Food and Quality

Katherine Bell interviewed Iron Chef Mario Batali in the May 2010 Harvard Business Review. Mario loves the “slogging battle of getting good food out quickly every day.”

Isn’t that true of every business? The slogging battle of helping patients in a hospital or making flawless autos in a plant?

When it comes to getting good food out quickly every day, Mario asks his staff: “What is the hardest thing about today?” Then he says: “let’s streamline it, let’s make it easier.”

Isn’t that the essence of quality improvement?

To describe his restaurants, Mario says: “Now we have all these smart, thoughtful people helping to evolve new ways of making dishes more consistent and delicious without sweating as much.”

Isn’t that the essence of a quality driven culture: consistent, delicious products or services delivered without sweating as much? Mario embodies the improvement methods we rant about in Lean Six Sigma, he just takes a jargon-free, simple approach to it much like he does his menus.

Quality professionals can learn a lot from Mario Batali.

Marketing Leads to Sales Confusion

Office Depo offered a hot deal on a Pentium PC and monitor combo. The price in the Thursday newspaper was $479 after $150 instant savings and $50 mail in rebate. So, I went to pick one up.

When I got to my local store, all I could see on the shelves were AMD PCs, so I asked a clerk who referred me to another clerk who brought the Sunday ad with her. The Sunday add showed a similar combo for $529 after $170 instant savings.  So I called my wife who found the ad in Thursday’s paper and gave me the model number. It matched, but the Sunday ad said nothing about a mail in rebate ($529-$50 = $479).

Needless to say, it took some time to sort out the various offers. Then, when I got to the register, the bundle rang up as $549 instead of $529. So I had to get an override to fix the price. And that took more time. All in all, it probably took me 30 minutes to make a 5 minute purchase and I tied up two floor salespeople doing it.

I know it’s hard to keep marketing, sales and computer system databases in sync, but not doing so leads to customer confusion, annoyance and, in some cases, a “no buy” decision.

Is the gap between what marketing says and sales does and the cash register rings causing your customers time and money?

Maybe it’s time to synchronize these processes so that your customers are surprised, not annoyed, when they decide to shop with you.

As  a side benefit, it will free up your salespeople to work with other customers.

Comcast Service Nightmare

Comcast decided to force all of analog users to upgrade to digital. Every channel has an annoying message playing over and over again to call their center to upgrade. They sent us hardware to connect and a link to activate the upgrade online. So I connected the hardware, turned it on and went through the activation script online.

Of course, the online activation didn’t work. I’ve called their activation help number every day for the last three days and, after a going through the whole automated response system, it tells me it’s going to transfer me to a technician, but, of course, it hangs up on me every time. The Qwest asks: “Would you like to make a call?”

Let’s be clear, I don’t like being forced to upgrade. I don’t like that the automated activation system doesn’t work. I really don’t like wasting time calling a help desk only to be disconnected.

I tried to order DirectTV, but the installer said he’d have to tear up our basement drywall to connect the dish, DVR, etc. Bummer. They didn’t mention that in their advertising.

So, unless I want a renovation project, I’m stuck with Comcast, but frankly, I don’t think Comcast wants anyone’s business. And their doing their best to drive business away. In times like these, that’s pretty silly.

Potential For Greatness

One of the recurring themes of the keynote speakers at ASQ World was that, as Sister Mary Jean Ryan said, every employee has the potential for greatness. The goal of management should be to unleash that greatness. For her, this would lead to “breathtakingly better healthcare.”

Geek Squad founder said the same thing in a different way.

Every employee wants to do a great job for the customer. Unfortunately, the systems and procedures they use force them to do less than their best. Engage employees in changing the systems to deliver breathtaking products and services. They have a lot to share. Turn them loose.

Wall Street Mistake-Proofing

On May 6th, a trading system may have allowed a trader to enter a “B” for billion instead of “M” for million. Or perhaps it let him or her put in three extra zeros (16,000,000,000). It may even have asked: “Are you sure?”

What we do know is that some trading activity triggered a series of stop-loss orders that caused the Dow to fall over a 1,000 points in 16 minutes.

Let’s face it, with highly automated trading, computer programs are going to have to be smart enough to defeat the humans that use them. Maybe there should be checks on how large the order is, preventing such actions.

Maybe there should be a set of “brakes” on the market that halts trading when activity goes crazy in one direction or the other, just like brakes halt a falling elevator.

One author calls these kinds of experiences a “Black Swan Event.”

Mistake-proofing software works in much the same way as mistake-proofing any other process, you have to figure out what could go wrong and put changes in place to prevent them.

Just like investors placed stop-loss orders to mistake-proof their investments, Wall Street needs to have stop-loss (i.e., brakes) functionality in its systems. Otherwise, the rollercoaster ride is just beginning.

Diabetic Overproduction

Reports from two nationwide studies show that aggressive treatment of cholesterol and blood pressure do not provide any additional benefit for diabetic patients but do increase the risk of side effects according to Thomas H. Maugh II of the LA Times.

And aggressively lowering blood sugar levels increases the risk of heart disease.

From a Lean point of view, these studies show that these aggressive treatments are a form of unnecessary overproduction.

A few years back, a friend of mine was being pressured to try an experimental bone marrow transplant for her breast cancer. She decided against it and studies later proved her right. More aggressive treatments are not always better.

With an estimated $250 billion in unnecessary tests and procedures performed every year, healthcare can help pay for universal healthcare by reducing overproduction. More aggressive treatment is not always better for the patient.

Angiogram Overproduction

Research discovered that about 20 patients out of every 100 had no serious blockages. With 1 million angiograms per year, that means that 200,000 patients are being tested unnecessarily at a cost of $1,500 to $3,000 per test. That’s a half a billion dollars or more of unnecessary healthcare costs just for angiograms.

Additionally, one percent of these patients may have a stroke or heart attack as a result of the test (2,000 patients unnecessarily at risk).

Overall, unnecessary healthcare testing is estimated at $250 billion per year.

From a Lean perspective, this is classic “overproduction” – unnecessary testing resulting in unnecessary costs. medical errors and deaths.

Healthcare will have to do its part to help cover the costs of universal healthcare. Eliminating unnecessary testing is a good first step.

Toyota Recall

With all the hype about Toyota’s recall, I think the media are overlooking a few key points.

1. The CEO of Toyota publically apologized for the safety issues and went to work on resolving them.

I haven’t heard the CEO of AIG (or any of the other financial institutions) apologize for driving us into the Great Recession. They’re still taking billions in bonuses for their stupidity.

2. Based on their culture, Toyota will make sure these mistakes never happen again. They will build it into their design process using something like failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) to mistake proof these elements of their design. And, I’ll bet that this gave them dozens of other ideas about what to look for and anticipate in their designs.

I doubt that AIG or any of the other financial institutions has done anything to prevent the kind of far reaching crisis they’ve created.

Trust is hard to gain and easy to lose. At least Toyota is trying to regain our trust. I doubt that AIG even cares.

Bad Root Cause Analysis and Countermeasures

After the recent terrorist attempt on Northwest Airlines Flight 253, some zealous, knee-jerk root cause analysis led to simple, easy-to-understand, wrong-headed countermeasures: passengers shouldn’t be able to get up during the last hour of any flight, anywhere.

Punishing millions of passengers to protect against a few extremists is a bad countermeasure stemming from bad root cause analysis. Random screenings of elderly women who have had knee replacement surgery or young children, a sampling technique, also seems to be silly.

Root cause analysis should get to the root of the problem: Why was a known extremist allowed to board any flight, anywhere?

After some investigation, it appears that the intelligence community knew about the problem, but just failed to put his name on the no-fly list. Duh! We can invest in expensive, invasive, whole-body scanners or just automate updates to the watch and no-fly lists.

It’s clear that TSA has become trapped in a visual scanning mindset. This requires the “inspector” to catch all of the “defects,” but humans make at least six mistakes a day.

Businesses do this as well, they become trapped in one way of solving a problem which usually costs more money and takes more people. Often, however, the problem can be solved inexpensively by shifting to another way of looking at the problem.

As the inventive procedures of TRIZ suggest, perhaps we could find a safe airborne catalyst that would cause an odor or color change when it interacts with known explosives. Maybe we could add screening technologies from some other physical field or method (i.e., olfactory). If dogs can do it, why can’t we?

(Where did I get this idea? In a related incident, J&J recalled Tylenol Arthritis Caplets that interacted with chemicals used in packaging and transportation pallets to create a moldy, musty, mildew-like odor that caused nausea, stomach pain, vomiting and diarrhea.)

Let’s imagine the Ideal Final Result (IFR). A good countermeasure would be simple, inexpensive and minimize the impact on travelers while detecting 100% of dangerous people, materials and weapons. I know it’s a tall order, but that’s how innovation happens.

Businesses should imagine the Ideal Final Result before coming up with knee-jerk countermeasures to perceived problems. When I worked in the phone company, wait times in the call center ranged up to 30 minutes at times. Someone decided that a better call director technology would solve the problem. They spent $12 million upgrading the call director and wait times didn’t change by a nanosecond.

At the time, 51% of all calls were for repair. Truth was, but no one wanted to explore it, that we needed less repair; less repair would have meant fewer calls. We never did get to the “root cause.”

Everyone from the smallest small business to the federal government needs to get better at root cause analysis and countermeasures. All you have to do is ask “Why?” five times (fishbone diagram); imagine the IFR; and implement countermeasures that prevent the problem as inexpensively and effectively as possible.

Six Sigma – Aberdeen

An Aberdeen Group study shows that:

• Six Sigma companies are twice as likely to be top performers with 19% improvement in profit margins and a 43% improvement in quality in the first two years.  Low hanging fruit indeed!
• Lean Six Sigma is “the most successful approach to business improvement” says the study.

Use Lean to reduce delay. Every 15 minutes per hour reduction in delay results in 20% improvement in profit margins.

Use Six Sigma to reduce defects. 4% of business processes (one step out of 25) produce over 50% of the defects, deviation and lost profit.

With laser focus on delay, defects, and deviation, it shouldn’t take long to dramatically cut costs and boost profits by plugging these leaks in your cash flow.