How many of the 50 Best Practices for Process Excellence has your company implemented?

Lee Pollock and Mark Kiemele are authors of a new book, Reversing the Culture of Waste – 50 Best Practices to Achieve Process Excellence. The book provides a list of best practices that companies use to become stronger in process improvement. Not every company excels at all 50, but the companies that apply most of the suggestions are much further ahead. You can even assess your company, to see how mature your process improvement approach is today.




The book is divided into 10 chapters, and each chapter identifies a few best practices. Where you see the term "process excellence" you can replace it with your company's initiative (Lean, Lean Six Sigma, Continuous Improvement, etc). Explanations of each best practice are provided in a concise summary, usually 1-2 pages in length.

Chapter 1 - Executive Ownership and Leadership Alignment
1. Establish ownership at the executive level.
2. Develop and communicate the need, vision and plan.
3. Train leadership first.
4. Link compensation to involvement and success.
5. Continuously assess what is working and what is not and adjust.

Chapter 2 - Effective Support Infrastructure

6. Designate a well-respected Deployment Champion early.
7. Commission and use a guiding coalition.
8. Partner with a capable and reputable service provider.
9. Integrate key stakeholders into the plan.
10. Create position descriptions that mandate a pull for excellence.
11. Quickly attain a critical mass of practitioners.

Chapter 3 - Integration with Existing Business Improvement Initiatives

12. Maximize the synergy of multiple initiatives.

Chapter 4 - The Right Projects and Studies and People to Lead Them

13. Establish criteria for project selection and prioritization.
14. Use quick-hitting studies to accelerate results.
15. Select top-tier candidates for first waves of training.

Chapter 5 - Integrated Training and Software

16. Use motivational and experienced instructors and coaches.
17. Keep the software simple and easy to use.
18. Use a blended approach to learning.

Chapter 6 - Financial and Implementation Responsibility

19. Use a consistent, simple and straightforward approach.
20. Generate successes early and communicate them.
21. Plan the service provider's exit strategy.
22. Develop internal subject matter experts.
23. Manage the expectations of every practitioner.
24. Define and use a meaty certification process.
25. Train all ares of the organization.
26. Apply the training immediately.
27. Provide expert coaching on all projects and studies.
28. Scope projects carefully.
29. Establish and follow rules for assessing benefits.
30. Publicize and use savings wisely.
31. Regularly review projects and act based on the assessment.
32. Conduct refresher sessions for leaders and practitioners.
33. Connect and use Champions to upgrade the initiative.
34. Make everyone aware of what is going on.
35. Design and use standardized templates.
36. Anticipate and manage position loss resulting from projects.
37. Include team-oriented "soft" tools.
38. Develop transfer functions to predict, optimize, and assess risk.
39. Make innovation systematic.
40. Solve new problems using trained resources and trumpet successes.
41. Make process excellence part of the human resource succession plan.
42. Integrate process excellence into all mergers and acquisitions.
43. Update the implementation plan based on feedback and results.

Chapter 7 - Reward and Recognition
44. Recognize people who execute successful projects.

Chapter 8 - Enterprise-Wide Knowledge Sharing

45. Establish a project-tracking database and keep it current.
46. Schedule benchmarking sessions.

Chapter 9 - Customer and Supply Chain Involvement

47. Involve suppliers and customers early on.
48. Implement a fact-based process for assessing the Voice of the Customer.

Chapter 10 - Change Management: Leveraging Cultural Strengths and Managing Its Weaknesses

49. View process excellence as a mindset, not just a toolset.
50. Leverage cultural strengths that promote change.




To assess your company on their maturity in process excellence, determine your ranking from 0-2 for each item.

0 = No implementation of that best practice whatsoever.
1 = Some areas exist where it is done
2 = We do that very well  

You can use decimals (like 0.5 or 1.5), but they suggest using integers only. Next, sum up the total score for each chapter, and enter the results on the Air Academy website: http://www.airacad.com/bestpractices.aspx  

Your total points will give you an idea where you rank against 500+ companies involved in a 2011 study. For example, if you scored a 32 or less, you are in the 10th percentile. If you scored a 48, you are in the 33rd percentile. If you scored a 59, you are the 50th percentile. If you scored an 82, you are in the 90th percentile. There were very few companies scoring above 90 (maximum score is 100 points). Exact percentiles are provided in the book.  

After reviewing your scores, we would recommend determining which best practices could provide your company with the biggest gains, and develop an action plan to address the gaps.  

Leave us a comment if you filled out the assessment, and how your company scored.

We don't need any help, we are already lean!

"Lean and Six Sigma are only for manufacturing organizations!"
"Our processes/company is unique, so that won't work here!"
"We're already lean because we're working so hard and so many hours!'

What "lean" looks like to people who don't get it yet.

Have you heard these comments before? That's the first sign of a company in desperate need of process improvement. 

I'll admit, there is some difficulty in getting people in a transactional or office environment to embrace lean and six sigma concepts. The biggest issue is that they can't SEE their workflow, so they cannot easily translate a manufacturing example (often used in training materials) to their own jobs.

I'll also admit, I can lean out anyone else's process, but when I decided I needed to lean out my own work, I ran into some difficulties.

After some serious evaluation of what I actually do (when not training or consulting, those are easy), I realized that I provide "items" to my customers. Items could be book summaries, templates, training material, procedures, guidelines, reference material, examples, recommendations, graphics, just to name a few. My clients take these items, and turn them into action, which should result in an increase in value or reduction in waste or reduction in life cycle costs to their business. Therefore, I indirectly help my clients improve their processes, or directly help them (when they get stuck).

I figured out I used a very simple process to convert a request from a client into an "item".

1. Obtain needs from clients
2. Gain approval to proceed (based on cost and time frame)
3. Create draft of item
4. Review draft with colleagues/experts
5. Make revisions
6. Review revision with broader audience and client
7. Make 2nd revision
8. Release item to client
9. Follow-up with client to determine usage
10. Review success and modify process

For example, one client asked for a summary powerpoint document of basic lean tools, that they could give to their employees, to let them read through prior to a lean event. We had some of it created already, but not in one single presentation, so it needed some work.

Here is what I did:

Step 1. Discussed how many slides, what kind of detail they wanted, which tools and concepts to include, how to navigate between slides, etc.
Step 2. I came back with how long it would take, and how much it would cost. We agreed to proceed after some discussion. I also provided some sample slides, and a basic framework for the presentation.
Step 3. I created a rough draft of the training. It's easy to get 80% done, then want to start something new (get sick of working on the same thing), but this is where you need to step it up to reach 100% completion.
Step 4. I next sent it to my consultant friends and former co-workers for feedback. Some provided better slides, challenged the intent of the presentation, and gave me some ideas on what to improve.
Step 5. I made most of the revisions, and ignored those that were minor, but would add significant time.
Step 6. I next sent it out to the client and some non-expert friends, to see if they could follow along with the presentation. They would better represent my target audience.
Step 7. After getting some of their feedback, I made some final changes.
Step 8. I sent the final "item" to the client for approval, and an invoice was provided.
Step 9. After the training, I asked for feedback on how it was received, and what additional changes to make.
Step 10. If I got hung up in the process, or missed a requirement, or the item didn't get used very much, I determined what I should do better next time.

Bottom line, until you actually reach step 8 above (release product to client), you have not provided any value to your clients. You don't get "credit" or get paid until you deliver. This is my "production", which connects me back to the training material that was too "manufacturing" focused before. If you can show this connection to clients, you'll see their eyes widen, and they will start thinking of all kinds of ways to apply lean to their processes.

What I want my office to look like...

Now, in order to apply lean to this particular process, I need to gather data on the following:

1) How long does it take from step 2 to step 8 (cycle time)?
2) How many items do I complete per month (output/deliveries)?
3) How well did the item get received or used (quality)? If it was good training, I would expect it to be reused over and over again. If they never touched it again, maybe it was considered low quality. Did I have to revise the item after releasing to the client? On a 1-10 scale, how happy was the client with the item?
4) Did I complete the item when they wanted it (on-time delivery)?

Once I have this data, then I can start to apply lean and six sigma concepts to the process. Create a whiteboard and display these metrics near your desk. Include a status board for the items you are currently working on, along with a visual of which step in the process each item is located. 

When reviewing the data, if it took longer than I planned, I need to look at my other activities, to see how they impacted it. The more items I'm working on at once (work in process), the longer it will take me to deliver to my client. This has really kept me focused on working on one or two items at a time (single piece flow). I like to jump around and "multitask" but I know that slows down my process, and it takes me longer to pick up where I left off. Once I start step 2, I need to stay committed to reaching step 8, so I can minimize the time between customer request to delivery to customer without any errors. This is the heart of lean.

Quality can be a little difficult to measure in the office. I mentioned some approaches above. When I go to step 9, and look at how often my items are being used, I feel this is a true measure of how good the item is. If I send out a well-written book review, but no one reads it, then did I actually provide value that the client could take and convert into improvements to their business? If not, then I didn't succeed in my task. If I create a template, and it gets sent around the company, and 50+ employees use the template, then I feel like that item was higher quality than the book review.

In summary, making the connection between lean and the office environment can be difficult and you should expect to get push back when discussing it. However, you can practice learning how to apply lean to the office by reviewing this article, and looking at the work you currently do today. It will be easier to convince others how lean directly relates to them when you can give specific examples on how you apply it to your own work. What has worked well for you when dealing with office processes?

Simple Business Approach to Continuous Improvement

As we rolled out our Six Ideas to Improve Your Business Today, we got some feedback that businesses are looking to go to the next level, and are looking for an easy approach, without using Lean Sensei's and Six Sigma Black Belts.

We continued with the theme of using layman's terms, and got rid of the consultant "lingo", to bring you an approach that anyone can use to better plan and prioritize their improvements.

We defined a 10-step approach. Here is a quick summary of those steps.

1) Gather customer complaints
2) Gather employee complaints
3) Review business finances
4) Determine top 3 issues
5) Determine importance of each issue
6) Get to root cause of each issue (using worksheet)
7) List potential solutions
8) Assign actions
9) Verify improvements
10) Communicate and celebrate (and go back to #1)

The process is simple, as you can see. Basically, a simple workbook that you can print out, fill out, and guide your business towards long term improvement. If you focus on the right things, this will either save you money, bring in more revenue/business, or both!

The best way to show you is to have you download an example form of how this form should be filled out. We used a small family restaurant as our case study.

Ready to begin filling out your own form? We have blank forms available for free download, including the Problem Solving Worksheet.

If you'd like to customize it with your own business logo, contact us and we'll modify it for free.

Six business improvement ideas you can implement today!

Sometimes us consultants get a bad reputation for making things more complicated than they need to be. We turn people away when we don't put process improvement tools in layman's terms that anyone can understand.

I was reminded of this when working with a small family restaurant recently. If I mentioned standard work, theory of constraints, 5-S, kanban, or PDCA, I would have been escorted out the door. They aren't used to hearing these terms, like some of our larger manufacturing clients are.

I needed to explain it to them, without the consultant "lingo". In fact, we applied every single one of the tools mentioned above, but we didn't call them by their name.

As I mentioned in my last blog, there are simple tools that any business can start with, that almost always gain some improvements.

We decided to package them into a one-page sheet. We identified six different suggestions for businesses who aren't sure where to get started. You can download a copy of them at the bottom of the page.

1) Workplace organization, cleaning and labeling – With your staff, get rid of everything you don’t need very often (put it in storage or recycle it). Everything that remains should be stuff used quite often. Label it and make sure there is room for it somewhere. Clean up the area, to make it shine, so that it looks like a brand new area (this gets the workers excited). Setup a process to put things away after use, and maintain the cleanliness and organization, so it doesn’t go back to the mess it was before.

2) Customer Surveys - send out a survey to your customers, and ask them how you can improve your products and services. Be open to input they receive, and gather the top 3 ideas for implementation.

3) Employee Brainstorming - Gather your employees and “brainstorm” ways to improve the business. Your employees hear the complaints and deal with the inefficient processes, so listen to what they say. Make sure you ask them about risks of problems, not just those that have actually happened (employee turnover, close-call accidents, anticipated issues, mistakes that almost made it to the customer, etc).

4) Reduce backups - Look for areas in your business processes where the work piles up or gets backed up(called “bottlenecks”). If you can improve the efficiency in that area, the results are often seen immediately with your customers.

5) Document tasks - develop a standard and consistent approach for doing key activities and tasks in your business. Write them down, so everyone knows how it should be done. If someone comes up with a better idea, update the steps. Provide as many photos and pictures as possible.

6) Cross-train employees - train other employees to be able to do multiple tasks and skills (not the same as multi-tasking, which tends to be inefficient overall). This gives you a more flexible workforce, so in case you get overloaded in one area, or someone is out sick or on vacation, you aren’t keeping the customer waiting, or providing poor service, or not responding to them at all.

Even really mature and highly efficient companies go back to these basic improvement approaches over and over again. They are critical for success.

Download a copy for free! Six Ideas to Improve Your Business Today!

Cost savings from process improvements can be misleading

I've been to many conferences, and have seen lots of companies claim cost savings and metric improvements that are very impressive. However, the more experienced I get, the more skeptical I get of these claims.

First off, let's define what process improvement savings should be. It should be the elimination of waste in a process (removing non-value added work), improving quality to the internal and external customers, reducing the time to complete value added tasks, or redesigning a process to provide more value to a customer.

Savings should not be the outsourcing of processes to another country to save money, or cutting heads and expecting them to "be lean" in order to make up the gap in resources. These are usually short-sighted decisions that end up costing the company more money in the long run, and risk negatively impacting the customer. But for this discussion, we will focus on one more incorrect savings: when the bottom line benefits do not actually exist.

Let's talk about one scenario that I've seen. Short term savings.

Let's say the process is tracking the Work in process (WIP) for approving charge numbers, so employees can start work on a new program or project.

Refer to the table below

Starting at Day 15, the number of charge numbers waiting for approval is 108 (red line). Each day, that total grows larger, as the amount of time available to complete these approvals is not sufficient to keep up with the new requests. This means the process will never be able to cut into the existing WIP. At some point, shown at Day 40, the management gets too many complaints about charge numbers not being available, and they work overtime, and add more resources to complete a bunch of them over the next couple days. They complete 350, 400 and 75 over the three days (blue line), compared to a typical day of around 20-30.

If we were to capture the savings from bringing the total number of charge number requests from 772 to 71 by Day 42, you could conclude a huge reduction of 90%, or 601 requests. If we determine that each request is $1000 per day in lost productivity, then on Day 39, we have around $772,000 tied up in the process, and it is reducted to $71,000. A savings of $601,000!

However, we didn't do anything "lean" since we spent additional money on labor to get the number down. We haven't actually addressed the time available or cycle time per request. Of course, the extra labor should be subtracted out of the savings, so we'll take out $10,000 for the extra labor/resources.

Next, we assume that this is actual bottom-line savings. In order to claim this as savings or growth, we would have to assume that all employees are not using any other charge numbers, and are charging to an overhead number, and therefore the company is losing money by employing them without work to do. This is highly unlikely. Let's be conservative and assume that 10% of the employees would be in that situation, so we'll claim around $60,000 in additional sales/work, not $600,000.

The next assumption is that the 772 open requests would have stayed at that level for an extended period of time. It does appear that this number was continuing to climb, so the number of new requests would have to be reviewed, to see if that was true assumption for the future. If the requests drop off, then they might have been able to catch up on their own.

Finally, we must assume that they can maintain the savings at the low level of around 70 requests for an extended period of time. If we look at the data in the future, you can see that the requests climb back up again. Again, this shouldn't be a surprise, since we didn't do anything to address the original problem, that we cannot keep up with the request demand for charge numbers.

Let's assume that they actually "lean" out the process and are able to keep up with the demand now. One final problem with cost savings is the impact of the improvements to the bottom-line financials of the company. For example, if the process was able to keep up with demand, and a resource was able to be freed up to do some other work, then if that resource isn't actually given value-added work, the savings won't actually show up in the bottom-line. You should be able to see an increase in output or work as a result of the freeing up of the resource, which is where the true savings hit the financials. This step is critical, and should be verified after any claimed improvement.

So next time you see some cost savings presented, think about these key points:

1) Did the baseline data represent the true situation if no action was taken, or was it an unusual time period and not representative of the typical situation for that process?

2) Was waste taken out of the process to improve it, or were more resources and cost thrown at it?

3) Were the improvements maintained over a long period of time (6-12 months)?

4) Did the savings actually flow down to the bottom line?

So be careful what you read about lean or six sigma cost savings, and be diligent if you are involved in a project or event to report the correct and most accurate numbers you can.

Don't "check the box" with soft improvement tools

We recently were reminded of a problem that comes up every so often in regards to process improvement tools. The "check the box" mentality.

You train, teach and mentor individuals on which tools to use, and when they finally decide to use the right tool at the right time, they try to shortcut the process just to get it completed, missing the entire purpose of the tool!

Let's use the fishbone diagram. Our clients will identify the need for a fishbone or maybe we'll have to suggest it. Instead of gaining the benefits of the team discussion and brainstorming, someone sits down at their desk and starts to fill out the diagram.

"I worked on that last night, and finished it, then emailed it to everyone. Now which tool do we need to do next?"

Process Improvement tools, like fishbone diagrams, are not the end result. The purpose of the tool is to provide a framework in order for the process of evaluation to take place. When we perform a fishbone diagram, we are actually doing many different things without realizing it:

1) we gather up the right resources from cross-functional areas
2) we clearly define the problem statement (often overlooked)
3) we openly talk about problems and variables that cause the problem we are trying to solve
4) we brainstorm why it could be happening (without fear or insults) using commonly used categories (Man, Method, Material, Machine, etc)
5) we generate a very thorough list of potential variables to go investigate

The REAL output of a fishbone diagram comes down to two main things:

1) a plan to go investigate some of the most likely variables
2) an opportunity to interact with a diverse group of stakeholders in the problem, get to know them, and see their unique perspectives and hear how that problem impacts them

Notice we didn't mention a nice looking fishbone diagram with a fish outline around it, with color-coded labels for each category.

Even if NOTHING is done after the fishbone diagram meeting, there still was value in creating the fishbone. Most likely, you will have actions that come out of the effort, but don't overlook the PROCESS that took place to create it, which is where much of the value came from.

We use the fishbone diagram as an example, but it applies to many of the tools, especially ones we consider "soft" (little to no data analysis involved).

The inspiration for this article came from a group we worked with that was trying to quickly complete a Current State Value Stream Map (VSM) because they were running out of time before the scheduled Future State Mapping event. This event had a hard date due to individuals who were flying in from out of town. The team was suggesting that they could quickly draft the Current state map on their own, then have the actual owners of the proceses review it right before the next event, then jump into developing the Future State.

We politely reiterated that the completion of the current state map is not the end result. It is the PROCESS of developing the current state map where the value is created. The most important part is the time spent with a concurrent group of people defining the process, talking about the issues, understanding that the process is broken, and hopefully building relationships with these other stakeholders. Those relationships are really the key to the VSM. Now when future issues come up, they can be avoided or better anticipated, since the perspective of others are now better understood, and they can include or discuss the impact with them BEFORE a change or issue occurs.

For example, during the VSM, you might discover that leaving off the account number on a form causes 10 minutes of work for a later process run by Judy, who was at the event. After the event, you run into an account number that looks unfamiliar. You call Judy and discuss, and she recommends you return the form to the owner before processing it. You've saved yourself time processing it, and cut the wait time from when you completed the form, until she would find the error, and have also given instant feedback to the form originator that there was an error. You also saved Judy time reviewing the document to find the error. Obviously, you would want to permanently resolve this issue. However, this probably was not even a major issue that came out of the event, yet the benefits are already being seen because of the VSM event. If you and Judy had not gone through the VSM process, you would have never been able to anticipate those kinds of issues.

Spending time in an event will also give people a chance to think clearly about how they do work. It will also allow them time to digest the fact that the process is indeed broken, and that they will have to change the process in order to make it better, especially if their process is the one causing the most problems. If you speed through this process, you'll miss the entire change management process, and you won't have the commitment you need going forward.

We also see people get wrapped up over the format of the template. On an FMEA, they argue over the title of a column (Key Product Characteristic or Critical to Quality), or whether the Severity ranking is a 6 or a 7. The FMEA creates a nice spreadsheet for prioritizing the effort, but the value lies in the concurrent discussion between all stakeholders. After the event, the individuals in the event are much more likely to think differently, and talk directly to each other about other issues they encounter, than they were before the event. The FMEA was just a process developed that forced this group collaboration to take place.

In a perfect world, all processes would be linked together where this communication and discussion was happening constantly between all stakeholders, but we know that's not realistic. Companies get siloed away from each other via departments and budgets and physical locations. These soft tools are necessary to bring thsse groups back together, even if for just a day or two.

The tools that are more about the process, rather than the actual end result include: FMEAs, 5 Whys, Affinity Diagrams, Force Field Analysis, Process Flow Diagrams, Value Stream Maps, and Fishbone (Cause and Effect) Diagrams. This doesn't really apply to the "hard" analysis tools like control charts, histograms, statistical analysis, etc. Those can be performed by an individual without a team, as long as the results are shared and digested as a team.

Bottom line: The process improvement tool is not usually the end result. The process to get there is where most of the value is created and discovered, so don't try and shortcut the process just to "check the box".