Briefly about Lean on the example of pizza delivery
In this article I will share the main ideas that I learned from the Lean Management training, which took place in mid-December in St. Petersburg. I hope this article will be useful to those who just want to know what Lean is, as well as those who have already heard something about Lean and want to get a general idea of it.
Because Lean's ideas are applicable to the functioning of various queuing systems , I will analyze them using the example of a pizza delivery company.
But first, briefly about the training. He was led by Francois Bachmann, an agile / lean coach from Europe. I met him at agileee in Kiev. We corresponded for some time, and then I invited him to read a seminar in our city of St. Petersburg. Thanks ScrumTrekwho undertook the organization of the training. Well, without Tanya Vasilyeva, this idea simply could not be realized.
Thanks to Francois for the training. Francois has a very sound outlook on things and a vast Lean erudition. He easily finds application for Lean ideas wherever you are: at the airport, in traffic jams, in line at a store or cafe. It seems that after the training I also became infected with this.
In general, Lean grew out of production management practices practiced at Toyota plants (TPS, aka Toyota Production System). In the late 60s, American automakers (Ford, GeneralMotor, Crysler) unexpectedly felt strong competition from Japanese automobile manufacturers, who offered the American buyer cheaper and, moreover, better cars. What was their secret? If you believe the sources, Mr. Deming , an American mathematician who played a mathematical apparatus under the idea of quality control , played a significant role here . Japanese manufacturers took his ideas and emphasized the quality and improvement of the entire production process (including the kaizen philosophy, which is now even used by confectioneries) You may have read books about Toyota or heard stories about how any worker at Toyota can stop the entire conveyor if it finds an oil stain on the floor of the workshop. This is not easy - Lean says that quality cannot be achieved without reflecting on the process. The fact that Lean has much in common with agile and scrum is not surprising. The following simple picture should put things in their place:
One of the basic concepts in Lean is value . Intuitively, value is what makes your customers eyes burn and ultimately brings money to your company.
For Toyota, these are sold cars, and in our example, sold pizzas.
As experience shows, sometimes it is not out of place to synchronize an understanding of the value produced within a team (company). Swan, crayfish and pike understood the value differently, so Lean did not go with them.
It is clear that value is formed in stages. First, the operator accepts the order from the customer. Then he passes it to the cooks. They prepare pizzas and pass them to the peddler, who delivers them to the customer and accepts payment. Each step adds value to the result.
As I said, Lean deals with queuing systems. And they all work with the flow of applications. This can be a stream of cars on the highway, a stream of customers in a store, a stream of product requirements. We will consider the flow of pizza orders.
So go ahead! Let's take a look at pizza delivery from the Lean perspective. To increase the profitability of the business, we need to increase productivity, i.e. process more orders per day (assuming there is room for growth). This can be achieved by various methods. For example, increase staff. But wise Japanese people (as well as common sense) say that you need to start the path to real efficiency by reducing the processing time of the order. Those. with tuning system.
Where to begin? Buy advanced quick kneading equipment? Or invest in a navigator to a carrier? In order not to fall into microoptimization, we will draw up a simple scheme, which in Lean is called a value stream map. For simplicity, we will assume that we are considering a “typical” order.
Total time of order service took 1 hour 4 minutes.
In the diagram, we immediately separate the phases that contribute value from the non-beneficial ones. Clearly, steps 2 and 6 fall into the second category. By eliminating them, it would be possible to reduce the processing time of the order by 25 minutes! Lean has a special term for ... time and effort spent - waste . In short, the loss can be safely made out as the Nnu amount thrown to the wind.
Having such a picture, it becomes clear which steps to optimize. Waste should be disposed of completely. It hardly makes sense to start by optimizing the order acceptance phase. But reducing the delivery time from 25 to 15 minutes (for example, reseeding on a motorcycle) is an achievement.
What's next? You need to monitor how the order queues and order service time behave when you make changes. Tell the client with good accuracy how long the pizza will be delivered. Understand in which case it makes sense to stop accepting orders, because their processing time will be too long. A lot of interesting!
In conclusion, I will give a classification of losses. Although the Japanese made it for the assembly process of the car, the classification is perfect for pizza delivery and software development.
It was easier for me to remember the names of the losses in the English version (the first letters make up the word downtime):
We will analyze them with examples.
So to summarize.
Lean is a look at things that helps to see problems in the process and solve them using practices and tools (value stream mapping, gemba, kanban, scrum).
Lean is a philosophy of continuous improvement at all levels of the organization (kaizen, 5S).
I hope reading the article has not become a waste for you.
Because Lean's ideas are applicable to the functioning of various queuing systems , I will analyze them using the example of a pizza delivery company.
But first, briefly about the training. He was led by Francois Bachmann, an agile / lean coach from Europe. I met him at agileee in Kiev. We corresponded for some time, and then I invited him to read a seminar in our city of St. Petersburg. Thanks ScrumTrekwho undertook the organization of the training. Well, without Tanya Vasilyeva, this idea simply could not be realized.
Thanks to Francois for the training. Francois has a very sound outlook on things and a vast Lean erudition. He easily finds application for Lean ideas wherever you are: at the airport, in traffic jams, in line at a store or cafe. It seems that after the training I also became infected with this.
In general, Lean grew out of production management practices practiced at Toyota plants (TPS, aka Toyota Production System). In the late 60s, American automakers (Ford, GeneralMotor, Crysler) unexpectedly felt strong competition from Japanese automobile manufacturers, who offered the American buyer cheaper and, moreover, better cars. What was their secret? If you believe the sources, Mr. Deming , an American mathematician who played a mathematical apparatus under the idea of quality control , played a significant role here . Japanese manufacturers took his ideas and emphasized the quality and improvement of the entire production process (including the kaizen philosophy, which is now even used by confectioneries) You may have read books about Toyota or heard stories about how any worker at Toyota can stop the entire conveyor if it finds an oil stain on the floor of the workshop. This is not easy - Lean says that quality cannot be achieved without reflecting on the process. The fact that Lean has much in common with agile and scrum is not surprising. The following simple picture should put things in their place:
One of the basic concepts in Lean is value . Intuitively, value is what makes your customers eyes burn and ultimately brings money to your company.
For Toyota, these are sold cars, and in our example, sold pizzas.
As experience shows, sometimes it is not out of place to synchronize an understanding of the value produced within a team (company). Swan, crayfish and pike understood the value differently, so Lean did not go with them.
It is clear that value is formed in stages. First, the operator accepts the order from the customer. Then he passes it to the cooks. They prepare pizzas and pass them to the peddler, who delivers them to the customer and accepts payment. Each step adds value to the result.
As I said, Lean deals with queuing systems. And they all work with the flow of applications. This can be a stream of cars on the highway, a stream of customers in a store, a stream of product requirements. We will consider the flow of pizza orders.
So go ahead! Let's take a look at pizza delivery from the Lean perspective. To increase the profitability of the business, we need to increase productivity, i.e. process more orders per day (assuming there is room for growth). This can be achieved by various methods. For example, increase staff. But wise Japanese people (as well as common sense) say that you need to start the path to real efficiency by reducing the processing time of the order. Those. with tuning system.
Where to begin? Buy advanced quick kneading equipment? Or invest in a navigator to a carrier? In order not to fall into microoptimization, we will draw up a simple scheme, which in Lean is called a value stream map. For simplicity, we will assume that we are considering a “typical” order.
- Reception of the order took 4 minutes.
- After 10 minutes, the order waited for the cook to finish serving the previous order.
- It took 5 minutes to prepare and roll out the dough.
- 7 minutes - to cook the ingredients.
- For 10 minutes the pizza was in the oven.
- 15 minutes of pizza waiting for the peddler.
- 25 minutes the peddler traveled around the city to the client.
- 3 minutes took the process of payment of the order.
Total time of order service took 1 hour 4 minutes.
In the diagram, we immediately separate the phases that contribute value from the non-beneficial ones. Clearly, steps 2 and 6 fall into the second category. By eliminating them, it would be possible to reduce the processing time of the order by 25 minutes! Lean has a special term for ... time and effort spent - waste . In short, the loss can be safely made out as the Nnu amount thrown to the wind.
Having such a picture, it becomes clear which steps to optimize. Waste should be disposed of completely. It hardly makes sense to start by optimizing the order acceptance phase. But reducing the delivery time from 25 to 15 minutes (for example, reseeding on a motorcycle) is an achievement.
What's next? You need to monitor how the order queues and order service time behave when you make changes. Tell the client with good accuracy how long the pizza will be delivered. Understand in which case it makes sense to stop accepting orders, because their processing time will be too long. A lot of interesting!
In conclusion, I will give a classification of losses. Although the Japanese made it for the assembly process of the car, the classification is perfect for pizza delivery and software development.
It was easier for me to remember the names of the losses in the English version (the first letters make up the word downtime):
- Defect
- Overproduction
- Waiting
- Not using employees creativity
- Transport
- Inventory
- Motion
- Extra processing
We will analyze them with examples.
- With defects everything is clear. Cold pizza is a bug. A normal client will simply refuse it.
- Overproduction is when we have produced more pizzas than we can sell. But hardly anyone will do this. Therefore, another example is when we decided to make a surprise and present Hawaiian pizza “as a gift”
- Loss of waiting, we looked.
- If we do not use the talents of employees, we lose! This is a topic for a separate article. In the meantime, it’s so clear that if the chef comes up with a suggestion on how to diversify the menu, and the delivery man how to speed up delivery (for example, transfer to a motorcycle), it makes sense to listen to them.
- Transport is interesting not only in the literal sense. Information transfer is also a transport. Suppose your cook gets sick and is replaced by a new inexperienced person. Once it was with me in the clinic, the ENT examined me following the instructions on the phone.
- Inventory is the cost of storage and accounting. For example, vegetables, if we bought them for the future. Accounting for simultaneously processed orders from customers is also an inventory. A large number of work in progress orders are at the expense of context switching. This is where kanban techniques that limit work in progress come to the rescue.
- Unnecessary movements can often be avoided by arranging the workplace in the right way. In addition, having refined the movement, you can increase productivity many times. Professionals know this, exceeding the speed of cutting products of mere mortals by an order of magnitude. You can avoid unnecessary motion following the rules of 5S.
- Suppose we decided to please our customers and cut the ham in the shape of snowflakes. If this is not our competitive advantage, we have lost on extra processing.
So to summarize.
Lean is a look at things that helps to see problems in the process and solve them using practices and tools (value stream mapping, gemba, kanban, scrum).
Lean is a philosophy of continuous improvement at all levels of the organization (kaizen, 5S).
I hope reading the article has not become a waste for you.