Work Arounds

Jay Arthur
888-468-1537
303-756-9144
KnowWare International, Inc.
DBA LifeStar
2253 S. Oneida
Ste 3D
Denver, CO 80224

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Copyright © 2011

I don't know about you, but when I'm under the gun to satisfy a customer and the existing process, procedures, or systems get in the way, I go around them.

We recently hired a new employee to handle order processing. From day one, she started to identify problems with our procedures and information systems that caused problems. Instead of fixing them, we'd simply found ways to work around them.

Similarly, our customer database has grown with many hands entering address information in many different ways with many different abbreviations. This wasn't a problem until we tried to send mail to our customers, then it was a nightmare to clean up the data, often taking a day or more.

I worked in the phone company for many years. We had hundreds of people in various locations whose only job was to fix problems with service orders and bills. Work arounds.

If the IT systems didn't quite work right, the service representatives would find ways to pervert the system to do what they wanted to meet the customer needs. Many of these work arounds were simply incorrect, or made invalid by ongoing enhancements, but the folklore persisted, resulting in more errors.

Stop the Line

Work arounds may be expedient, but they are inefficient. They are a form of rework: the system isn't working properly, so people learn to cope with it. And coping takes longer and costs more than fixing the system.

One of the principles of Lean Thinking is to stop the line when there's a problem. Any employee can stop the line when a problem is detected so that you don't continue to make bad products or deliver bad service. Then everyone rushes in to solve the problem before restarting the line.

When you fail to stop the line, the pressure to serve the customer is like the flow of water, it finds another path. If you don't come back to the problem soon, the work around becomes the new channel for handling customer needs.

For more information on Lean Thinking check out my new book Lean Simplified at http://www.qimacros.com/lean.html.

Eliminating the Work Arounds

In my business, I created a program to edit the customer database and fix all of the inconsistencies and eliminate all of the issues that devoured a day or more of manual labor every time we wanted to send out a mailing. Then we created standards for entering customer information that matched the USPS requirements.

Although we don't actually stop the line, I got everyone to report snags and work arounds every time they happened. Then we address and fix them as soon as possible, usually in our weekly meeting.

What have you been working around? Isn't it time to stop the madness? What processes do you need to simplify and streamline? What information systems changes do you need to make to redirect the flow of work into a smoother channel?

© 2008 Jay Arthur, the KnowWare® Man, works with managers who want to plug the leaks in their cash flow.

Hire Jay Arthur to train your staff in his one-day Lean Six Sigma Workshop! Contact Jay at (888) 468-1537, support@qimacros.com.

Rights to reprint this article in company periodicals is freely given with the inclusion of the following tag line: "© 2008 Jay Arthur, the KnowWare® Man, (888) 468-1537, support@qimacros.com."

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