Simple and Easy Processes

In the last post I commented on Ron Popeil’s product development approach – to make the product easy to demonstrate drives making it easy to use, which creates more value for the customer.

Let’s take the same thinking back to your internal customers.

What if, rather than just writing a procedure, you had to go and demonstrate it to the people who had to follow it? What if you had to demonstrate it well enough that they saw the benefit of doing it that way, and could demonstrate it back to you to confirm that they understood it? If you broke down the work and organized it to be easy to demonstrate and teach, would it look any different? (Hmmm. TWI Job Instruction actually sounds a lot like this.) Would you still ask “Why didn’t they just follow the procedure?”

Look at the information displays and the controls on your equipment. Do they provide total transparency that things are working? Or do they abstract and obscure reality in some way? Can your internal customer be sure things are going as expected?

Do controls give clear feedback that they are being set correctly? Are sequences of operations readily apparent?

How many “blinking 12:00” situations do you have out there on your shop floor – things that have been put into place, but nobody uses because nobody can really figure it out?

Come back to the design of the product itself. Is the manufacturing and assembly process apparent, obvious, and as simple as you can make it? Would it be designed differently if you had to demonstrate how to fabricate and assemble it?

How about your administrative processes? I recall, many years ago, a “process documentation process” being taught. In the class they were using “baking cookies” as a demonstration example. Yet the instructors, who presumably were experts, actually struggled trying to show how this works. This “process” was far less clear than they had thought it was when they had simply thought through it. “It did not work on TV.”

Look at your computer programs and their user interfaces. What makes sense to a programmer rarely makes sense in actual use. Watch over someone’s shoulder for a while. Could you easily demonstrate this process to someone else?

Ron Popeil cooks real chickens and real ribs in the production of his infomercials. He does not use contrived or carefully limited demonstration examples. As you look at your examples and exercises, how well do they stand up to the real world application? Can you go out to the shop floor and demonstrate your “product” in actual use?

This post is full of questions, not answers. I don’t have the answers. Only you (can) know how well your processes are engineered.

Design your production system (for product or service) as carefully as you would design the product or service itself.

One Reply to “Simple and Easy Processes”

  1. This and the linked post have many good points about the synergy between lean and user-centred design.
    5S has some very good ideas about making workplaces self-descriptive. However, I would be surprised if a single computer system or piece of automated machinery came anywhere near meeting 5S. There is huge potential here to improve user interface design.

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