By Paul Boots, President Praesto Lean Solutions
Separate your fast and slow-moving orders to speed all orders to the customer faster.
Ever been stuck behind a slow-moving trailer or RV on a narrow mountain road with no place to pass? On a holiday weekend, the traffic may bottleneck back for a mile or more…
Imagine how your customers’ orders feel, being stuck in the same sort of traffic behind big, complex orders… and for them, it may be happening every single day.
If your orders or customer requests go through a significant order review, configuration, quoting or design process then read on. Here is a game-changing opportunity to create express lanes for your office-based order flow, and create a fast-moving flow of work through your order handling processes…
Complex vs Simple, Slow vs Fast
Your team members know that all orders are not the same. Some are complex and time-consuming while others are clean, straight-forward and quick. You can probably jot down a list right now of your typical complex orders, based on customers, products, $ value or markets (maybe even salespeople). Same thing for the really quick and simple order types.
At the same time, each of your team members likely has a queue of orders to be completed – sometimes small, sometimes large. Most of the lead-time for each order is tied up in those queues – typically orders spend 80% to 99% of their lead-time waiting in a queue. The easiest way to reduce lead-time is to reduce the queues.
Express Lane
You’ll see immediate, dramatic improvements in lead-time overall and especially for the more-standard orders by making a simple change:
– Split your order processing team into two teams. One team for the ‘Complex Lane’, working on the slower-moving orders, and another team in the ‘Express Lane’ for the faster-moving, more-standard orders.
– Do some calculations to get the staffing levels of each team as close as possible to the typical workload of complex vs standard orders. Don’t expect to get the calculations perfect. Where you have doubt, plan to err on the side of understaffing the express lane. If it gets overloaded, allow the overload to flow into the complex lane (this is much better than the other way round)
– You may even be best served by creating 3 lanes (complex / medium / standard).
How does it work?
I’ve successfully applied this simple change in many environments over the years and the results are always dramatic. Why does it work so well?
– The express-lane orders are no longer held up behind the big, slow-moving complex orders. It’s exactly the same thing you experience on that country road, or in the grocery store checkout line. Creating the express lane for fast-moving orders removes them from the slow-moving lane and enables them to flow much more smoothly with fewer bottlenecks.
– Lead-time reductions for the express lane orders generally range from 50%-90%. On the complex side, those lumbering orders also experience lead-time reductions as their flow becomes steadier and more predictable. I typically see lead-time reductions of 10-30% for these orders. Since the volume of express-lane orders generally is much greater than complex orders, average order lead-time is greatly reduced.
Best candidates
Some environments will achieve greater improvements than others through utilizing this approach. If you fit these criteria, you have a great opportunity:
– More than 4 individuals working on order processing
– Time to complete a typical complex order is more than 2X a typical standard order
– Team members can work all order types in the new lane structure (or can be trained to do so)
– Orders can be readily identified at the start of the process as complex or standard.
Great start. Now what…
The creation of express and complex lanes is a game-changing move to reduce order lead-time. Once you begin this journey and pay attention to the flow of orders, you’ll undoubtedly identify more opportunities for further improvement in order lead-time and productivity.
Interested to learn more about how Praesto Lean Solutions addresses these issues – or how we can help your business? Contact us at [email protected] or call +1 720 891 2829.