Tips and Insights

We've been creating visual work instructions for several years, but obtaining metrics regarding the impact they have on a company's bottom line has proven difficult. Typically, we're called in to help at the same time a company is implementing several Lean/quality initiatives. That makes it hard to figure out what percentage of the resulting improvement is due to effective work instructions alone.

The notion of giving an operator what she needs, when she needs it, in a way she can use it (visually), seems like a commonsense approach, but it's surprising how many text-heavy, confusing, unfriendly documents we see. I have to assume that's because companies haven't seen or can't imagine the impact effective work instructions can have on their metrics; therefore, I want to share statistics from two companies we worked with where we definitively captured the results.

We created visual work instructions for an international company that develops medical devices—a highly regulated environment. The procedures were complex and the workers inexperienced. The devices were intricate and expensive, allowing for only minute deviations and making quality imperative. Though we were part of an overall Lean initiative, the company was able to determine the impact our instructions had on three metrics:

• Yields increased 8%
• Deviations per lot decreased 83%
• Training development time decreased 50%

Another company, an automotive parts manufacturing plant, asked us to help define standard best practice and create work instructions for all their operations. We created documents—laminated, easy-to-see posters—that they displayed on the shop floor. These were used to reinforce the training that had been done with the same work instructions. Our documents impacted the company's results in two ways:

• Reduced secondary inspections and eliminated tertiary inspections
• Reduced scrap by 50%

It may be hard to determine what share of the credit visual work instructions can claim, but it is worth measuring. We do know, based on the numbers above as well as shared anecdotes from clients, that the potential savings far exceed the cost of developing these instructions.

For many clients, the affirmation comes immediately. After speaking to a room of engineers and supervisors during a recent sales presentation where we showed before and after examples of work instructions, one of the engineers voiced what many thought: "Holy cow, if you can't see the benefits of visual by just looking at the differences . . ."

I'll let you finish the sentence.

Labels: Lean, metrics, quality, standard best practice, user's needs, visual work instructions

Even though what something is called doesn't change what something is (you remember Shakespeare's "a rose by any other name . . ."), when semantics creep into an industry, it can cause problems. I generated this list of possible terms for identifying work instructions in just a couple of minutes (and missed how many more?):

• work instructions
  
• standard operating procedures
• job aids
• standardized work instructions
• job planning
• product design documents
• technical manuals
• user instructions
• procedure manuals
• policy manuals
• job skills
• training tools
• detailed process sheets

Isn't communication hard enough, without having different words mean the same thing? I'm laughing, of course, because we are talking about the English language here, where multiple meanings, multiple pronunciations, multiple spellings is the bane of meaningful conversation.

I don't think using different terms for an object or a process is necessarily a Lean or quality issue when it happens between different companies, but it could be an issue if it's happening within the company and hindering communication between departments. Take, for instance, the engineering department and the shop floor. If engineering is in charge of writing instructions—and they often are—they may use terms for parts that don't match what the shop floor technicians and mechanics call them. And if the engineer and the user don't agree (or confer ahead of time) before naming the parts, the potential for confusion when reading the instruction rises; i.e., if a worker wants to find out how to fix the thingamajig on the hoosit, she's in trouble if the engineer has named it the wallabaloo on the cratshis. She won't find what she needs unless she looks through the entire manual.

We were exposed to this issue when we worked with the United States Postal Services maintenance department. Barcode label printers at bulk mail centers are high-speed, high-volume machines that can disrupt an entire station if they go down. USPS maintenance, which handles dozens of machines and infrequently works on these printers, needed to diagnose and fix them quickly. Not only did they have to read through the columns of text in the table of contents to figure out what procedure they might need, they also had to figure out which term matched the part they needed to repair.

We solved this problem with a visual table of contents that allowed maintenance to identify the part based on what it looked like and/or where it was located on the machine. The user could then turn to the page of the operation that applied to it.

Since organizing is a relevant issue and a reoccurring theme for many companies employing 5S practices, I figure I have to say something about e-mail organization. Though I'm lucky enough not to receive 100 e-mails every day, I know people who do. I also know people who have thousands of e-mails stored somewhere, all waiting for something—a response, a reference . . . perhaps a burial.

E-mail, for many of us, has reached a point beyond usefulness and fallen into the realm of irritation and stress. When I have more than twenty e-mails in my in-box, I'm tempted to just hit the delete button. Surely we were not meant to hang on to all this information.

Because we're a small company, we've been given the freedom to use our skills and talents to fill niches as they become apparent. The leaders of the company happily delegate these tasks but recognize we need some oversight. Needless to say, their in-boxes are overflowing with copied and forwarded e-mails.

Recognizing this as a growing issue, we're now getting used to SharePoint, which, as I understand it, will end some of the e-mail nightmares that occur because we're trying to keep everyone informed. Instead, information—including e-mail discussions—will be stored on a server that everyone can access.

It's a good start, but as you've probably surmised, it still doesn't address all the issues. Several people have written articles with lots of solutions, and I especially like Stever Robbins' piece (a columnist for the Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge magazine). Not only does he give examples of good and bad e-mails, he also suggests that we figure out the per-minute rate it costs for each employee to read and respond to e-mail. When you multiply that number by the number of hours in a day, week, month . . . Well, you can imagine the steady trickle of money flowing down the drain.

One of his best suggestions, I believe, is the idea of training the senders. We know, of course, that we can't train clients how to send e-mails, but we can train ourselves (and maybe lead by example?).

Here are a few suggestions I like:

• Use the subject line as the whole message


• Include response expectations in the subject line
• NRN = No reply needed


• TY = Thank you


• NRB = Need response by (you fill in the date and time)
• Consider who you're copying and why, then tell each person what to do with the message


• Edit forwarded messages so they're appropriate for the next recipient

Even congress is inundated by e-mail, and they still haven't figured out a way to efficiently handle it (though one suggestion is to increase the budget for their offices—what a surprise). Since we don't have the luxury of extra money or staff to manage our e-mail, I guess we'll have to keep finding 5S solutions on our own.

Labels: 5S, Lean, organization, standardization

I threw 5S/6S in my last entry without explaining it fully. Though most of you probably know the background, let me share its Japanese origins and definitions:

• Seiri = tidiness, organization
• Seiton = orderliness
• Seiso = cleanliness
• Seiketsu = standards
• Shitsuke = sustaining discipline

And the English counterparts that came from it:

• Sort = cleanup
• Straighten/Set in Order = arrange
• Shine = neatness
• Systemize/Standardize = discipline
• Sustain = ongoing improvement
  

(The sixth S stands for safety.)

I can't say that we always live by 5S/6S in our office, and as I stated earlier, some of us work quite happily within our clutter. We rely on technology in this business, however, and we want to make sure everyone in the office can access the information they need when they need it. To that end, we've strategically organized our computer files, added software programs that help us manage projects, and tried to define all our processes, even the ones we think are indefinable.

Defining the processes hasn't been easy. Because we deal in mostly intellectual information and communication (though we do produce tangible documents), our processes have been hard to capture. We're constantly catching ourselves doing work in ways that contradict what we teach others, so we have to back away and start over.

When we do that, we look at the issue and ask what the user needs in the end (only this time the user is us), and we invariably define our process.

For example, we have several clients who wanted to create our EXPLAINIT Integrated Work Instructions in-house, and they looked to us to train their staff. Privately, some of us balked, claiming that our processes couldn't be duplicated, couldn't be categorized. Of course, what we discovered in our efforts to satisfy the client was that yes, we can define our processes. But would our clients be able to produce the same level of quality? It depends . . .

• Will the document designers be given the necessary software to develop the work instructions?
• Will they be given enough time to train on the software, learn the processes and create the documents?
• Will they have access to illustrations or be illustrators themselves?
• Will they be able to implement both a system that verifies the document's accuracy and a system that allows for changes?

These are questions we can't answer, yet we do know that when our clients aim for quality, creative solutions come alive. We're betting on their success.

So, as we continue to refine what we do to help our clients, we organize our thoughts, improve our processes and create standards that we can duplicate. Any 5S/6S proponent would say that's the kind of order that works.

Labels: 5S, 6S, Lean, organization, standardization, work instructions