Figuring out what you should focus on when striving towards workflow improvements can be a challenging task, especially if this is your first time going down this road. It doesn't have to be hard and in today's post we'll cover some of the more common things to focus on to get you started.
One of the first and easiest items to focus on are parts of your workflow that are highly repetitive. These steps can often bog down your workflow as you retread the same things over and over. Maybe there's a different or better way of doing these steps? Or maybe it's just a matter of reordering the repeated steps, or clustering them together, to gain efficiencies. Imagine painting a room in your home where every time you got a brush or roller soiled, you immediately washed it. Painting the room would quickly be a very slow process. But most everyone paints in the preferred workflow where you combine cleaning all your tools toward the very end of the project. In this example, it's clear to see the best way to do something, but some workflows aren't so readily apparent and you may need to systematically find areas of repetition and determine what can be done to make them more efficient.
Another item to focus on in your quest for workflow improvements are areas where the workflow might have quality issues. Maybe you're screen printing t-shirts and towards the tail end of the job, the ink isn't quite right. Either you end up with some shirts of lesser quality or you end up needing to scrap them and print new ones. In either case, this ends up a being a quality issue. In this example, it's worthwhile to try and determine what is causing the quality issue and what can be improved. Maybe there's not enough ink being used or maybe the squeegees aren't being fully cleaned. Regardless, pinpointing the root cause is your first step on the road to improved quality followed up by changes for improvement.
For the rest of the items, we'll be covering more "big picture" related items, the first of which is effort. If something in your workflow is extremely high effort, either in the number of steps, time to complete the step or simply something that takes a lot of physical or mental work, it's in your best interest to dive deep and see if you can make improvements. Finding solutions might not be easy, but depending upon how substantial the task, you could quickly start receiving dividends. For example after facilitating various meetings, you're finding that you're spending substantial time collecting your thoughts, organizing your notes and sending out the minutes. Improving this single aspect of the meeting workflow will free you up for other work thereby improving your overall productivity.
Along these lines, and almost the other side of the coin, isn't the labor side of things, but the financial. If a large step is extremely expensive to perform, maybe in labor costs, maybe in materials or potentially for some other reason, having workflow improvements to drive these costs down can be very substantial. And just like with improving overall effort, driving costs down in large steps may not be the easiest improvement to make, but it could lead to game changing results. Let's say the fleet of vehicles your employees are using for work are always breaking down, causing customer delays and substantial impact to your business. You make the workflow improvement of repairing and performing vehicle maintenance proactively, nearly eliminating all downtime during business hours thereby resulting in substantial savings.
The last item for workflow improvements is going to be the least tangible but potentially the most important, human suffering. Maybe you have one or more tasks that no one wants to do because they're difficult, there some intangible costs or they're tasks that never get rewarded. By changing these tasks, you'll potentially help morale or potentially have other benefits such as improved quality or a reduction of costs. If a task is extremely difficult, are there ways of making it easier or breaking it into chunks? Or maybe the task involves the risk of ink on clothes so everyone hates doing the task as they're always a mess when they're done. Maybe some shop aprons or other protective gear would go a long way to make the task more palatable to those doing the work. If the task is hard to get right and no one seldom does, which results in lots of negative by leadership, maybe the paradigm should change. Maybe it should be acknowledged that the task is indeed difficult to do and instead of punishing workers, those who are able to perform it correctly, get heavily rewarded.
At the end of the day, there's lots of different ways to tackling workflow improvements. These are just a handful of the more common ways in order to jumpstart your efforts. And remember that you don't have to build Rome in a day but instead you should be seeking long term continuous improvement.