If you are following me on Twitter, you might remember that Monday I sent out a series of tweets expressing why I feel the term “efficient” is often misused and abused in regard to business process performance.
This morning the most recent entry in my Lean Six Sigma news feed was the following Spokesman Review story:
City adds job to promote efficiency
Six Sigma overseer will cost $120,000
Staff writer, Jonathan Brunt, goes on to state
“As city leaders craft plans to lay off dozens of employees to meet an expected shortfall in next year’s budget, they decided Tuesday to create a new high-paying job responsible for overseeing ideas to save money.
The Spokane City Council approved the position – at a cost of about $120,000 a year in pay and benefits – that will promote government efficiency based on Lean Six Sigma, a business-efficiency program popularized by General Electric and other companies. “
My concern is that he describes Lean Six Sigma as a “business-efficiency program.”
What’s wrong with that description?
Lean Six Sigma is a systematic approach to identify, measure and reduce (if possible, eliminate) variation or waste in a process. The business system should operate to produce profit. If you are spending more than you are making you won’t have a business. After the non-value added activities are elimated or reduced the Lean methodology gives you the tools to then focus on adding value to process. Unfortunately some companies fail to understand this and bail before they get to this pivotal point. What people fail to realize that there is usually so much waste in the process that you forget to go back and add value later. This fallicy has led to layoffs being touted as Lean initiatives, which is far removed from the truth. I think Ron von Stekelenborg said it best this morning on Twitter.
@leanstekel Cost-cutting is like cutting into fat as well as muscles; lean only removes fat
I do find it refreshing that the Council voted 6-0 in favor of hiring a business process improvement manager.
How is the term “efficient” misused?
I think the term efficient is abused or misused when individuals neglect to quantify and define quality metrics. Unfortunately, some use the term and never qualify with relevance or a description. To give you an example you might think of a process such as an online checkout transaction.
The organization might have reviewed the process and determined that the current process frustrates an overwhelming majority of clients, citing too many clicks are required to complete transaction. The critical to quality metric should be defined as the number of page clicks required to complete checkout. So, if you improve the process such that it now requires one click checkout rather than six clicks. Then yes, that is a more efficient approach and a value to the customer. It’s relative to the process and can be expressed as a number.
Another example that comes to mind is that say a mobile phone manufacturer wants to reduce the complexity of assembly by reducing the number of unique components for a design. So instead of having one unique part for every digit and character on a phone, you may decide to develop on complete keypad. If you previously had 18 unique keys and the keypad drops you down to one unique component, then you reduced the number of unique components by 17.
So, again I would not describe this effort as just efficient. I have defined the metrics that are critical to quality and express the improvement in terms of the metric not blanket, vague statements like, “It’s more efficient”. Without a number, I’m not going to take your word for it that it’s more efficient.
Although, Brunt may have butchered the true meaning of what is Lean Six Sigma, he did a much better job of later citing in example of an efficiency improvement in the following statement,
“Danek said Six Sigma has already made the city more efficient, leading the city to streamline its approval process for contracts that don’t require City Council support from an average of 29 days to 10 days.”
During your next meeting or discussion, don’t let colleagues get away with labeling something as efficient without evidence. What is the ocular proof or is it just smoke and mirrors jargon?
I want to hear what you think. Leave a comment below. Do you think the term “efficient” is often misused and abused?
Welcome back to Lean Six Sigma Source! Thanks for your continued support.
Related posts:
Leave A Reply (No comments So Far)
The comments are closed.
No comments yet