibility of a digital Kanban board when using it to monitor progress in the workplace, for example, if the user is automatically logged out after a certain time period.

That’s not all, either before you choose a digital Kanban board, consider the possibility that it could slow down your employees, rather than motivating them to work harder. This is especially true in an office setting, where a digital Kanban board could have the opposite effect and minimize communications. This is because workers can simply stay in their seat and pull up the Kanban board online rather than heading over to discuss their idea with a colleague.

Since digital Kanban boards are so easy to update and expand, they can quickly become an idea dump’, overloading your workforce and making it harder to determine which ideas are worth the pursuit.

Finally, the discipline of updating and discussing changes on the board is best learned in person, so in the long term, the kanban boards may fall apart when the discipline hasn’t been established.

Pros of Physical Kanban Boards

Unlike their online counterparts, a physical Kanban board does not require an internet connection. An old-school’ way of doing things (physical boards, racks and card holders) have been used for Kanban cards successfully since they were first invented back in the 1950’s.

Physical Kanban boards utilize items such as colored magnets, sticky notes, and push pins to represent tasks at various stages of to do, doing, or done. Physical Kanban boards can be used to encourage communication in the office. Since employees need to get up and walk to the board to update it, this facilitates more conversations between employees. You may even notice an improvement in workplace morale as your employees get away from their desks regularly, improve their productivity, reduce ergonomic issues, and strengthen workplace relationships.

Physical Kanban boards are highly customizable, and there are many examples of them being used to improve employee satisfaction. For example, some businesses have their employees pick their favorite color or even a cartoon figure to represent their tasks on the board. A small gesture, with big results!

Cons of Physical Kanban Boards

Perhaps the main problem with physical Kanban boards is that unlike digital boards saved to the cloud, they are not indestructible. Accidents can happen, and if your workplace is damaged by a natural disaster or break-in, damage or loss of your physical Kanban board could set your business’ productivity back even further.

Additionally, it is more difficult to expand a physical Kanban board. When working digitally, it’s easy to add new cards and tasks to the board with little effort. On the other hand, physical Kanban boards must also be added to physically. For a business that uses physical Kanban boards often, a magnetic board is ideal, since this will help to reduce paper waste.

Lastly, consider the number and type of tasks that your business carries out. If the workload is very high, an interruption or restart often means making the effort to tear the Kanban board down and start all over again.

Final Thoughts

Regardless of the type of business you run, there are many ways that you can benefit from using Kanban cards and boards to track your tasks, improving efficiency and productivity. Keep in mind the pros and cons of each Kanban board type to make the right choice for your workforce.

Learn more about kanban boards >>>

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Pull vs Push Systems and Dealing with Capacity

When building or transforming a business, it’s essential to look into as many change options as possible, so you can choose the one that would suit the particular business the most. Implementing change should never be done for the sake of it, and it should always strive to serve the company’s competitiveness, efficiency and productivity. If you are going to invest time and effort in building or transforming an organization, it needs to be profitable.

When it comes to process management, and especially dealing with production, capacity and inventory, there are two main approaches to making your operation work push and pull. If you are going to be working on your organization’s structure, you need to be familiar with both, so you could implement the one that is going to be beneficial for you, given your current situation.

Push Systems

You could say that push systems and processes are the more traditional option. If we look at the majority of production facilities, we’ll notice that they require mostly external input to continue production at a steady pace. When a company has implemented a push system, they make forecasts about the expected demand, and make sure they keep production at a level that would be high enough to meet that possible future demand. Besides quantities, companies that employ this mode of operation need to predict exactly which products and models will sell more, and adjust quantities preemptively. The reason most businesses use a push system is because it is easier to implement, and it seems like the most useful and intuitive approach. In fact, many businesses think a push system is the only logical approach.

A push system comes with some obvious disadvantages, once you understand what the alternatives. While a company could employ a lot of sophisticated mathematical forecasting models, none of them can be fully reliable and consistently accurate. Six Sigma techniques can be useful, but the assumption is that historical patterns will be representative of the future, and over the long run, that won’t be the case. In the end, the market is driven by humans who are emotional and sometimes illogical beings, and demand can vary greatly in unpredictable ways. This often leads to overproduction, which in turn inflates storage costs, production costs, and might often lead to additional waste due to spoilage.

Those disadvantages are pretty significant, and make it quite difficult to manage capacities efficiently. Generally speaking, this is a model that can be employed only when the capacity available easily exceeds the market demand, and the business is not particularly limited by storage or production costs. Still, if that is the case, the inefficiencies and waste created through this method still impact the organization’s overall productivity and competitiveness, but allow it to meet significant client demand on short notice.

Still, there are certain types of businesses that might find this approach quite beneficial and it might allow them to meet larger than demand with smaller production capacities. This is very much the case with seasonal products where the company can have a small daily capacity but through proper planning and forecasting could ship very large quantities when their product is in high demand.

Pull Systems

While push systems forecast the demand, and thus try to produce and push specific quantities to the market, pull systems rely on the opposite approach. In pull systems, the pace of production is dictated directly by customer demand for each specific product. The production process is always triggered by a customer order, so companies relying on this approach produce only the quantities that are going to be properly utilized. If such a system can be successfully implemented, it leads to significant waste reduction and process optimization, so a business can utilize its production capacity in full, as very little is produced without real customer demand. The success comes from the fact that when problems occur, the problems are evident, and the process automatically stops. This makes each problem more painful, but that forces the organization to improve, in order to avoid these issues from occurring in the future.

Of course, pull systems come with their own set of challenges. For instance, it’s much easier for a pull system to be pushed out of capacity by large demand peaks, because there aren’t significant quantities that are produced in advance and kept in storage. Additionally, failures in the supply chain or other unfavorable occurrences and factors could easily lead to orders being delayed. This can have a severe impact on customer satisfaction, and thus hurt the company’s reputation and profitability. Pull systems require very strong communications between your customers in order to manage high peaks in demand and supply chain risks. Even though pull systems are more complex to setup and maintain, the effort will result in better overall performance in the long run.

The Spectrum In Between

While both approaches have their own advantages and disadvantages, the most efficient way to utilize a company’s production capacity is to use a hybrid approach initially, then slowly transition to a Pull System as your supply chain and customer relationship matures. This allows large and efficiently-organized businesses to take the best of both worlds having the ability to meet high and changing demand, while allowing the market to dictate their production pace. This creates the so-called push-pull systems.

Conclusion

While the push and pull approaches are both relatively straight-forward, they are both worth exploring and considering. Clearly defining each one, with its own set of strengths and weaknesses, allows an organization and its leadership to craft or choose an efficient medium between the two.

Most organizations and businesses start with a full push system, then slowly add pull elements like kanban, and continue to add more pull elements over time. The most competitive approach might be to have specific forecasts based on historical data (push system), but have your production schedule controlled more and more by customer demand (pull system), as the pull system matures.

What system does your organization use?

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What Are the Principles of Kanban and Why Do They Work?

Kanban is both one of the simplest and most efficient tools to manage workflow in a visual way. It’s one of the important tools used in more complex process improvement methodologies (such as Lean), and its wide-spread adoption is a testament to its flexibility, utility and effectiveness. Kanban is based on a few core principles that ensure successful implementation at scales ranging from the individual to organizations with multiple departments and teams that need to be coordinated.

Let’s explore the 4 core principles that the Kanban approach is based on, and why following them is advantageous.

1.     Visualize

Our brains are wired in such a way that processing visual information is what we are best at. For instance, looking at charts or graphs gives us a much better understanding of a large set of numbers than looking at the raw data ever could. Kanban takes this visual approach and applies it to the workflow.

In Kanban, each task and each step of the process has a clear visual representation that also includes the most vital information. This is an extremely efficient way to make the current state of affairs in an organization visible and understandable by all. Everybody can infer what they need just by a quick glance at the Kanban board, and all workflow impediments like blockers or bottlenecks become obvious right away. This is extremely beneficial by making communication within the team easier and more efficient, and by uncovering problematic areas that need to be fixed.

2.     Limit the Work in Progress

One of the few rules that Kanban imposes is limiting the number of pieces of work that can be worked on at any given moment. The actual limitation depends on those that are managing the particular Kanban implementation, but the simple act of imposing a limit is quite advantageous.

This limit fosters focus and forces proper prioritization. This allows an organization to be efficient in how it utilizes its workforce. Additionally, it eliminates decision paralysis, as it doesn’t allow individual team members or managers to be destabilized by the sheer amount of tasks that have piled up, and prevents the common mistake of trying to do too much all at once. On top of this, having a WIP limitation also ensures that each piece of work will go through the workflow process as quickly as possible, which helps productivity.

3.     Focus on the Flow

Despite the fact that this can be partially viewed as a function of the first two principles, focusing on the actual workflow is a core value engrained into Kanban as a tool. It should be viewed as an integral part of its proper implementation. Kanban takes the workflow to the forefront of the team’s understanding of their job, and how their organization functions. While Kanban is being used to manage how individual pieces of work are handled as part of the larger process framework, data about what is going on is collected, so the flow can be described and understood using a system of clear metrics. This understanding allows the organization to gain deeper knowledge about its own inner workings, and sets the stage for the last principle

4.     Continuous Improvement

Kanbans have a lot of benefits in the day-to-day operation and management of a team or an organization. It puts you in a position where continuous improvement can be achieved and can become part of the company culture. By making sure everything is visual, and by focusing on the flow and collecting data about the performance of the system over time, Kanban allows improvement opportunities to be identified, and taken advantage of on a regular basis. As this process is repeated over and over again, even the smallest of improvements can start to affect the overall performance of the organization in a positive way. This leads to ever increasing productivity, efficiency and thus competitiveness.

Read more about Kanbans >>>

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