Page 43 - Lean six sigma demystified

22 Lean Six Sigma DemystifieD

Success Secret 4: Watch Your Product, Not Your People

Trying to make employees more efficient is usually a waste of time; a 50%
improvement in employee efficiency will barely make a dent in your overall
cycle time. Making your product or service more efficient is a great use of time.
How long does it take to gather all the information to issue an invoice or bill?
Why isn’t it all up to date and available immediately? Why does a purchase
order take so many approvals? Why does it sit in so many in baskets waiting for
a signature? Face it, your product or service is lazy. It’s sitting and waiting for
someone to work on it over 90% of the time. Watch your product, not your
people.
When you take these secrets to heart and start making improvements, you’ll
see a rapid improvement in the bottom line.
? still struggling

too many business owners try to make their employees work harder, but this
only leads to more mistakes and rework. if, instead, you focus on making the
product faster and the customer’s experience faster, you will automatically
delight customers, grow the business, and reduce mistakes and errors.

Secret 5: Implement a Proven Improvement System

Because of this people orientation, most managers and employees think they

should be able to find and fix problems in their business using their instincts,
and they can, up to a point where they hit a wall. This isn’t their fault. Research
into the science of change has found that one set of problem-solving methods
(e.g., common sense and trial and error) will work for a certain class of prob-
lems, but not for another. Then you will want to discover a new set of methods
and tools to solve the next class of problem. Consider antibiotics: they fight
bacterial infections, but not viruses like the common cold. The same is true in
business.
Since most processes are created by accident in an ad hoc way, problems
with the processes are fixed using common sense and trial and error as the busi-
ness grows. But at some point, the ability of these two methods to solve the
more mysterious and complex problems begins to fall off. Eventually, they stop