“gemba walk” (lean thinking term) to go to the actual place where value is added + “walkabout” (Australian aborigine) a short period of wandering bush life engaged as an occasional interruption of regular work
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In my last post “My Old Job Had 8% Value-Added Work” I described how depressing it can be to realize that much of the activity in a process does not really add value from the standpoint of the customer (in this case, the patient).
Here’s some follow-up information and observations on what the team did the remainder of the week:
This team is comprised of representatives from two organizations: 1) a blood center (supplier), and 2) a hospital that is the customer of the blood center. It’s hard enough to help people learn and apply lean concepts in one organization, and to do it across 2 organization is a bold experiment. From what I saw, I think they will be successful and this will be a great example of thinking an improving horizontally, across vertical silos with organizations as well as across 2 organizations.
The team spent time describing the current state as shown in these 2 photos (I could not fit it onto one photo):
The red dots indicated steps that did not add value, and the few green dots represented value-added steps. The team used the white slips of paper to go to gemba (where the work is actually done) and determine how long it really takes, what problems occur and how efficient the process is at this step (first-time throughput yield).
The team also described the many hand-offs (including information) in this hand-off chart:
The team then described what “ideal” would look like (no boundaries, no limitations, off into the future) and they came up with 2 ideal states that were pretty similar.
Some of the ideas were not that far fetched and are actually concepts that are currently in existence or being developed (artificial blood, chip identification, wireless communication).
The team could not stay in utopia, but described something in the future (a year away) that would be better than the present and work toward ideal.
As you can see from the last photo, the future looks better according to a number of measures.
The team then worked on some “if-then” statements or hypotheses (if we improve this, then we would expect these results).
Realizing that it was necessary to come up with some sort of prioritization, the team used a PICK chart which helps determine if an improvement idea is easy and high impact (has Potential), easy and low impact (Implement), hard and high impact (Consider) or hard and low impact (Kill or Kibosh).
This made the planning easier. Some became projects, others were designated as rapid improvement events and others were “just do its”. The planning calendar is shown below.
The team then got very specific about how they would go about these efforts developing these chartering documents.
So, this is impressive and important work. I’m encouraged and I’m sure the team is as well. I plan to keep tabs on the effort to see how it is going and share some of my own learnings and insights.
