Kanban is a lean method to manage and improve systems and process across an organization. The methodology balances the demands with available capacity, and improves the handling of system level bottlenecks. The Kanban board is a tool within the methodology which will allow the visualization of any process. The goal of a Kanban system is to limit the amount of work in process so the work flowing through the system matches its capacity.

Check out this informative video on the Kanban Board!     

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The Kanban board is a lean tool for managing flow in a process. From simple processes to the most complex, the board will visually represent a every step in a process process and show the status at any given time. During the late 1940’s, the line workers at Toyota displayed colored Kanbans to notify downstream workers that a demand existed for parts or assembly. As early as 2005, the Kanban board tool started being applied to knowledge work, where processes are typically more opaque than in the manufacturing sector.

When a process is mapped out on a Kanban board and Kanban cards properly represent the work, the process becomes visible and hidden aspects of the work becomes more clear. By mapping out the process, the entire team process is visible to every member and provides more clarity in their sense of purpose. The information displayed will answer the basic questions of who, what, when, where, why and how. There are three basic steps in establishing your Kanban board.

Map Your Workflow – Documenting the steps of a process. The starting point is exactly what it is in the real world. For every step, consider the tasks required to complete the step. Now it is time to build your Kanban board.

Visualize Work in Process (WIP) – Once your process is mapped on the Kanban board, start adding the tasks. Every task that should be done or worth doing, name them so everyone understands and put them in place.

Set Your WIP Limits – Early on, it will be a challenge to understand the ideal amount of work in a process. Start with your best guess. With your WIP limits in place, put them on the Kanban board.

It is important to remember, Kanban is a pull’ concept. This means when someone is ready to do work, they look on the board to see what needs to be done and will pull the task into the next column. The task is then their responsibility until it is complete and someone pulls it to the next step. The natural process of the Kanban board will start revealing bottlenecks in any process and quickly identify inefficiencies. Learn from mistakes and move your processes forward!

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Untangling the twists and turns of workflow in a process can be frustrating. Have you ever tried to visualize the flow of a process, from start to finish? In most organizations, it can be convoluted and complex. The goal, of course, of any workflow, it to try and use the most direct flow from point A to point B. That is what exists in an ideal world! The fact remains in organizations, there are silos and protected turf. Everyone wants to ‘touch’ the product or process in the flow. The question then becomes whether those ‘touches’ are valid and provide value to the end result. Simplification of the flow and allowing ‘touches’ from various departments only when necessary to the success of the end result should be required.

Clarity With a Spaghetti Diagram

A Spaghetti Diagram will provide an overhead view or visualization of all the stops or ‘touches’ the product or process encounters before the delivery of the end result. When you can see it, touch it and feel it, you can then start to untangle the mess involved in workflow.  As you trace along the workflow line, you can quickly begin to understand and analyze the value of each ‘touch’ along that flow. Does that ‘touch’ bring bring value to the end product or product? Each touch along the way can then be broken down and evaluated for the value it brings to the process or product. Once a proper and thorough evaluation of those ‘touches’ have been undertaken, you can then eliminate the unnecessary stops or create additional ‘touches’ that are required to add value or quality.

Simplifying For Quality

When applied properly, the Spaghetti Diagram can provide clarity and understanding of the complexities of workflow. Simplicity is the key to success. You can now comfortably eliminate redundancies and unnecessary touches to the flow, which drain quality and increases costs. The tool is valuable in helping break down silos in an organization for better efficiencies. You may not go directly from point A to point B, but your journey along the flow will become much more efficient and cost effective, ultimately delivering a higher quality product or process for the customer.

If you’d like to learn more about Spaghetti Diagrams, check out our podcast episode called “Unappetizing Spaghetti Diagrams“

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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 a Leader Can Address Employee Concerns on an Individual Level

No matter how well an organization is run, there will always be problems along the way on all levels. Being a good leader is not so much about preventing these problems from happening at all although it’s good if you can achieve that.

Your main goal should rather be to ensure that whenever something is wrong, these concerns can be addressed on a close, personal level and that employees feel that they have the safety to express their thoughts. They should also know that their concerns will actually get addressed, which is a part of the equation that we often see missing in some larger organizations.

Why It’s Necessary in the First Place

If you don’t develop systems that can address concerns on a level as low as possible, you’re going to run into significant problems with your company in the long run. It might take a while for those issues to present themselves, but make no mistake they will sooner or later. The most obvious implication is that this will prevent you from knowing when something is wrong so that you can take corrective actions against the problem.

But it goes deeper than that. Ongoing issues with employees’ ability to voice their concerns can lead to growing resentment and decreased productivity. And when dealing with issues of this type, by the time you realize something is wrong, it’s often too late.

Providing Good Input Points

The most obvious thing you could do to make things better for your employees in this regard is to ensure that they have viable points to voice their concerns through. This will vary from one company to another, but the general idea is to have an integrated system that allows people to express what concerns they might currently have and to track their eventual resolution.

Modern technology can make it very easy to set something like this up, so take advantage of that. But make sure that the system is not too complicated to use, and does not exclude anyone for any reason. This will only lead to even more problems of the kind that you’re trying to address in the first place.

Filtering the Input

Not all input is equally good. In fact, as a leader of a company, you’ll have to deal with the problem of filtering out the good input from the bad. And this will sometimes be hard, especially when it comes to people’s concerns. Whenever someone has a problem that interferes with their work, their perception of its importance can get skewed. Some people see their issues as much more critical than they actually are.

And in some cases, someone might not even realize that the things they’re complaining about exist for a reason. The point is, you need an efficient way to filter those opinions out from each other, and this must be deeply rooted within your system itself.

Feedback

Once you’ve implemented something like this, your employees are going to start providing you with feedback on it sooner or later. And it’s a good idea to pay attention to what they have to say, as this will allow you to improve that system in the long run. Ideally, you should have that feedback system integrated into the main tool that you’re using to collect information about the state of your organization in the first place.

But since that’s not always possible, just prioritize setting things up in a way that allows employees to share their current concerns with minimal possible impact to their work. Sometimes, people might be worried that raising their voice on some issues might have negative repercussions for them. You have to make it known that this is not the case in your company.

With enough effort, this kind of system can provide your organization with incredible benefits in the long run, the kind that you simply can’t get from anything else. It’s important to have a proper feedback system integrated tightly into your company and its workflow. And the more your organization continues to grow, the more important this is going to become in the long run. Sooner or later, you’ll be glad that you’ve taken the time to set this up and perfect it to its current state.

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Is it Six Sigma or Lean Six Sigma? What is Lean then? These can be some of the most confusing questions that can be asked when trying to understand quality processes. Understanding the differences and similarities are crucial to clarity.  Check out this informative video that defines what is really Lean Six Sigma.

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Standard work is a common practice used by many who apply lean and Six Sigma into their workflow, and it has many benefits that can be realized by pretty much every organization out there. It’s important to study the implications of standard work and consider its integration into your own company’s workflow if you want to remain as efficient as possible, as there are many ways that it can improve the overall capacity of the organization.

1. Better quality across the board

The most obvious positive effect of standard work is that it can lead to an improvement in the work quality in pretty much every aspect. It becomes easier to ensure that things match specifications correctly, and workers additionally know what results they should expect at every step of the process. That alone can be a huge benefit when it comes to controlling the final quality. Not only that, but standard work can also allow an organization to detect problems with its production much more efficiently, giving it an even greater degree of control over the final production quality.

2. Efficient reduction of waste

Waste reduction is one of the most important topics in many modern organizations, as various companies are now dealing with significant issues with waste in their production flow. By following standardized work principles, waste can be reduced to an absolute minimum, as it will be eliminated in the initial planning stages before it even reaches any production point. This shifts the responsibility of waste elimination to designers rather than producers, which can often work out much better.

3. Defects are easy to identify and address

When the entire workflow is broken down into standardized pieces, it gets much easier to figure out when something has gone wrong, and what exactly it may be. Error detection is really simple in a typical standard work process if everything has been implemented correctly, and correcting the error afterwards is just a matter of following the right procedure. This can provide the organization with a much better degree of flexibility when it comes to resolving problems in the production line, while also making it more capable to scale up without worrying about any reduction in quality.

4. Easier budget planning

When you have a good idea of how much exactly every part of the process is expected to cost, this can give you much more freedom in planning the company’s budget and its next moves on the market. Of course, there will always be some deviations from the norm, especially when dealing with faulty equipment and other production issues, but for the most part, the company can expect to stabilize around a certain cost point for most of its projects. It’s also much easier to make changes to that budget later on when you treat the whole budget like a puzzle, with perfectly fitting and aligned pieces.

5. Streamlined employee training

Bringing new people into the workforce is always a challenging ordeal for every organization, especially those that involve more complex procedures in their work. It’s not rare for companies to spend huge amounts of resources on training alone, and that can be quite the drain on their budget in the long run. Standard work allows an organization to integrate everyone into its work as easily as possible, without any hassle or hiccups along the way. When done right, it may even be possible to execute this with almost no human intervention required along the way, making the process for bringing new employees on board a very streamlined and efficient one. That can, in turn, make the company much more flexible in who it hires and how often that happens.

Conclusion

Standard work can bring a huge number of benefits to the table for any organization that implements it correctly, and it doesn’t take too long to get started with the process either. It’s something every responsible leader should look into as early as possible in the growth of their company, as adopting this methodology in the long run can be one of the easiest ways to reduce stress and mistakes across the organization as a whole.

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Lean brings a fundamental change in the way companies build products and manage activities. It is about validating hypotheses and aims to reduce the waste activities (not bringing value to the customer) and increase efficiency.

Recently, Lean marketing has started to become popular and for a reason! Its process is primarily focused on iteration, testing, and measurement as they are the core tenants of the Lean methodology. It allows for flexibility, easy coordination with other departments, such as sales, PR or partnerships and gives incredible simplification of complex projects.

Lean marketing strategy is the solution to immeasurable results. We all know that if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it, and now we have the opportunity to make our process a tool allowing us to influence results due to empirical data and a scientific analysis. Guessing and estimating are replaced by data-driven analysis and measurable outcomes.

How Lean Differs from Traditional Marketing

In traditional marketing, the final product is determined beforehand and teams can’t adjust and adapt throughout the creation process. In other words, the great marketing plan. Sometimes, marketing specialists start to repeat certain activities until the end of time without measuring success regularly. Customers’ interest is not a constant and they often disengage and are pushed away by not precisely targeted, personalized or creative messages.

in practice, Lean marketing relies on the following key points:

• Realistic prioritization: Focuses on realistic prioritization when creating marketing initiatives that meet customer requirements.
• Faster Delivery: Break large, long-term deliverables into small tasks; deliver small pieces every few weeks and aims toward an optimal solution.
• Frequent status meetings: (feedback loops) to discuss what’s working, what’s done and what’s keeping your team from doing more.
• Rapid correction: If things change or people switch context, it is rapidly corrected, without a complete overhaul.
• Staying focused: The Lean marketing strategy encourages people to be focused and work on single tasks. Multi-tasking is a taboo here because it only lowers productivity levels.

Getting Started with Lean Marketing

The decision to go lean has to be a collective commitment to pursue an incremental change. It has to be discussed and mutually agreed in to order to obtain the best results. The next step is to set regular feedback loops daily stand-up meetings, weekly KPI meetings, and monthly strategy meetings. They need to be short with clear agenda and followed by specific action items. With lean, the change happens mostly as people’s mindsets are adjusted.

The easiest way to apply the lean principles to your process is the Kanban method. Kanban pursues small incremental changes and is easy to overlay. It adds practical steps to follow and the tools to use. Visualizing all the work on a Kanban board allows you to see where the bottlenecks of your process are and follow how every task is progressing from ‘Requested’ toward ‘Done.’ You have the original physical whiteboard with cards and now, there are the online Kanban boards, which make it very easy to begin kanbanizing your workflow.

If you are not sure what indicators you should track, here are the top four lean metrics you need to measure to ensure success:

• Process Efficiency: The ratio between the time a work item just sits there after being started and the time spent actively working on it after starting it.
• Cycle Time: This is the time it takes your tasks to reach the done state.
• Throughput: The number of work items that exit your system in a given time frame.
• WIP: The number of work items that are considered in progress at a given or past time or time frame.

Conclusion

The Lean marketing transformation has already started, and results are proving that the trend will continue. Enhanced communication and no more he said, she said,’ as all the data is on the board.

• No more information loss.
• Remote team members are more included in the work process and take on more initiative and responsibility.
• Encouraged knowledge-sharing for the sake of continuous improvement.
• Substantially increased efficiency.

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Value-added time is an extremely important concept to study if you’re trying to optimize the flow of any process or system of processes, and it has special value in some specific environments. Typically, areas where response time is critical tend to benefit more from a stronger approach to this factor, and healthcare tends to be one of the biggest contenders for that.

It should come as no surprise that hospitals are constantly on the lookout for ways to improve the value-added time in their processes, as this allows them to service patients more quickly and to a greater degree of satisfaction.

How it Relates to Healthcare

Wait times are often one of the biggest issues a healthcare facility has to deal with, and there is no universal solution that works across the board. Each facility typically needs to conduct its own study into its practices in order to pinpoint areas where patients are being forced to wait unnecessarily, or where procedures are taking longer than they should.

Simple tools for tracking time and throughput can help identify bottlenecks very quickly, while talking to your employees in a more direct manner can be useful for localizing issues that aren’t that obvious on the surface.

Sometimes a small change in your processes can result in a significant reduction in wait times and other unpleasant factors, adding a lot more value to the time patients spend in the facility. Not every hospital or clinic is that lucky to operate in an environment so properly aligned to its optimization though, and in most cases you’ll have to think more carefully about how you can reduce certain times without negatively impacting the facility.

Don’t Go Overboard!

And this brings us to the next important point while it’s a good idea to optimize your processes and ensure that you’re always getting a lot of value out of each minute spent serving patients, it’s also very important to make sure that nothing is getting rushed and that you aren’t pushing the constraints of your employees too far.

This is a common problem in some overworked healthcare facilities, and it can quickly lead to disaster that’s pretty much impossible to undo. If you want to make sure that things won’t get that bad, you will need to pay close attention to how your changes are affecting the overall workflow at the facility.

Spend some more time talking to your physicians to make sure that nothing is wrong beneath the surface. The nature of healthcare work can sometimes make it hard to share negative impressions about the current situation, and you’ll need a more hands-on approach to ensure that you’re seeing the full picture.

Having some system in place that can track changes over time, as well as categorize input from your physicians and patients alike, is a good idea if you want to make sure that you’re not missing any details from the picture while at the same time not having to put in too much manual work yourself.

Just make sure that you don’t rely exclusively on your data collection system to give you an overview of the situation, and always give things a more personal touch to ensure that you’re not missing anything.

Conclusion

Value-added time can have many forms, but healthcare is arguably one of the fields that recognize it the most. There is a lot to gain from improving the way your facility works with regards to how fast patients are being served and what procedures they have to go through on a regular basis, and ensuring that you have some systems in place to monitor all that is a great step to making things run as smoothly as possible.

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There are various techniques that can be used to drive process improvement and solve problems in your organization’s workflow. Some are more complex than others, and some require a specific set of circumstances for their use to really make sense. In any case, it’s important for you as a leader to recognize the kinds of situations that call for the use of specific problem solving techniques, and of course, know what techniques are available at your disposal in the first place.

You’ll find that it’s actually not that hard to ensure that every change in your organization’s workflow drives things to an improvement, but you will need to carefully measure and evaluate everything that you’re doing. To this end, there are several popular techniques that you may find useful.

PDSA (Plan-Do-Study-Act) is a popular and relatively simple method that can lead to great results with relatively little effort. On the other hand, DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) can provide you with a slightly more complex set of tools for addressing each situation, but it can be a bit more versatile in the way it’s used.

PDSA Works Well for Iterative Processes

If you have a process in your organization that’s constantly going through improvements in an iterative manner, then you’ll probably want to look in the direction of PDSA. It’s designed to work in a feedback loop, constantly using the results of the last iteration as input for the next one, and it can work especially well when you are planning to run some process that promotes change for a very long period of time.

It’s critical that there is some sort of feedback loop present in order for PDSA to work correctly though, otherwise you will simply be starting over from scratch with each iteration of the cycle, and in that case you might as well not even use it.

DMAIC is Great for Data-Driven Improvement

On the other hand, if you have a certain process that constantly works based on external data, you might find DMAIC to be the perfect fit for your needs. The way DMAIC works makes it perfect for organizations that gather a lot of data about their operations, especially when there are adequate systems in place for sorting that data and filtering through it.

DMAIC can also be a bit more complex though, so make sure that you’re prepared to take on that extra workload if you’re planning to use it. In most cases, a little preparation can go a long way towards ensuring that your application of DMAIC is successful and doesn’t take an excessive amount of effort, and once you’ve gotten used to the way it works, you’ll find it especially easy to drop DMAIC into a new situation and work with it.

There are some intricate details to observe when using DMAIC though, and you’ll want to ensure that you always have enough data to work with. This is similar to PDSA, which relies on a good set of output data from the previous iteration of the cycle, but in this case, you’ll need more information from your external sources.

Sometimes DMAIC can even promote improvement in your company’s data collection practices, as it’s not rare to realize that they are inadequate for the needs of the current project.

Conclusion

DMAIC and PDSA may seem very different at first, but they have their similarities, and it’s important to understand when a situation calls for either of the two. With time, you should get a pretty good sense for that, and you’ll be able to make decisions that make sense in the long run.

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Poka-yoke is a technique that aims to prevent operator mistake, or at least minimize it down to acceptable levels. It’s based on the philosophy that human error cannot be completely avoided no matter what one does, while on the other hand, it’s also impossible to prevent mistakes arising from other reasons, so it doesn’t make sense to put any effort into trying to fight against those. There are various subtle details to how poka-yoke should be implemented in an organization, and studying it in full detail is recommended for leaders of organizations that perpetually suffer from poor performance stemming from human error.

1. Identify the appropriate type of error detection

There are several modes of error detection that poka-yoke recognizes, and it’s important to realize that choosing the right one can make all the difference in the results you see. For example, you could test a completed piece against the values of some of its attributes compared to a baseline model. Or, you could check if certain values exceed their appropriate ranges. Sometimes, certain modes of detection will not even make sense in the context of the way a specific part works, so you’ll need to put some serious thinking into that aspect of poka-yoke’s implementation in your business.

2. Ensure that proper procedures are in place to act when a defect occurs

So far, so good you can detect human errors in your processes with relatively good accuracy. What do your operators do when an error does get detected? It’s just as important to ensure that there are appropriate procedures in place for working around those issues and resuming the normal workflow. Sometimes companies pay too little attention to that and end up simply moving the bottleneck to another part of the process. Study the way your processes work and figure out what the most appropriate way to deal with an issue of each type would be, so that your workers are prepared when the time comes.

3. Implement a system for long-term learning from errors

And of course, it’s also important to ensure that you gain some valuable knowledge and experience from those situations where you run into errors. To this end, you have to ensure that adequate data collection and retention systems are in place, as well as a good way to search through all the information that’s been gathered. And then, you’ll obviously also need to make sure that this information gets properly used and doesn’t just end up in some random archive.

4. Continuously develop the system

If you’ve done everything correctly so far, you should have a robust system that constantly teaches you new things about the way your operations flow, and this should allow you to make further improvements to the error verification system itself. Take the new knowledge you’ve gathered and figure out a way to boost the accuracy and/or productivity of the error detection system, and this will pay for itself in the long run. It’s sometimes a lot of effort, and it’s not the kind of work that most leaders find pleasant, but the benefits you’ll get in the end are more than worth all of it.

5. Get input from the operators themselves

Last but not least, you will want to make sure that you have a good overview of how things are flowing on the most fundamental level. Get as much input as you can from the people who run your operations, and consult them on what types of errors they most frequently run into and other similar factors. You may sometimes gain valuable insights into the way your operations run just from that alone, and this knowledge can show you new ways to figure out when errors are coming up in your production processes.

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Working in the transactional environment can present many unique problems for an organization to overcome, and a competent leader must learn to recognize them and possess the skills to overcome them. This can sometimes be particularly challenging, for example in cases of leaders who’re more used to working in a manufacturing environment and therefore familiar with its challenges. Here are 5 of these challenges:

1. Workers need to have enough independence

An important point for working within a transactional environment correctly is that all your workers must have the capabilities to make critical decisions on their own relevant levels, instead of having to navigate a complex chain of command to get approval for everything. Transactional environment work often requires you to move fast and implement new changes as quickly as possible, and this requires adequate input from all levels of the organization. This, in turn, means that you should give your workers the tools necessary to give that input.

2. The organization will need higher-level problem resolution processes

Unlike the manufacturing environment, work in the transactional environment often relies on changes that are on a much higher level, overlooking multiple components of the current process chain. In the manufacturing environment, you’d typically deal with problems within individual processes and sometimes, rarely, the connections between them. Here, you must see the bigger picture and analyze how the various resources involved in your work flow through the chain until they reach the final point.

3. It can be hard to figure out new issues

Detecting new defects can be surprisingly challenging in the transactional environment, because they may take a long time to manifest. It’s important to keep a critical outlook on all new processes introduced in the workflow, and ensure that their performance is measured appropriately, especially with regards to preexisting processes that may be affected. You must make sure that any changes in the workflow are propagated correctly and don’t produce any negative impact on the organization, as this kind of problem may sometimes be very difficult to reverse, especially if you have already moved through several stages of your product’s lifecycle.

4. Identifying the appropriate values for working data

Proper data measurement, collection and analysis are also important when you want to work successfully in the transactional environment and avoid running into some of its common problems. You must make sure that you’re not only working with fresh data at every moment, but also that it’s been correctly analyzed and that you have a good overview of any possible patterns in it. This requires you to work with a good number of competent analysts, needless to say, so you will want to ensure that every member of your organization’s leadership is on board with working in the transactional environment. Of course, this also includes you, and you should always be striving to improve your skills and bring even more value to the company when working in the transactional environment.

5. Constant re-evaluation of the toolset

It’s not rare that the tools your organization works with will have to undergo some significant changes from time to time, and it’s important to have a well-structured system in place for that. Otherwise, you risk running into significant delays and major bottlenecks when a larger part of the toolset has to be changed. These issues can compound too, and before you know it, the whole organization might be stuck out of inability to adapt to the newly introduced tools. This happens more often than you’d think, and it’s a problem you must try to eliminate preemptively, because it can strike at any time. Make sure that all your workers are on board with the correct procedures for introducing new tools to the workflow, and that any issues can be directed to the appropriate levels of the company’s leadership as quickly as possible.

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Process capability and process performance are both useful indicators for determining the current performance of your organization. However, they are quite different in nature and a common problem among leaders is that they end up confusing them a great deal of the time in their analysis, leading to mistakes that can be easily avoided. It’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with the concept of both indicators, and to find out how they are related to your operations if you still have gaps in that area.

Short-Term vs. Long-Term

One of the biggest differences between the two factors is in their application in your planning stages. Normally, process capability can be a useful measurement for short-term analysis and improvements to your operations, while on the other hand, process performance can show you some useful details for the long-term development of the organization.

This will vary from one organization to another, and it’s not a universal measure. In some cases, long-term measurements simply make no sense in the context of your specific organization, and it’s important to align the knowledge obtained through performance measurements to this state adequately.

This difference mostly arises from the data used for calculating each factor, but we’ll cover that in more detail below. What’s important to understand is that you need data collection systems that can provide you with a good high-level overview of your whole operation, as well as the capability to sample your current variables on a smaller scale when appropriate.

Different Sample Sizes

You’re going to work with differently sized data sets when calculating your process capability and process performance. For measuring performance, you should typically use the full data set related to the process that is, all the data collected from start to finish, or however this scales in your current state.

On the other hand, when calculating process capability, you should use smaller samples that reflect the work done over a shorter period of time. This can allow you to make more localized measurements that give you a good overview of what exactly the limits of each process in your workflow are, and how close you are to reaching them.

High-Level Overview

Keep in mind that these are both parts of a statistical analysis methodology, and understanding their true use requires you to have a good overview of the way statistics are used in your organization at the moment. Many leaders still struggle with even the most fundamental concepts of statistical analysis, and you can’t realistically expect to get a good grasp of process capability, process performance, and other similar factors involved in analysis, if you don’t understand the general high-level methodology where they are used in the first place.

There are other factors that come in play at later stages as well, and you will need to know how to define the acceptability of a process, as well as know how to integrate new processes in your workflow without impacting the status of any of the current ones.

To this end, having a good understanding of process performance and capability can be of great benefit, and it can give you a strong push in trying to improve the statistical analysis practices in your organization. Just make sure you take things slowly and don’t attempt to take in too much at once if you’re feeling lost with the general concepts, as the differences between factors like these can sometimes take a while to click in your head.

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The Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry has gone through some very significant stages of improvement in the last few decades, but it’s very likely that we’re barely scratching the surface of what’s possible. This is one of the most dynamic and rapidly evolving sectors, and it makes sense that we keep coming up with new optimization techniques and new approaches to solve old problems. And among all the tools and methodologies that can be utilized to this end, Six Sigma easily stands out as something that keeps delivering consistent, predictable results time and time again.

Rooted in Operational Excellence

Operational excellence and Six Sigma have a lot in common, and you’re going to see the concept utilized heavily in that field. This makes Six Sigma a natural fit for improving the work of the AEC industry, and we’ve seen many companies completely transform their style of work by just adopting the idea of operational excellence. It’s not something that’s just commonly found in facilities management, even though it’s a common element there it’s a tool that can introduce significant changes to the way a company works.

What’s more, a company in this field will be able to see continuous improvements to their operations, and they will have actual measurable results in a relatively short period of time. Six Sigma is something that, when applied correctly, transforms the work of an organization from the ground up and doesn’t leave any area unaffected, so you can expect to see the effects pretty quickly after implementing it.

General Benefits

Various points about your operations will be affected positively after implementing Six Sigma in your operations, and it’s not just about increased profits. Although, if this is an important point to you, you’re definitely going to be happy with what Six Sigma has to offer in this regard. The work of people in the AEC industry commonly puts them at risk of physical harm, and despite the strong efforts to promote workplace safety in recent years, there is still a lot that can be done to improve that situation.

With that in mind, if your company is also having problems in this aspect, you should definitely look in the direction of Six Sigma as a potential solution. There are many points to be made about the way Six Sigma promotes better safety and a more efficient overall workflow, but you have to really use the methodology for awhile to realize those benefits fully.

And on that note, you can also expect your workers to utilize their available resources much better than normal. This is something that occasionally drives leaders to Six Sigma just by itself it’s a philosophy that encourages a much more efficient approach to resource utilization, and reduces waste as much as possible. You’ll actually find that waste reduction is one of the most critical aspects of Six Sigma and something that will be constantly touched upon in all the work you do, so you should get used to the idea of minimizing this harmful presence in your work.

Waste can actually take many forms in the AEC industry, not just physical ones, making it particularly important to look at Six Sigma as a potential tool to alleviate the situation. If you’re constantly recording unsatisfying results in the way your company uses its resource pool, you should see some good changes with relatively little effort after implementing Six Sigma into your workflow.

Conclusion

Six Sigma has a lot to offer to the AEC industry, and we’re likely going to realize even more of its potential benefits in the near future. It’s a methodology that keeps evolving steadily, and the great demands of the AEC industry in this regard have occasionally helped accelerate that process even more.

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Operational excellence refers to the idea of satisfying the demands of the customer, while ensuring that the organization fully applies all principles and methodologies related to its field of work and utilizes their potential as best as possible. An organization must also strive for sustainability in its growth in the context of operational excellence, and it has become a critical part of the workflow of many companies around the world nowadays.

Facilities management is a field that sees a particularly strong adoption of the idea of operational excellence, and there are many opportunities to improve the way a company operates in this field, and ensure that it gets even better, more consistent results. When an organization is applying operational excellence correctly, it should have a complete overview of the whole system, something which can be of particular importance when it comes to facilities management.

A Systematic Approach to Facilities Management

A commonly seen problem in many organizations today even some larger, well-established ones is that they often have a pretty chaotic approach to their facilities management. While it’s true that this field predisposes to spontaneous decisions and thinking on the frontline, it’s also important to ensure that the whole development is driven by a sustainable approach with a clear final goal.

Considering that facilities management has a strong overlap with the integration of technology within the organization, it makes sense that you would want to pursue a more systematic, streamlined approach to it. This is especially true today, when we have such a huge range of available options when it comes to technological solutions to any problem. It’s very important that the company implements those with a clear view towards the future, instead of just thinking in a short-term mode.

Realizing the Company’s Full Potential During Emergency Situations

Another important area of facilities management business continuity can also benefit strongly from an approach driven by operational excellence. The better the company is prepared for a state of emergency, the better it will be able to utilize its resources during those challenging periods. It’s not rare for some companies to go under as a result of poor emergency preparation in case something happens for a longer period of time. Even if things don’t get that bad for your business, lack of preparedness can still have catastrophic consequences on your operations, making it hard to recover for quite awhile.

And unfortunately, it’s still not rare to see companies taking a very uneducated approach to their continuity planning, and leaving critical aspects pretty much to chance. It’s one thing to see this in a smaller organization that doesn’t devote serious resources to continuity planning, but when it happens in a larger one, it’s a strange sight that leads one to question the overall leadership of that company.

Outside of the Scope of Business

It’s also possible for facilities management to extend beyond the main scope of the company’s work, targeting non-core areas. This is also something that can benefit a lot from a good application of operational excellence, although the specific details are going to vary from one company to another. It’s still important to remember that this is usually an area that benefits a lot from an innovative approach and constant integration of new solutions, which is a direct match to what operational excellence aims to provide within an organization in the first place.

Conclusion

There’s a lot to gain from approaching your facilities management with the methodology of operational excellence. Following these principles at every step of the way can have great results in the overall development of the company, and it won’t take long to see the benefits across the whole organization.

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