Thread by @joshuamschultz

Here is a gentle intro to process improvement.

Not the first step, but one that will give you a quick win!

You can use this to
- save money
- lower time spent
- lower friction for your people

Let's dive in 👇🏼

We want to make getting work done, in the way we want it, the path of least resistance for all of our workers.

We can use Procedure Analysis.

This is a breakdown of each step, along with some data.

1. Writing it down brings focus to the step.
2. The data helps us prioritize

1. Know your basic symbols

- Square: Activity or Process
- Diamond: Decision or Inspection
- Arrow: Movement or Transport
- Semi: Delay or Buffer
- Down Triangle: Storage

2. Write the steps for a procedure you want to improve

- What you do
- Why its important
- Action Type
- How much time it takes
- How frustrating it is

3. Note value vs non value add steps

Hint:

Activity is value add (Square)
All others are not!

4. As each step is in focus as you write it, note improvement ideas

For these two steps, I thought of:

1. Consolidate incoming shipments to >5 pallets to reduce my workforce load
2. Require all vendors to pre-email packing slips

What did you come up with?

5. Rank by Time and find the most time consuming activities.

How can you lessen that time spend?

Here, we could:
- Use barcodes
- Use supplier EDI or API
- Use RPA to grab data from PO screen and enter into receiving

6. Rank by Frustration and reduce friction

Look at the unloading friction...

We could:

- move staging closer
- Install a liftgate
- add receiver to create a receiving team
- reconfig the floor design for better flow

7. Rule of Collective Change

All changes take:
- time
- money
- mental focus
- outcome variability

Thus:

Your organization, as a whole, can only take so much collective change. You want to concentrate this in the areas that will give the largest impact at any time.

8. Prioritize

You need to prioritize all possible solutions.

Some will be expensive
Some will fix problems that don't matter
Some will have a lot of backend maintenance after implementation.

Assess, discuss, analyze, prioritize, act

9. Collective Impact Analysis

Take all your steps, from different processes, and group them in one large sheet.

This will allow you to analyze issues cross organization, not just intra task.

10. Use Salary Allocation to find expensive steps to work on.

Look at total labor cost for each step using
- Salary or hourly wage
- time needed
- people needed
- # of times performed

You can rank cross-org for expensive steps.

11. Be realistic, know when to ditch the excel file

Number-wise: Admin has a bigger problem with entering invoices, than the Salesperson has creating a sales report.

Reality: You don't want to lose a frustrated sales guy b/c of 2 hr project. Admins never left b/c of invoicing.

12. Use a weighted Problem Score

Using the collective sheet, add in other areas of concern.

- Equipment costs
- Resources used during steps

Then weigh and score these for a collective Problem Score

(Be sure to normalize data since scales are different)

This is a recap from my detailed breakdown in today's newsletter. You can subscribe here

getrevue.co/profile/joshua…

Want to learn more about

- smb operations
- systems and process
- automation
- code & nocode builds for smb

Then follow
@joshuamschultz

In Summary:

- Process Improvement starts with being aware of minutia / focusing your mind on it for the first time in a while

- Quantify risks, costs, issues, and problems

- Prioritize which are worth solving

- Brainstorm solutions with tradeoffs

- Don't change too much