Marshall Atkinson So, I'm sure some of the listeners are thinking to themselves, “Well, a lot of the routes to this are probably in Japanese business.” And there are terms like "Muda" and "Going to Gemba", and ties on and that really doesn't make sense to them maybe. And they just want to improve a process like in their screen room or in their receiving department. So, where would you start somebody on this type of journey? What would you have them do? Ali Banholzer So the very first thing we did was we sat down with our team, and we brainstorm. And all I did was ask the question: "What's broken? What's broken in our processes?” And I left it at that -- I didn't define it, I didn't try to pigeonhole them. What's broken? And we brainstorm and literally, we went around there several different techniques for brainstorming. But my favorite is to literally go around taking turns round-robin. So you start with the first person and they say it. And there's somebody just writing it on a whiteboard, or a big easel board, you know, whatever, somebody is recording it. And you just keep going around and around and around. And the reason I like that method is that if you have somebody who is a powerful thinker, an over talker, or anything this way in your business -- if you just leave it as a free-for-all, they're going to monopolize the brainstorming session. And if you have somebody that's an introvert or maybe newer on the staff, they're never going to speak up, but they probably got really great ideas. So we go around one at a time, you can only say one idea at a time. And if you have nothing, you just say pass, and you can pass to the next person. We write down all of those ideas, and then we have everybody vote on them for what they think is the most egregious or most important, or what they think will have the most impact to fix. And then I as a business owner, kind of look at them from a perspective of cost, cost to fix it, impact to profits, timeline, things, and I put my critical thinking as the owner on it, and then we select one. Once that one concept, let's take your receiving concept, to streamline receiving as the concept. Now we're going to define it -- and that's the D. So when you're defining it, you're going to have a project charter. And your project charter is going to very clearly, in one or two sentences, state exactly what the problem is. You're going to state the business scope, so how it impacts the business. You're going to define what 'not' how you're going to fix it, but what the goal is. So, is it to increase profits by 3%? Is it to make receiving, you're able to do all of your receiving within an hour? Is that you know -- depending on the size of your shop, whatever that goal is that you're trying to get to you're going to define the goal. You're going to define your internal stakeholders, food impacts within your company, you're going to define your external stakeholders. Is it your customers by doing this -- are you decreasing your costs, so maybe your customers receive their goods faster? Or maybe you can decrease your prices? So those that would be external stakeholders? Ali Banholzer And then one of the most important parts of your project charter is the scope. And the reason why that is important is that on any project, it's very easy to get scope creep to start going. "Oh well, if we fix this, it's a domino effect. Now we're going to fix this, this, this, and this." Now your project's never done and everybody gets burned out. So you want to define the scope, we are only solving this problem. And if we come up with other things that need to be fixed while we're defined, while we're fixing this one; we will put that over here in a bucket, so to say, for future ideas that we're going to fix next. But we're not going to touch that now, we are only fixing this problem. So once we have a really good definition, what the problem is, what the goal is, what the current state of it is, our stakeholders internal and
336
Made with FlippingBook - Online catalogs