Have you ever had the experience of waiting for something, with nothing at hand to do? People often use the word ‘frustrating’ to describe this experience.
Of course, here we are focusing on the wastefulness of it all. Let’s say, the ship to carry your export consignment has arrived as per schedule at the port, but your trucks have not reached yet. You are, of course, going to pay demurrage charges to the shipping liner. You will also have to explain to your customer why they are going to receive the goods late, and you will have to deal with damage claims related with that. Not to mention the loss of goodwill with the customer.
Waste: Waiting
Have you come across online internal company applications that seem to hang each day in the evenings due to heavy use? Or entire teams waiting because the prior process step has not been completed on schedule? Think masons sitting at site because bricks have not arrived. Think content developers sitting idle because managers have not signed off on content. Think product launches delayed, missing the festive sale season, because the step of parts development by vendors has not been completed.
In short, this is a wide-spread malaise in the workplace. And huge costs are involved.
Better coordinated planning by related teams is the obvious measure to minimise the waste of waiting.
Functions take various measures to minimise this sort of waste – for them and for other related functions. Planning is the obvious step – planning of projects such that dependent tasks are triggered at the correct time, or changing resource allocations, where feasible, so that work packages complete as per schedule. In processes, this may entail changing capacities at various process steps to push up ‘through-puts’, to use a term popularised by a famous guru, Eli Goldratt. Some of the others: getting started with assumed / estimated inputs and making course corrections later; completing downstream activities that are not dependent on the awaited inputs; multi-skilling, so that teams can be engaged with other tasks; maintaining task inventories, so that teams can get on with other tasks while they await inputs for the priority task; and so on.
Some of these measures build functional capability better than the others – those which lead to consistently reduced cycle times, those that enable more accurate forecasting and scheduling, those that lead to better coordination among teams, and so on. Keeping the team fruitfully engaged is only a secondary consideration.
Much work that is invisible is involved in achieving smooth, steady flow of work for a team. Consider an automotive production line. Typically by the 20th of the previous month, the run is finalised. But for Sales to specify requirements several weeks in advance requires that they feel confident to sell those products when they arrive. They have various systems in place to achieve this. For instance, in the industry, it is typical to track, on a daily basis, how many potential customers visited all their dealers and the website, and inquired about specific models! This is because, over time, empirically, fairly accurate models of actual demand (placed orders) at future dates have been built by each player, based on this input. In addition, dealers are cued each day to commit realistic delivery schedules to customers – and they are separately informed if those schedules change. Escalation paths for dealers to change those schedules on an exceptional basis have also become standard practice. On the procurement side, similar mechanisms have been put in place to ensure timely availability of materials on the line in just the right quantities. Outbound logistics processes have also been fine-tuned to ensure products do not sit as inventory while customers await deliveries.
In short, minimising waiting times is a game involving a very large effort at coordinated planning, with many hiccups along the way. The next time you meet a senior person in an organisation, just ask a simple question such as, ‘How often do your people wait for inputs during the course of their work?’ The answer and the conversation can tell you a lot about the entire organisation.
Related Readings :
CRAFT K. Developing Collective Consciousness In Your Organization, Tettra ( Aug 2018 )
