“How can I provide a faster service to my customers without taking on more people?”

What does “work smarter not harder” really mean?

A common mistake in many workplaces is to take on too much work at the same time. The more products or projects being worked on in your organisation, the longer will be the average lead time (the start to finish time for the product or project to reach the customer). This is a mathematical inevitability (Little’s Law for those who want to delve deeper). Working harder won’t get everything to the customer more quickly if there are just too many products or projects in the system.

“How does the Theory of Constraints help me?”

Nowadays the largest use of lean thinking and Six Sigma is in information processing (transactional processes such as finance and insurance) and service industries (such as travel & vacation businesses).  You may well be in this sort of industry. Silicon Beach provide excellent training courses on Lean Six Sigma with many participants from transactional and service organisations. In this training we learn that the “Theory of Constraints” is an essential partner to Lean Six Sigma and has a several powerful messages for supervisors and managers. One of these is about how many products or projects to have in the system at one time, and how to organise the work.

Does organising the work really matter?

Consider six ships coming in to harbour to be unloaded. There are six ships and six cranes to unload the ships. It takes one crane six days to unload one ship. If each crane unloads one ship then the average time the ships take to be unloaded is six days. However, if the six cranes unload one ship first then this takes one day. The next ship will be unloaded after one day waiting and one day unloading i.e. two days, and so on. The average time to unload will be 1 + 2 + 3 + 4+ 5 + 6 / 6 = 3.5 days – almost half the time for the previous method but using exactly the same resources.  This simple story (from Hal Mather in 1999) shows powerfully that it is best to put as much resource as possible on to one product or service at a time. Don’t work on many things at once – your customers will on average get a faster service if you reduce the number of products in the system.  This is “work smarter not harder” as we are exhorted to do. Multitasking is the enemy of efficiency.

Case study: a real example from a design company

Here is an example based on a real improvement project (somewhat simplified). Consider a small company doing design projects (transactional knowledge-based work; no physical manufacture in their workplace). On average a design project takes three months if all resource (staff) is applied to this one project. On average there were four projects in the system. Staff were shared across all projects. Thus on average it took one year (four projects x three months) to deliver a project to a customer. The Sales Department then sold more projects which were taken into the company (additional staff were not recruited). There were then an average of eight projects live in the department. Delivery times started to be badly missed. Customers complained. Why? What is the new average lead time per project? It must be eight projects x three months = two years: twice the time used historically to predict delivery dates. That’s why customers were unhappy.

Critical Chain Project Management: simple but powerful ideas

Critical Chain Project Management is part of Theory of Constraints, and has several key ideas for reducing lead times. One of these is that multitasking is inefficient and drains people’s time. Avoid mutlitasking: as far as possible, work on one product or project at a time. This is known as the “relay runner” way of working. Each person does all their work on one project, and then hands the baton (their completed work) over to the next person, who immediately works on the project full-time and then passes on the work again, and so on. This will reduce start to finish times for service and projects, and will help delight your customers.

“But is this practical?”

Yes. Many organisations use Theory of Constraints and Critical Chain project management. In practice, working on a single project may be impractical, but single-project working should be the intention (vision) for reducing lead times in the workplace. Steven Wheelright showed many years ago (1992) that the optimum number of simultaneous projects for a skilled engineer is just two. Any more projects per person reduces the value-adding time spent on work.

“So how can I use this simple idea in my workplace?”

Think about where you can work on fewer products or projects in a more dedicated way, ideally one at a time, moving work more rapidly to the customer.  You will increase the throughput of your organisation and so make more profit (or get best value from resource if you are public sector or charity). Take some training: Theory of Constraints is introduced in the  Silicon Beach Yellow Belt training course, and covered more fully in the Silicon Beach Green Belt and Black Belt Lean Six Sigma training courses.

“What other key ideas will help increase my organisation’s throughput?”

Theory of Constraints thinking adds powerful tools to the Lean Six Sigma toolkit. Global optimisation does not come from local optimisation: system thinking is required. Improvement efforts should be focussed on constraints (bottlenecks) to the organisation doing its job (throughput of work to the customer).  The “Five Focussing Steps” show how to get benefit from understanding the constraints of your organisation. All these ideas are covered in the Silicon Beach Lean Six Sigma and Value Stream Mapping courses, and will be the topics for future blogs. Simple methods lead to dramatic improvements.

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critical chain management, critical chain project management, Lean & Six Sigma, Lean Training, Six Sigma, Six Sigma Resources, Six Sigma Training, theory of constraints

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