Recent reading in batches

The benefits of batching the news.

The benefits of incrementalism.

The benefits of grocery shopping more frequently.

Visual management, kindergarten style

Toyota's lean operations system emphasizes making work and data visible inside the workplace. It part what's been meant by the term "visual management". It's an idea you can see in practice in any kindergarten. And no one has more fun with it than them!

I see batches: CVS Delivery

There's a CVS on my block that gets deliveries in a big batch once a week on Mondays. Here's today's. A fifty-five foot truck parks on the street and the trailer's lift loader drops pallet after pallet onto the sidewalk. It blocks the street for hours as people and hi-los wait for each other to pass and the crew sort the boxes to check them in.

Every other shop in my neighborhood gets these kinds of deliveries multiple times a week, some multiple times a day. The small batch deleveries take minutes, not hours, since they can be tossed off the back of a truck onto a hand cart and wheeled directly into the store to be checked in immediately by the regular crew, not a special Mondays-only check-in team.

These are CVS's operational problems, which are painful enough to contemplate. The deeper problem, to me, happens inside the shop with the customers. CVS's shelves always look half empty. That's because 50% of the time I visit the week is half done and the shelves are picked over, waiting till next Monday's delivery.

Bigger batches lead to more out of stocks. This is one of Lean's counter-intuitive learnings. Its remedy: order less. They key is to order less more frequently, so you can respond to demand. Do that and you'll be in stock more often.

Don't frequent deliveries cost more? Maybe, in some cases. (With all the extra equipment and check in time I see down the street each week at CVS I'm pretty sure the answer is "No" for them.) But ignore cost for a moment. More frequent deliveries mean items are in stock more often. That means you make more sales. In other words, more frequent deliveries increase sales. This lean thing is not just powerful for improving process and the bottom line, but for improving sales and the top line, too.

Randomness Helps

I never stop being amazed by small, counter-intuitive operations innovations. From a New Yorker article on Yoox, the online fashion site:

When clothes arrive at the warehouse...folded items are placed in black plastic storage bins that look like large milk crates. The crates are packed randomly—pants, shirts, and sweaters are mixed together willy-nilly. When an order comes through...it is placed on a conveyor belt that...delivers it to the correct wrapping station, which are manned by humans. Were items sorted with their like, the humans would have to search all of them to find the one matching the order, but since items are sorted randomly, it's easy to spot the right one. "Chaos is our friend," Guillot said.

I don't know how to use randomness like this at ZMO but maybe there's a way?

Education is a Push

In lean terminology, there are pushes and there are pulls. Pushes are bad and to be avoided. They're when you make something for a customer — or the next process in your sequence — regardless of whether it's needed. Pulls are good. They're when the customer — or the next process — asks for something and then you make it.

Classroom education is largely done as a push. The process usually pushes a class identical units of information — lectures, homework and reading — regardless of any individual's specific need. (Sometimes you get time for questions and answers, which is an example of pull.) Anyone who's dozed through a class knows push education can be boring as hell. And often not terribly effective.

Here's some interesting news about a school that's trying to make education a pull process,  one that responds to what the student needs when they need it. They are creating classes that are customized daily. It's an interesting experiment.