Lean Service Machine
Enviado por Kenmejia12 • 18 de Junio de 2012 • 2.140 Palabras (9 Páginas) • 561 Visitas
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initial application so that he or she could physically assemble the policy and send it to
the adviser. It was possible that employees would spend extra time assembling
policies, leaving teams idle downstream and delaying the flow of application
processing. JPF split the receiving team in half, assigning some of the employees to
assemble the policies while the rest continued to receive applications. The change
required no additional space, equipment, or people, but it eliminated confusion on the
part of employees about what they should be doing when, and it substantially reduced
delays and waste.
Setting a Common Tempo. The team further smoothed out work flow by applying
the concept of “takt” time. Takt, the heartbeat of lean operations, is derived from the
German word for musical meter. It refers to pacing work according to customer
demand. The team knew that to satisfy demand, New Business needed to process ten
applications per hour; the takt time was therefore one application every six minutes. A
worker producing at a slower rate would leave the next person in line temporarily idle
and would ultimately prevent the group from meeting customer demand. The lean -
team members timed each work element of the model cell, such as retrieving an
application from an in box and performing the keystrokes required to get an
application into the system. They established a baseline time for each element by
determining how quickly an untrained person could do it, then challenged employees
to make improvements and create shorter baseline times. As workers found ways to
cut unnecessary tasks, the lean team determined the minimum number of employees
required for completion of all steps.
Balancing Loads. Lean production systems are designed to balance work evenly
among employees. Although workers appreciate the fairness of this practice, its
greater value is that it eliminates unnecessary delays. JPF had always allocated
incoming applications first by distribution channel and then alphabetically at each
stage. An application from a customer named Burns would be allocated to the A –C
team even if another team was idle. In the model cell, the alphabetical method was
replaced by sequential allocation, so that every team received the same number of
applications. This enabled work to flow smoothly from one fully utilized employee to
the next without unnecessary delays.
Segregating Complexity. Anyone who has stood in line at a bank while a single teller
assisted a customer with a lengthy transaction understands this principle. The key to
successfully segregating complexity is to cluster tasks of similar levels of difficulty into
separate groups with their own performance goals. Thus the model cell eventually
divided into two groups, one handling cases that did not require a physician statement
and the other handling those that did. Once the separation was made, the turnaround
time for cases not needing a doctor’s statement fell by more than 80%.
Posting Performance Results. Following one of lean manufacturing’s best practices,
JPF displayed the cell’s hourly productivity rates along with the company’s
expectations. The numbers were posted on large white boards so that all employees
could see when and where—and therefore why—performance was suffering. The team
also set aside an area by the boards so that employees could meet quickly to discuss
ways of solving performance problems that arose. Not surprisingly, the boards made a
few people uneasy. Some workers feared that the posted results would be used to
assign blame and punish low performers. But as employees grew accustomed to the
ubiquitous boards, the displays became rallying points for celebrating successes and
encouraging the team to set new performance records. Employees understood that
they would be evaluated on and rewarded for objective results they could track
themselves—rather than by their bosses’ subjective observations.
Setting Performance Goals
To implement lean production, a company typically must overhaul the way it measures
costs, speed, and quality. Indeed, managers often find that many of their company ’s
favorite metrics actually inhibit productivity. For example, if the performance of call -
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center reps is measured by the length of an average phone call, the center may get a
lot of repeat calls because customers’ concerns are not being resolved the first time.
To get around this kind of problem, practitioners of lean production follow an
important principle: They always measure performance and productivity from the
customer’s perspective. For a call center, managers will usually measure the
percentage of customers whose issues are addressed in a single call.
Among the metrics JPF found it needed to change was processing time. The company
had traditionally measured the time from when an application arrived at the newbusiness
processing center to when the approved policy was printed and bound. JPF
switched to measuring the gap between when the application is mailed to the company
and when the adviser receives a completed policy, which is how its customers assess
the company’s speed. Customer-focused metrics of this kind helped erode the “My
work is all that matters” mind-set of JPF’s employees.
Another important principle of lean production is that shop -floor goals should be linked
to the metrics that are applied to the CEO’s performance. Toyota calls this hoshin
kanri , or policy deployment, and it is the best way to align an organization’s activities
with its strategic objectives. At JPF, the metric for the CEO’s performance is the ratio
of the company ’s total acquisition expenses to the value of new paid premiums. The
cell’s productivity directly affects this measure—as productivity increases, the
acquisition expense eventually decreases. An employee inputting applications is
evaluated by the number of applications he or she inputs per hour, and the input
team’s manager is assessed on the hourly number of applications the team inputs. The
input manager’s boss, the New Business assistant vice president, is assessed according
to
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