Something for the Weekend - Mystery Flavour

I spotted a great example of LEAN practices this week that I really wanted to share. You may remember before Christmas I wrote about the importance of establishing flow in processes with the article of the Empire State Building, this isn't quite as impressive as building the world's tallest building in a year but its good thinking all the same!

Dum Dums are a US lollipop and they started creating a 'Mystery Flavour' in 2001. Basically Mystery Flavour is a by product that the manufacturing process creates as it switched from one 'actual' flavour to another. So you might get a mix of Cherry Cola and Banana split… quite good fun but also a really good example thinking differently.

Two things are noteworthy with this example:

• The downtime of shutting down production, cleaning and restarting would obviously cost more than the waste - so they've got the LEAN flow principles down correctly by leaving the machines running and increasing production.
• Creating value from waste that can’t be removed is an interesting thought. Do we have unavoidable waste that could used to better effect?

Sources & Credits
Thanks to Dum Dums and the Signal Vs Noise Blog reflections on programming by products

Something for the Weekend....Andrew Kim's Eco Friendly Coke Bottles

There's not much in the packaging world that you can point to as inspirational. That is except for Andrew Kim's concept design for Eco Friendly Coke Bottles.

3 million bottles of Coke are sold worldwide each day - so savings, environmental or otherwise certainly add up. Whilst the current design keeps (albeit quite loosely) the iconic Coke Bottle design, it is cylindrical which means that lots of air is shipped in each box. Andrew's square, stackable and collapsible design means that an additional 3949 bottles could be squeezed in per shipping container (321,856,830 bottles of Coke shipped per year with a zero carbon footprint!). And when you've finished with it, you can squash it down, so you can make fewer trips to the recycling centre.

Even if you don't design packaging I think there are lessons here for us all the same. Probably more on the operational design side than technical but the crux is the acceptance that the decisions we take with process design can have long term operational cost and environmental impacts.

• When improving processes removing as many physical items as possible (most likely paper / stationery in our world) will create savings - each item has a cost and a need for creation, processing, storage, transport & destruction.
• Follow the 'life' of any physical items and remove 'waste' wherever possible.
• Just because something is valuable (like the brand aspect of the Coke bottle shape) doesn't mean it’s the only way to do things - it's always worth the challenge!
• Perhaps the most simple of all, remember that 'waste' is multiplied by volume. Even small improvements can make huge differences in our high volume processes.

You can read a little more on the coke bottle here. Lets see if Coke adopt it!!

Something for the Weekend - Understanding vs. Listening

I recently read an article from the Harvard Business School on elBulli. elBulli is constantly recognised as the worlds best restaurant, people travel from all over the globe for the 5 hour dining experience. Not just that, each year, some 2 million hopeful diners vie to be one of the fifty customers he serves each evening for the six months that elBulli is open (8,000 a year). The HBS report (some of it plagiarised below) had a marketing lens but I'd like to look at the same case from a LEAN perspective.

There is much about the restaurant that's inefficient, as MBAs are quick to note:

• They should employer fewer staff - (1 waiter per customer is unnecessary!)
• They should source cheaper ingredients
• Less complex cooking techniques
• The restaurant is a 2 drive through mountains from Barcelona - they should relocate to Barcelona and perhaps open another branch in Madrid.
• They should make the booking process easier (2 year waiting in some cases!)

However the study also recognised that if you stripped all that away what you'd end up with is, McDonalds! (if you put that logic on steroids). I'm not saying McDonalds isn't popular but certainly wouldn't wait two years for one!

There are number of interesting points that relate to this, in particular in understanding what motivates seemingly irrational customer behaviour but I'd like to focus on is one point in practical relating to LEAN and its Voice of the Customer principles and the difference between listening to the customer and truly understanding the customer.

To summarise Chef Ferran Adria's comments in the report he believes that if you listen to the customer they'll tell you what they want based on what they know and they'll be happy with it. But it'll never be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I agree with sentiment, listening and delivering against expectations gives good service (Critical Success Factors) but GREAT customer service (enhancing features) is about something more, going above expectoration.

LEAN techniques, being grounded in manufacturing, are naturally efficiency based - I'm certainly a big LEAN advocate but I can't help reflecting on whether certain processes could risk being over-LEANed? Is an element of service orientated 'waste' acceptable if it provides a differentiator? Or should the processes and systems be slick and efficient and our people be the differentiating feature?

An interesting point to consider…

Full HBS report is available here