What product or service will you create this year to shake up the competition? What are you doing to turn “tradition” upside-down? You are the expert in your industry; and as an entrepreneur you’ve been up late night thinking about these ideas… But, do you have the resources? If your daily operation is clogged, noisy, and inefficient – it will be far more difficult and costly to shift from idea to delivery. Like anything, it is about balance. And, and company with a nice balance of efficiency and innovation is sure to be successful. What will be your next quality tool?
Continuous Improvement v. Disrupters? It’s not one or the other, but both. Unless you have unlimited resources (and few companies do for very long) you are continuously searching for ways to do more with less. Process and/or system improvement efforts will help you free up as many resources as possible from your current operation to develop new products and services, seek new marketing strategies, and attend to your new strategic goals to help you realize your vision. Our current blog series is highlighting some very basic process improvement tools to help your small business or department make some incremental progress in developing a more efficient operation.
Please, don’t take this too far. As much as I like to preach quality improvement initiatives, I’m also a big fan of Occam’s Razor. This philosophy will help you to reallocate your newfound resources on developing your company’s game changer. After all, at some point you will reach a level of diminishing returns. Don’t spend all of your energy on quality. Remember, the point of an efficient operation is to eliminate your operation’s noise and distractions so you can create new and cool stuff.
Now back to our regularly scheduled blog series on simple, yet effective, quality tools. Today we are discussing the notion of building a value-based flowchart. There are many variations of this concept, and I’m going to add one additional element or filter.
The underlying notion of these simple charts is to identify non-value-added steps in your processes and eliminate them whenever possible. It’s not much more complicated than that. The additional filter I’m going to add is the regulatory or compliance aspect of your process, because I don’t want you eliminating a non-value-added step that is required by law or statute.
Here we go… Grab a nice big piece of paper, a pencil, and a few highlighters. Start from the beginning of your process. For each step: draw a rectangle, write in a description of the step, and include the approximate time the step takes in minutes. Once you have mapped out your entire process, take a highlighter and identify any process that does not add value to your customers (both internal and external customers) or your company. Next, using a different color, mark those processes that are in place due to regulatory rules/laws.
In most cases, you will find a cornucopia of process steps that do not add value to your customers or your organization. Stop doing these. Now, look at the time you marked in each box, and total the amount of time you spend on non-value-added steps every time you execute this process.
You are now on your way to saving time, resources, and money… all, of which can be used to do something cool for your customers!