by Chris Anderson
www.Bizmanualz.com
chris@bizmanualz.com
© 2005
Delays, we all encounter them everyday. But in
business terms, delays are one of the biggest causes of ineffectiveness,
inefficiencies, and poor performance. For example, delays in the
manufacturing cycle cause inventory turns to fall, driving the
cost of inventory up.
Do you realize that if you could reduce or eliminate
delays by 50% you could reduce the fluctuations in your business
by as much as 80%. Therefore finding and eliminating delays should
be a primary objective for business improvement.
Just what is a delay?
Webster’s dictionary defines a delay as:
to stop, detain, or hinder for a time; to move or act slowly;
to cause to be late or behind in movement or progress.
Synonyms include: retard, slow, slacken, detain,
put off, and postpone. As you can see, none of these are particularly
flattering terms for your business.
How do you eliminate business delays?
Most delays occur at transition points from one
process step to another. By reducing the number of transitions
or process steps we can significantly reduce delays. Research
has shown that providing equal capacity at all steps within the
process is the best way to eliminate delays.
Adding flexible capacity for potential changes
in demand at only one step will lead to increasing delays downstream
later in the process. Thus you should make every effort to design
in equal capacity at all steps within your processes to eliminate
delays in your business.
How do bottlenecks compare to delays?
A bottleneck is a type of delay where a process
step has less capacity at its input than is demanded. As such,
it determines the overall velocity or speed of the whole business.
Any changes made to improve individual steps of a process, without
addressing the bottleneck, are likely to fail to improve the business
at all. What you get instead is sub-optimization not business
improvement.
Start by analyzing your business using a process
map to identify your bottlenecks and delays. The aim is to identify
where the flow slows within your business. Note that the bottleneck
is not necessarily the step with the largest queue. Bottlenecks
frequently occur when many sources merge into a single narrow
channel.
What can you do about business bottlenecks?
* Eliminate bottleneck idle time.
* Put inspection steps before bottlenecks.
* Distribute work to non-bottleneck areas, even if it's less efficient.
* Look for more bottlenecks. Reducing one bottleneck may create
others.
What else can you do about business delays?
As odd as it seams, you can do nothing. Many
times when we act to fix something we don’t see any immediate
results and we don’t realize that there is a delay, so we
continue to take actions. Doing something makes us feel like we
are in control. But doing something, without understanding the
delay, can lead to overcorrection. Now your business results are
zig-zagging. Therefore, it’s critical to understand your
process delays, when to take action and when to just do nothing.
When in doubt, focus on understanding your business
first before changing it. After all, if you spend less time changing
things that don’t change the overall system’s performance,
then you will have more time to change the things that do improve
performance. In other words, think more, do less, achieve more.
The System Produces Your Business Results
The outcomes you receive from your business come
from the design of your business. One major cause of poor business
performance (waste) is delay. So we want to eliminate delays the
best we can but, first you must understand the delays before making
any changes (quantitatively measure them). If delays are caused
by bottlenecks then optimize the process (redesign) for bottlenecks.
You now have a step-by-step method for improving your business
in a continuous manner.
Learn more about business process design, implementation
and continuous improvement with a How to Create Well-Defined Processes
Class.
