Recently, as I was leaving an event late in the evening with my two sons, I remembered that my wife asked me to pick up a few supermarket items on the way home – the usual mid-week supermarket items – milk, eggs, bananas etc. Based on our timing, I knew that we would be cutting it fine to make it to our regular supermarket before it closed at 10 pm. So, being the productivity guy, I was trying to quickly figure out the optimal way to execute this challenge. I knew that I had two critical variables to consider, 1) time needed to arrive at the supermarket to get in through the doors before they closed; and 2) once I get in, the time needed to complete the shopping round, also before they closed the doors.
My preference was to make it to the regular supermarket close to home, as I am familiar with the layout. There, I can be super-efficient as my mind is at ease not having to figure out where things are. Familiarity is huge factor. I generally stick to the same brands to reduce the decision fatigue too. However, on this occasion it was unlikely that we would make it to our regular supermarket in time. Therefore, I was compelled to find an alternative supermarket on the way, with a slight detour.
I got in through doors with about 15 min to go – plenty of time for my need, I thought. However, frustration started building up soon as I was going through many aisles and even doing multiple laps at this unfamiliar supermarket to find a few items. It was definitely not as efficient and relaxing as shopping at my regular supermarket. I managed to get all the items in the end, but with angst that I don’t normally generate. I also walked away with a lot more things than I intended to buy – a behaviour that supermarkets thrive on – but that’s a different story.
That challenging shopping experience reminded me that the same thinking also applies to improving productivity in factories, based on a concept called the Glenday Sieve. The concept is mainly around how one schedules the range of products to be manufactured to gain through a statistical advantage and leveraging process familiarity for operators.
Ian Glenday, a British microbiologist in the 1970s later turned an industry lean expert, made a significant refinement to the well-known 80:20 rule, developed by economist and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto in the early 1900s. You may know this as the Pareto Principle. Pareto found that for most outcomes, 80% of consequences came from 20% causes (starting from his initial founding that 80% of Italian land was owned by 20% of the population- highlighting the existence of “the vital few”). Exploring Pareto principle, Glenday found that just 6% of the products accounted for 50% of the volume of sales. You may be rushing to analyse your product mix to see if this holds true for you as well. “So, what’s next?” I hear you ask.
Well, Glenday Sieve suggests that once you’ve identified this 6% of your products, then fix the production schedule to repeat regularly for these products – i.e. repeat it in a frequency such that it becomes a routine to the operators. Generally, high volume ‘cash-cow’ products tend to be within these 6% items. So, why not make a routine for your employees and specific shifts to master these products, so that they become familiar with the processing steps. A bit like my shopping at my regular supermarket efficiently as I know the layout (the sequence) – muscle memory!
I know start-up shifts, for those who operate on a ‘Mon-to-Fri’ kind of schedule, the first shift generally tends to be troublesome, especially if it had had maintenance work done over the weekend period. Then get one of the 6% products to start the cold line to provide some sort of familiarity for the operators. A line / factory is most unstable during start-ups or changeovers. So, if you can help your teams to carry out most tasks through muscle memory, it makes things a lot easier to get going quickly.
If you can nail the 6% of your products, then 50% of your sales should be delivered on budget or less, with expected quality or higher, and completed on time or earlier. You might think that this approach goes against the grain of being world-class. You might argue that any shift should be proficient to produce any product at any time to the same level of efficiencies. Yes, such factories do exist – I’ve seen them with my own eyes and have walk through them as well. If you are one of those, then well done! You fall into a small fraction of companies with such seamless production capability. The ground reality is most companies are not quite there yet and these approaches can help them to stabilise some of turbulence in productivity.
So, what regular patterns, sequences and cycles can you leverage to get higher efficiencies?
