Reflection – Visualization

Challenge

I’m part of a process improvement team within our company to help various departments with work  flow and efficiency. Our usual approach to each task is to identify issue(s) and work out a potential  solution. Once the solution is validated and approved, we will move forward with Plan, Do, Check, Act  (PDCA) cycle for a 3 months period. Often times our biggest challenges in this approach are to find out  the root cause(s) of the issue(s) and to come up with effective corrective measures.

Take one recent task as an example: for each statutory holiday, our distribution team needs to put  together a special delivery schedule for over 6000 customers and communicate it with all relevant  parties – customers, order desk, sales representatives etc. The holiday schedule process takes a lot of  time and resources. And often times the accuracy of the information on the schedule is to be desired.  Considering how often this process is repeated during the course of the year, it’s evident that the  process needs to be revamped.

Selection

To identify what caused the inefficiency and inaccuracy of holiday schedule process, we decided to use  visualization to illustrate the current process, which in turn should lead us to problems as well as root  causes.  Other design thinking tools were also considered but passed over for following reasons:  not  enough data/information for mind mapping; no solution yet to test out using learning launch; lack of  emotional connection for storytelling given the nature of this particular challenge.

Application

We set up a half day workshop with key players from all involved departments. Together we used post-it  notes to map out each step of the current process on the wall. Once the process mapping was  completed, we started to add in pertinent details to each step: responsible person; timeline; roadblocks;  error occurrence; frequency and severity of errors etc.

*The picture below is for illustration purpose only, NOT actual work conducted.

When everything we could think of was laid out, we did a quick recap on each step to make sure we all  had the same understanding. Then we took turns to point out what worked what didn’t, what seemed  redundant or posed unreasonable timeline. Each participant was also encouraged to identify areas for

improvement in the current process map. All the findings were then added back on to the map using  color coded post-it notes: green for “Good”; purple for “Can be improved”; red for “Requires corrective  measure”. Once this part was completed, the issues and problems immediately stood out – steps  covered with most red post-it notes were the areas we needed to focus on. The team agreed on issues  and root causes fairly easily at this point.

The same process was used again to create future process map. Corrective measures and  improved/streamline work flow were incorporated and mapped out again under color post-it notes. At  the end of the half day workshop, we had a workable solution ready to be implemented.

Insight

Visualization really helps illustrate problematic areas in the work flow process. Not only it flags areas  that need attention, it also reveals redundancy and obsolete requirement. For example, our current  process mandates three weeks lead time for one major grocery chain as opposed to the two weeks for  the rest of our customers. This special requirement caused work duplication and was prone to errors as  late changes in schedule sometimes didn’t get communicated back to the customers in time. We  discovered that the additional lead time requirement was put in place by our Sales team. They need the  extra week to convert our holiday schedule to a format that can be uploaded to the customer’s system.  Since our proposed process would be able to handle the format conversion simultaneously, this  additional week would no longer be needed.

Approach

Process mapping is a great visualization tool to navigate through some seemingly complicated work  flow, especially when the work flow involved multiple layers of process and multiple teams. It’s easy to  be overly focused in one’s own area of responsibility and to lose sight of the bigger picture. Future  process mapping should of course include all pertinent details. However in order to keep priorities in  check, it’s equally important to remind participants to zoom out on the map periodically to examine the  complete picture.

