Waiting is a waste. Keep your customers waiting??
In lean, waiting is classified as one of the main waste categories. Waiting is wasting of time, and money and effort. This form of waste is covered extensively in this blog. But how about keep your customer waiting? How big of a waste it can be?
I saw a post of this nature on the Mark’s leanblog.org. It clearly demonstrate how much of a waste it is to keep people waiting, specially a person with a blog and good reach. Bad experiences for a customer in general, will not only turn that customer away; it creates a negative feel and will eventually turn many more current and future customers away. Mark's blog post is a good example of it.
Mark as a good lean consultant, looks at the cause of it. His observations and conclusions are very important. Organizations, which are trying to get the 100% utilization of the employees is losing one of the important points. Mark points out when employees are loaded to 100%, they are very less effective and there will be long queues. If the employee is in the direct customer care, this means long waiting time for customers and more frustrations and eventually loss of sales and profits. Even if the employee is not in the customer care, still this means lots of work in queue for the worker to complete. This is equally bad as well.
I always prefer Simple, optimized solutions, over complicated and high efficient solutions. Simple and optimized solutions generally provide better results as they are simple to understand and use and made to deliver the result in the bigger picture, not to keep people busy.
Lean management is different from scientific management and most of the other established management systems. It looks for the results by creating systems and eliminating wastes from the system, continuously not by pressing people, machines or any of the resources to its maximum.
5 comments:
I think you're right when you talk about choosing the most common methods for achieving goals.
I agree with Mark, Also I think we should simplfy and optimize solutions not only that related to the customer,but only when we need solutions for cronic problems on production lines, To make solutions for cronic problem on production lines and to make this solutions applicable, they should be simplified, optimized and clear, they shouldn't be complicated. one of the most important lean secret that Lean is a discipline of life due to simple tools and methodolgy
Thanks
Ahmed Hussein
in furniture small medium enterprise, waiting often occured. It was becaused by procedure not clear. Layout jig and tools, assignmet job in the machine. Sometimes, one machine very overload than the other. To easy and fast, operator used the other production line without procedure. And problem occured.....
MAKING PEOPLE AT ACTION POINT AWARE OF WASTES AND THE NEED TO IDENTIFY THE WASTES (IN DIFFERENT FORMS) IN ITSELF IS HALF BATTLE WON SINCE IT DOESNT BENEFIT ANY OF THE STAKE HOLDERS IN AN ORGANISATION. iT IS IMPERATIVE THAT WE USE VISUAL MEDIA, RADIO, NEWSPRINT MEDIA TO MAKE PEOPLE AWARE THROUGHOUT THE WORLD OF WASTES AND THEIR IDENTIFICATION. ONCE THIS IS DONE PEOPLE THEMSELVES FIND OUT HOW TO ELIMINATE THEM.
V.DWARAKANATH
I agree that waiting is a major waste also. I have found that many problems have very simple solutions. Sometimes we ourselves try to find solutions to problems and over-complicate it when the a simple and effective solution is staring us in our face. It has been my experience that getting shop floor employees involved in the process is most effective.
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