An existential approach to process optimization

This week I had a meeting with a client that, for a moment, took me back to my college days and the intense, alcohol induced philosophical debates my fellow students and I used to get drawn into. The debates often involved trees in forests, fish, bread and bicycles etc. Jean Paul Satre’s ‘The Age of Reason’ and Immanuel Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ both came flooding back.

I was in a meeting with a senior manager whose team had the responsibility for designing KPI’s for measuring the effectiveness of business processes. At one point I ignorantly suggested that to design an efficient process it is best to separate technology from the process itself. I suggested that no matter whether we are in SAP, Cognos, BO, or any other system for processing and/or reporting, we simply need to get back to the essence of the transaction itself. It was at that precise moment that my client interrupted me by saying:

“Harley, I have been studying this exact theory for the last 13 years and no matter how I approach it, I realize that what you are saying is impossible. Try imagining even the simplest of processes without the use of tools. For example, imagine how to design the process of getting from your home to your office without any tools or technology – you can not, it’s just not possible. So we are obliged to accept that tools are an intrinsic part of the process its self, there is no other way of approaching it”.

I considered what he said for a while then told him a true story:

I was once working in China, my client was in the closing stages of building a giant chemical production plant which was situated two and a half kilometers away from the regional head office. The problem was that twice per day a massive amount of data needed to be transferred between the plant’s production systems and the servers located in the regional head office. By coincidence, I had joined a technical meeting addressing the problem, at the point where everyone present had seemingly exhausted all the options. I was told that: ‘Laying a dedicated cable meant tunneling under our competitors factory. Going around it was way too expensive and the cable would then be subject to damage from road building schemes and other forms of maintenance. Using satellite or 3G technology would be too unreliable and would cost the earth.’

The participants were close to panicking – the new plant had cost millions of dollars and was only a few weeks from going on line. It was then I noticed a Chinese construction worker cycling past on his bicycle – “Why can’t you do it manually”? , I asked. “Why not simply download the data onto an external hard drive and have someone cycle with it to office”? The room fell silent. “Are you kidding?” someone asked. “No, I am deadly serious! Give me one good reason as to why it might not work? Give me a simpler, better idea if you have one. If you are worried about risk, download the data onto two hard drives and have two cyclists, one in reserve – just in case”.

As far as I know, to this day the bicycle method is still being used!

Of course – this process, just like any other, uses a tool so my client is correct – but it is not the kind of tool that technologist naturally consider – why? Because, it’s too simple, too embarrassing to admit to one’s colleagues. Me, I don’t care. I am not an engineer. I am just a pragmatic manager that dislikes endless discussions and simply likes to get on with the job in hand. (Except when I have had a few too many units of alcohol and I am in the presence similarly intoxicated philosophers)…

An e-mail from my mother and an excellent lesson on business efficiency

My mother replied to an e-mail in which I mentioned that my lawn mower is at the repairers, just at the time when I need it most. My mother is 80 years old and her lawn is bigger than a full size tennis court, with additional grass paths and grass covered orchards. In her reply she gives me seven valuable lessons in four lines of text, amazing:

Here’s what she wrote:

Harley,

Can't you borrow a mower from a neighbour, friend or relative? I get my mowers serviced in the winter when it is 10% cheaper, I must admit that Judith takes it for me to where she gets her machines serviced. We cut all the grass today, using the big machine to pick up the leaves etc. Then I can use my mulcher, a smaller, manageable size with no grass box to empty, so much quicker.

Have a good weekend,

Love Mum xxx

The seven lessons:
Lesson one: be resourceful
Lesson two: solve the real problem and don’t complain
Llesson three: plan ahead
Lesson four: save on bottom line costs
Lesson five: delegate and get the task done,
Lesson six: be efficient; use the right tool for job
Lesson seven: put the right tools in the hands of the right employees

Here’s my reply:

Mum,

Me and grass, we have a love / hate relationship – I try to ignore it and hope it goes away, it ignores me and keeps on growing!

Following your email I have put an annually reoccurring reminder in my computer to take the lawn mower in for a service on the first Saturday of December every year.

I think human evolution takes so long purely because the things we should do to improve, we don’t do – because for the most of us, planning ahead is not natural. In prehistoric times (and still today for the millions of those that are living on the edge) we lived for the now moment, each day, live or die.

In business I learned to plan ahead and have created elaborate focus, planning and progress measuring systems – but in my private life, I simply want to go home, chill out, listen to radio 4 and drink a glass of white wine in the sunshine – all the rest is an unwelcome interruption ;-)

Love Harley xxx

I know my mother, I know she’s going to reply “Harley, stop theorising and just get on with it, if you follow my advice – you won’t have to even cut the grass yourself , you lazy swine!“

If my wife reads this blog, I'll have to go and borrow my neighbours lawn mower and I'll spend my sunny Saturday cutting grass - I need an excuse, quick!

Kaizen - Myth or useful Methodology?

Anyone who has worked for Toyota will know the meaning of this word. According to Wikipedia, it is Japanese for ‘change for the better’ or ‘improvement’. In fact it is now becoming mostly used to mean ‘continual improvement’.

The Japanese have an interesting approach to management, where (in principle) no one goes home until everyone has completed their work for the day. The result being that managers are blamed if their employees are over worked or over stressed – a balance being considered as always best. And so it is that the application of Kaizen, in the workplace, becomes a daily task and can be seen as much more than just the application of improvements to productivity.

I was reminded of Kaizen this week because I am busy struggling with the reality of finding a way of not only applying it into a company, but also I want to see if I can even apply it to myself!

One of the Bayard Partnership’s clients has an extremely complex supply chain and end to end business process flow. If the results are bad in November, the real root causes maybe down to errors considered as unimportant that occurred many months earlier. If I may offer an analogy: it is not until we actually see the great icebergs melting that we begin to believe that global warming might actually be a problem.

Until now the global warming argument has always been (very conveniently) centered around, 'if what is causing it has anything to do with human behavior?'. Yet right now the symptoms are becoming so severe that they are forcing us to look much deeper into its possible real causes and to finally begin to tackle the complexity of the problem in such a way as to eventually find solutions.

The question for both the Bayard Partnership's client and the World is – is it too late? Or will the continuing irrelevant, sidestepping questioning and fault blaming only deliver short term solution strategies, rather than tackle the core issues?

As evidence of surface level, side stepping, arguments: only last week we heard Senator McCain make fun of Senator Obama because he said that if Americans checked their tire pressures more regularly and had their car engines tuned for efficiency, the amount of oil that McCain wants to drill out of an important world nature site would not in reality be needed.

If anyone has experience in effectively implementing Kaizen techniques into companies apathetic for change, then please feel free to share them with me and my blog readers…

Have a good week,

Harley