What’s your ‘blue light’?

Kevin Rutherford recently shared with me an old post by Kevin Fox on The Theory of Constraints blog.

In the post KevinF talks about going into a factory that had an alleged capacity problem in the welding station and had orders building up in backlog. Kevin went to the factory thinking about the simplest indicator he could use to check at what capacity the welding station was actually operating — the plant manager had said it was operating at 93% capacity.

In the post, Kevin tells how he settled on measuring the amount of blue light being emitted from the welding activity as the key indicator. On his first visit he observed that blue light was only being emitted about 15% of the time, indicating that the welders were using only 15% of their time to do welding. Most of the time the welders were moving and preparing parts to be welded instead of actually welding. You can read the punchline in the original post…

Visualizing the work

Every organisation has bottlenecks like the welding station in its workflow. It’s also a result from the Theory of Constraints that improvement work done away from the primary bottleneck won’t improve the overall flow through the system — the chain is only as strong as its weakest link. With improvement at the primary bottleneck a new primary bottleneck will emerge.

Pascal van Cauwenberghe’s post on the “Five Focusing Steps” in action is a good summary of how to identify your primary bottleneck and organise your work more effectively, so I won’t say more on that other than to encourage you to read it.

My only addition is to suggest that once you’ve identified your primary bottleneck think about what your blue light is for that bottleneck. If you don’t already have something as obvious as a blue light could you design an equivalent into the work at the bottleneck? Clue: Kanban boards are a great way of doing this in an office setting.

I’m working in organisational transformation and service delivery at the moment and thinking about the bottlenecks that exist in such a setting and how to visualize work-in-progress as it flows through different parts of the system. I was struck by how powerful this blue light story is so thought I’d share it.

I’m also a sucker for a good workflow visualization so please let me know what your blue light moments are…

Also of interest

I’ve not tried it but the Bottleneck Game has been suggested as a good simulation of the 5 focussing steps if you’re so inclined.