The hidden secret in Business Processes

I was contacted by a management team, this wasn't too long ago, I was talking to them and they had a need of hiring more engineers. It's a wonderful feeling, right, because you develop your business, you need more people and such. I love that myself.

Here's the thing though, they weren't really thinking about the possibilities of improving that specific area first. The problem that many companies face, I think, is that when it comes to business processes, they have never really mapped out the process to fully understand the losses they have. They're often organized in about ease of management, so people who have the same type of job title and job function report to the same manager sit together and they are most likely never working together with any person close to them. So they always have to walk around and find people in the organization that they actually work within the process.

This company specifically, they had eight engineers. They needed to up the level of new products coming into their organization and they were looking at maybe hiring two more people. Here's what we did. We mapped out the process. We understood where the losses were. We saw that the lead time was a little bit over 400 days to implement a totally new product. We worked together with the team to reduce the lead time by doing a certain number of activities that takes away the time between all the tasks you do, so the lead time went down to approximately 200 days, a 50% reduction in Lead time.

What if this is a situation that you could have as well? What if you could reduce your lead time with 50%, what would that actually mean? In the previous 400 days, you could introduce one product. You can now do it in 200 days. That means that you have basically doubled your capacity, right? You can develop two products in 400 days. To me, that will be a double capacity. They didn't have to hire any engineers. They already had them in house. They increased their production or output 100% without adding any people. Imagine, I'm just saying imagine if that is true fro you as well. What would that mean for your organization?

Being a leader, a modern leader, means that you constantly look for how the organization and it's individuals can develop. Having a structured approach like this will lead to success, I'm sure of it. You can do it too, dream about it, smell it taste it...it's called success.

Johan Majlov, CEO Lean Dimensions International

LetsDoIt@askldi.com