Yesterday morning I had to go into the DMV (Department of Licensing here in Washington State) to renew my driver’s license. As I walked into the waiting room and saw the hundred and fifty or two hundred poor souls already lost in purgatory ahead of me, it reminded me of something that had happened years before.

Back when I worked for Genie Industries, I had to renew my license. As I was sitting in the waiting room, who should walk in, but the company’s owner. There I was, a brand new employee, sitting a few chairs down from the big boss. The DMV doesn’t play favorites.

But maybe it should. More on that later…

It dawned on me as I sat and counted that there were close to 20 of us in line for each and every window that was open. Seems like an awfully gross disregard for the value of the time of the taxpayers of the state of Washington. Each minute that ticked by cost over three hours of productivity for the crowd. In the hour and change that I waited from start to finish, I only talked to employees for about 3 minutes of value added work. So, in the time I was there, let’s say there was two hundred hours of lost productivity. In the eight plus hours that the office was opened, that amounts to about 1600 hours of lost time.

Now, I have no way of knowing if the hour I was there was representative of the typical wait, but I will say that there were still a lot of empty chairs. The branch was less than half full. That tells me that I may actually be being a bit generous in my guestimates. The chairs would not be there if they were not needed, at least some of the time.

So, let’s do the math. If the office is opened 6 days a week, with a few holidays, there is little under half a million hours of people’s butts in chairs per year in that branch. That’s the equivalent of having a staff of 230 people sitting in those chairs for a year. Doing nothing.

And what’s really amazing is that those numbers are for just one branch of the DMV. If I counted correctly, there are 58 offices in Washington State. Now I don’t know how big or busy they are compared to the location I was in. But if they were anywhere close, that could mean that somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 people worth of productivity is being involuntarily squandered. In one state. Remember, there are 50 in the US. I shudder to think that at any given point in time somewhere in the neighborhood of half a million people are sitting in DMV offices scattered throughout the country. For reference, McDonald’s employed 385,000 people in 2011. Imagine if every one of their employees from around the world spent their entire shift for a year sitting in a chair in the restaurant doing nothing. Add in a hundred thousand of their closest friends, and that’s still less waste than the we could potentially be talking about at the DMV.

Now, the median household income in the US is about $50K, but not every household has two people employed, and some have driving aged kids. Let’s say $30K for the average wage of a person sitting in those seats. At that salary, the time spent sitting in those seats would cost the US…$15 BILLION PER YEAR!

In truth, I suspect that my logic is based on some faulty assumptions that come from using a sample size of one. The office I was in could have been big, or poorly run. Some of the thousands of offices might be rather empty, and I might have been there at a busy time. Plus, my salary numbers are just ‘thumb in the air’ guesses, and not everyone is actually employed. But even if I am off by a factor of ten, that is still a billion and a half bucks worth of time squandered annually. So it might just be all the US based day shift employees of McDonald’s sitting down for a year. The point is that even if I am way off, we are still talking about massive waste. Unfortunately, I don’t think I am off by that much, so the number is likely significantly north of that.

The first thought that came to mind when I was there was that the DMV could learn a lot from Disney. At the theme parks, you can sign up for a ‘Fastpass’ that takes you to the front of a line at a designated time slot. Imagine if the DMV had a system like that.

1. Go to the website.
2. Get a time. (Obviously, the slots would be limited to match capacity.)
3. Show up at that time.
4. Go to the front of the line.
5. Get your 3 minutes of value added work.
6. Go home.

I can’t imagine that there would be much programming needed for that. But even it was a significant project, the cost would have to come in cheaper than the $15 billion alternative. But the investment would only be made if the DMV actually respected their customers’ time. That’s really the point I am making with this article, in a rather lengthy fashion. In the real, non-governmental world, this situation doesn’t exist. People vote with their feet and leave. But, when there is only one government mandated show in town, you don’t have a choice.

I will say one thing here, though. I always feel for employees who are put in that position by their bosses. I only have to be around that angry throng once every five years. The employees have to, through not fault of their own, spend a couple thousand hours a year listening to people like me vent and stew and complain. It has to tear down a person’s spirit.

Let’s finish with one more little rant, while I am on the subject of the DMV. If you choose to hand out numbers, please consider the emotional impact of giving a person a number with 715 or 910 on it.

Now serving E107...

The fact that a number that large is needed doesn’t give one much confidence that there is a chance of being out the door any time soon.

In continuous improvement, you often have to go out and collect information from people. Sometimes it is from observations. Often, though, you will be speaking directly to people doing the process, and you will be asking them questions.

Keep in mind one important distinction. Interviews generally seek answers. Interrogations seek confessions. Don’t go into an interview with the intention of figuring out who is at fault for a problem. 

A hidden factory is the set of undocumented and unstaffed processes that are done in an organization.

When you dive into a process, you will often find two methods of doing it. The first is the documented method, or the one described by the operator as what he or she does. This is often the method that is used for timing, and ultimately for planning the capacity of an operation.

Then there is the second process. It is the one that is done without realizing it, or in response to specific problems. This second process flies under the radar, so seldom has any attention, and almost never has appropriate resources.

The big problem with hidden factories is that they are hard to see, hence the name. This means that they seldom get any continuous improvement focus on them. 

A gemba walk is a leadership process in which a manager walks through his or her areas of responsibility in order to gain a better understanding of how the operation is running. The term “gemba“ means “the real place” in Japanese. The level of structure of a gemba walk varies by the individual. They range from a simple walkthrough on up to a formal checklist containing specific things to look for.

Gemba walks should be a regular, recurring part of a leader’s personal standard work.

“Form, fit, and function” are most commonly discussed in relation to the design of an object, or when considering if a process is value added or not.

• Form: Form is the physical characteristics of the product. It includes things like shape, weight, color, material, etc.
• Fit: Fit is short for ‘fits intended application’. Alternatively, it may also reference whether the physical dimensions of a part fit into the product it was designed to go into.
• Function: Function is what the product actually does.

Economy of scale means that an organization is structured in such a way that as production volumes rise, per unit costs fall. In effect, this is a fancy of way to say ‘bigger is better’.

It is based on the idea that a product has two basic components to its cost, fixed and variable. Fixed costs stay constant as production fluctuates, and variable costs shift as production changes. The cost of a building, for example, stays constant regardless of whether zero units or a million units are produced inside of it. The spending on widgets that go into the Widgetron 2000, conversely, goes up and down with the ebb and flow of production.

(NOTE: Fixed costs are relevant only for specific production windows. Once capacity is exceeded, the infrastructure will need to grow.)

This means that companies with a lot of overhead need to produce more to cover their costs. One of the problems of that overhead is that it often reduces flexibility. A company that does not scale will lose far less money during slow times than a company that relies on a large, expensive infrastructure that scales well.

Consider the example of a lemonade stand. Fixed costs of the stand are likely relatively low. Rising and falling sales just means more overtime for the neighbors kids and a few more bags of sugar. There is little scaling, as the unit costs are independent of the production quantities.

But what if little Jimmy ran a bottling operation out of the garage? Let’s imatign that he invested in sophisticated equipment, maintenance contracts, and pays rent to his parents. He has a lot of costs to cover even if he doesn’t sell a single bottle of golden delight. But, at high volumes, he spreads his costs over thousands of bottles, meaning the costs above and beyond ingredients become minimal for each bottle. The bottling facility exhibits economy of scale.

When using drawers to store equipment, one expression stands out: Out of sight, out of mind. Things in a drawer tend to get piled up, misplaced, and forgotten about. Drawers take time to open and close, and slow down processes. They hide things.

Bottom line: Drawers are fine for storage, but they hinder 5S and flow in a production environment.