The Return of the Dilshad

Our favourite Indian take-away, The Dilshad, had delivered tasty Tandoori and Balti dishes to our doorstep every weekend for years. The food was always excellent and the delivery took 45 minutes give or take 5 minutes. Then recently a competitor opened in a nearby town offering "express delivery". We were seduced by the thought of Indian food at the speed of light and so we tried it out. The food was good and the delivery outstanding - a staggering 15 minutes; in future we would definitely use the new service in town.

Then, after a period of time, we noticed the delivery seemed a bit ‘hit and miss’. Occasionally it would take 20 minutes instead of 15 and sometimes nearly 30 minutes. On one occasion, when we had friends joining us, we were really let down with the delivery taking nearly an hour and a quarter causing a fair amount of frustration. It was then that I realised that it wasn’t really speed of delivery that was paramount - it was consistency. Speed of delivery was an important second place.

The choice to return to the Dilshad was an easy one. At least we knew when to expect the delivery and could plan accordingly.

Parcel delivery services are another good example of variation causing not only frustration but waste too. How often have you wasted time waiting at home for a delivery from a service that wasn’t able to give an exact time, or offered am or pm as guidelines? Compare that with internet grocery delivery services that normally provide a window of half an hour or so.

And so it is in organisations - variation costs. Think of the frustration and waste in many finance functions caused by the huge variation in timeliness and quality of expenses claims!

The "6 Sigma" approach pioneered by companies such as GE and Motorola yielded millions of dollars in savings. This approach is becoming widespread with massive improvement coming about by focussing on tightening the way processes run so that variation, customer dissatisfaction and waste are drastically cut.

This weeks tips are some easy first steps you could take on the same journey:

1. Choose a process that you think is ripe for improvement
2. Find out what customers of the process expect. What would be outstanding from their point of view?
3. Measure how consistently you deliver - do you stack up with the ‘Dilshad 6 Sigma’ standards or is the range of outputs varied?
4. Ask your team to identify the root causes to variation and help them come up with some creative solutions that will fix the causes forever
5. Watch for improvement - a useful tool for this is Control Charts (e-mail me at trevor@kaizen-training.com if you would like to receive a one page summary of what these are and how to use them)
6. Celebrate your improvement - and look for the next process to improve.

If you would like to know more about the outstanding results we help clients get with process control and improvement, 6 Sigma, Kaizen programmes or any other aspect of process change, contact Trevor Durnford or Paul Wright at Kaizen on 01923 291618