Improvement Insights Blog
Are You Ready for Your Mother’s Day?
The U.S. phone system was engineered to handle one day’s maximum traffic: Mother’s Day. What’s yours?
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“Well hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” and QI Macros [software].
“In 1973, I graduated from college and went to work for the phone company in Denver, Colorado Mountain Bell at the time, as a programmer. We did lots of different types of projects, and at one point I ended up working on a thing called the Trunk Forecasting System.
“Now, trunk lines are how you connect each major city with other cities and so on. It turns out that the entire… all of the Telco’s transmission [network] was designed for one day and one day in particular: Mother’s Day, because everybody called their mother. And so if I called my mom from Denver in Tucson well it might go from Denver to Tucson, but it might go from Denver to Dallas to Tucson and it might go from Denver to San Francisco to Las Vegas to [Tucson], but no matter what it would connect. You don’t want to annoy people on Mother’s Day, and so the whole thing was engineered that way.
“Recently we were out and our local pub had this giant tent set up on the street next to their building because they were preparing for St. Paddy’s Day – that’s their Mother’s Day. You know, if you think about it, turkey farmers… what’s their Mother’s Day? It’s Thanksgiving, right? So you spend all year raising turkeys and that’s something that you’ve got to be prepared for, because people are going to want to eat turkey on Thanksgiving. Maybe not the rest of the year, but that day you’re in. So there are these Thanksgiving days.
“Now there’s also a little… they’re kind of like a tsunami where it just kind of crashes on shore, but there are other situations like that. In healthcare, flu season starts in November and then crests in about December and January and then then slides down in February and March. That’s sort of like a big wave that comes in. Now they weren’t quite prepared for the hundred-year storm that came with COVID. In banks, the same sort of thing: People get paid on Friday, and they want to cash their check and get some money for the weekend. I worked with one credit union and they had struggles with everybody… these big long lines on a Friday. It turned out that they had a [policy] where you couldn’t take out more than $200 unless somebody in the management staff signed off on it. I said, “Well why is that?” Guess what? We raised it to $800 and that was the end of the lines in that credit union. Also, I was talking to somebody down in Texas and it turns out that emergency rooms are flooded between September and December on Friday nights because all of the high school kids get injured and they have to come into the emergency room on a Friday night. They have these things that happen just repeatedly.
“So what’s your Mother’s Day? What’s the day of the week or the day of the month or the time of the year or the one day out of the year where you’re flooded? Are you engineered to be able to handle that kind of load, and can your system support it?
“That’s my Improvement Insight: Figure out what your Mother’s Day is. Let’s go out and improve something this week.”
