Productivity improvements in small steps

Increasing productivity can be a tricky matter. Unless you thoroughly understand the processes, goals, and bottlenecks making large random changes to a work flow can actually end up making the situation worst. You have to establish a baseline so that you can track the results of any changes.

I’ve seen manufacturing processes where an improvement on one step of the process caused a bottleneck on a following process, reducing overall efficiency. As discussed by Jered Benoit in his post “On the road to productivity” the Japanese utilize a philosophy of kaizen, or continuous improvement.¬† Once a process is basically sound or in control, Japanese Kaizen is applied most often as a series of small steps or improvements.

Importantly, kaizen must operate with three principles in place: process and results (not results-only); systemic thinking (i.e. big picture, not solely the narrow view); and non-judgmental, non-blaming (because blaming is wasteful).

So when you feel you want to improve your own productivity be sure to first understand the process you want to improve and then decide if perhaps improvements should be accomplished in small steps rather then a huge overhaul.  Small changes are easier to control and measure.  A good kaizen process will include the following steps:

1. understand the current process, establish a baseline for measurement,  and identify problems or bottlenecks;
2. choose the biggest problem and determine the root cause;
3. brainstorm and research possible solutions or countermeasures;
4. establish a detailed schedule for implementing selected countermeasure;
5. follow and keep the implementation schedule;
6. gather results data after countermeasure implementation;
7. compare the results to the baseline;
8. if problem is fixed then choose the next biggest problem at Step 2 and continue kaizen; or
9. if the problem is not fixed then return to Step 3 to determine a new countermeasure and continue kaizen.

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