Oftentimes in management, the way that we frame a problem will strongly influence what type of solutions that we're going to get. I have to confess that in most of these modules so far on responsiveness, I have framed everywhere where we had waiting customers, I have framed this as a waiting time problem. I took out my Tq formula, computed wait times, computed staffing levels, looked for opportunities to pool and to potentially re-shuffle or re-sequence the flow of customers. Consider the following example from rental car company Hertz. A couple of years ago, Hertz was struggling with long waiting times at airport locations where customers picked up cars, where they had previously reserved over the internet. Now, one way of looking at this problem is, asking for how much capacity do we need at these airport locations? Hertz, however, was more creative, they realized that there was a broader, more general solution than just optimal capacity. Instead of optimizing the current process, they changed it and just got rid of checking in at the airport altogether. Instead, the idea was, customers could go directly to the car, and pick it up. In this session, we'll talk about some of the broader approaches of redesigning, most often service processes but responsiveness issues in general, of looking for solutions beyond just queuing analysis. Instead of looking at the resource as an inventory and front of this resource. In this session, we're going to take a slightly different perspective, the perspective of the customer. Consider once again, our example of the physician's practice. Now, we've looked at the utilization of the doctor, and how that can drive the waiting time in front of the practice. But how does a patient experience the encounter with the doctor? What's important to remember is that the patient doesn't live in the practice. For the patient seeing a doctor means, getting ready, Driving to the practice, finding a parking slot, Getting up to the practice, checking in, you typically get your vital signs taken and have to fill out one of these forms, then finally, you're allowed to start the waiting time. Now, you have the waiting time where as all the Tq type of analytics that we talked about, and then, finally, you're going to see the doctor. Typical primary care appointments range between fifteen and 30 minutes. But after that, the whole thing goes backwards. You have to check out, You have to potentially get some labs done, you have to go to your car, and you drive home. So, the waiting time here, say, for the sake of argument, something between 30 minutes and an hour, is really only a small part of the problem. If anything, it is a tip of the iceberg. To really understand improvement opportunities, it's important that we look at this entire process end-to-end. We notice that beyond the waiting time, there are a set of activities that are really required to get to value add, Mainly the time of the doctor. But they are not adding value by themselves. Getting to the practice is important. But after all, not value add time. The usual diagnostic measure to compute is the ratio between the total value add time. In our case here, twenty minutes. And the total time in the process, this is our good old friend the flow time T and often times you noticed that this number is dramatically less than five to ten%.. The analysis I just showed you is the basic idea behind value stream mapping. Okay, there are a gazillion other words for the same idea such as process mapping and service blueprints, but all of them boil down to basically mapping out over time, what type of things have to happen to the customer to be served. We then take the timeline and break it up to value add activities and those activities that are not value add or waiting for the customer. Recently, I came across a technique by a French fellow named Yves Pigneur that is a quite elegant and visual way of mapping out the customer journey. It separates the things that the customer does into customer actions, and onstage action, between our organization providing the service and the customer. It also lists the things that we, as a service provider, has to do. Again, onstage action and backstage action. Things that we can do when the customer is not there. Think about the process of applying for a mortgage by going to a mortgage bank. Imagine, this is a traditional retail outlet, and so the process starts by us going to the branch. This is a customer action. Once we talk to the agent, and the agent interviews us and collects some basic information, this is happening onstage. We talk with the organization, with the bank, and so both of us are investing in this process. Then there are things that we have to do that cost us as a bank money, but they're not requiring any effort from the customer's perspective. If you go through the classic mortgage approval process, You typically go through a three, four, five rounds of reaching out to the customer for additional data. Again, it's important to remember that, that might not cost us a lot of money, but it costs customer effort. I like this way of mapping out the process, and by showing the different types of customer actions and our actions because it's really a good starting point for innovating and thinking about alternative process designs. Let me give you a couple of examples. Here are seven ideas I want you to have in mind as you're redesigning the process. All of them go beyond the simple question of how much capacity should I add to reduce waiting time? The first idea is trying to move work off the stage. This is what's just happening when you're checking in for your flight the night before at home. That's much more comfortable than doing it at the terminal. So, moving work offstage is often a good idea. Second, always ask yourself, can you reduce the customer actions. Last time, at least I have to, I went to my doctor, I had to once again fill out all of my medical history, my name, and everything. You would think that after many years of service, they have just this information somewhere in their computer. After all, I also had an appointment. So why exactly did I have to fill out all these forms again? Reducing customer action makes things easier for both the company, as well as for the customer. I already mentioned the example of Hertz. Instead of optimizing the capacity to resource, ask yourself, is that activity really adding value, is it needed? Oftentimes, we find that eliminating process steps makes both the company offering the service and the customer enjoying the service happier. If you go back to my example of the mortgage bank, my biggest frustration with banks, oftentimes, is they keep on coming back to us asking us for more information. The main reason for that is there are many people, oftentimes very specialized people involved in processing a mortgage request or other things, and they keep on coming back to the customer. I as a customer, I hate this part. I think it's the bearing's job to figure their coordination out instead of me providing them with all kinds of different pieces of information. So, avoiding fragmentation and interacting with one face to the customer, as opposed to having the customer interact with many parts of the organization seems like a good idea. Now, you also notice that if you are encountering a waiting process, such as waiting for your coffee at a Starbucks, that customers when the waiting time becomes too long, they might be considering leaving. We'll talk about this more at the end of this module. What you notice that Starbucks does quite elegantly, is they going to start with an activity that doesn't require much waiting which is taking your money. And then they have to wait you afterwards, before they serve you the drink. Again, holding capacity constant, just changing the sequence of steps can help turning more customers into paying customers. When we talked about the appointments times, we talked about the idea of having the waiting not happen in the doctor's office, but at home. You often see restaurants using buzzers that avoid the hungry customers sit in the entrance of the restaurant, but instead tour through the mall and enjoy a shopping experience. When the seat becomes available, the buzzer buzzes and the customer rushes to the restaurant. Again, by having the waiting occur outside the line, the customer has a better experience. The final idea is to communicate the waiting time with the customer. By setting expectations, the customer knows what to expect, as opposed to always being on, waiting that the next second, I'm going to get served. If I tell you up front, that it's going to take another 30 minutes, the customer finds peace at this and if it's gets served after 25 minutes, might even be pleasantly surprised. When you design the process, you have many more levers to pull than just adjusting the capacity in the form of a clever staffing plan. In this session, we talked about things such as eliminating activities, moving some activities off the stage to the back office, Trying to make waiting more pleasant, and waiting time go by faster, And so on, and so on. Notice the length between what we did today, and our discussion of OPE Eand OAE in the productivity module. When we talked about the overall equipment effectiveness, or the overall people effectiveness, we carefully looked at a resource and minute by minute, asked ourselves what was happening at this resource? Now we take the perspective of the customer. Minute by minute through the customer experience or the customers flow time, we ask ourselves what was the value added at this step? Oftentimes, I would argue the scarcest resource of any process is the patience of its customers.
