Keep it simple

We like to complicate matters. Where many a times, all it takes is a simple solution. When it involves people, and is complicated, what will happen is it gets bypassed, compromised or dropped. When it is simple, and people are able to understand and buy into it. Allowing you to simplify processes, sales pitches, marketing messages and internal conversations. Imagine what it will do for your business.

There was a factory production floor where multiple production belts were bottling drinks into plastic bottles. Machines will pack the bottles into carton boxes, load them onto trucks and then delivers them to the various retail outlets. There was an issue that needs to be resolved. At times the bottles would turn up empty, totally bypassed by the filling station. Yet, it would still get packed into carton boxes and get shipped out to the retail outlets. Imagine the frustration at the outlet when they receive a box full of empty bottles. The resources that goes into rectifying every of such incidences was intensive and costly. The team quickly assembled and brainstorm on ideas to arrest the issue, amongst all the ideas given, the one chosen was to implement a digital weighing scale at the end of each belt. When the scale detects carton boxes that weigh close to zero, it halts the belt and sounds the alarm. The attendant would come by, remove the empty box and restart the belt, which requires a 5 min walk to the switch.  Now with that $25,000 solution in place, they manage to reduce such occurrences to zero.

It seemed to have solved the issue for the company, but the attendants were not very happy, as every time the alarm goes off, they need to drop whatever they are doing and attend to the belt. With an average of 5 such occurrence happening each shift, it means 5 reset per shift. Back to the drawing board, now they are forced to looked into the bottling issue which is a more expensive problem to rectify. Till one fine day they received a report that a particular belt had been operating a week without any reset. Upon inspection, they were astonished to discover that the attendant for that belt had bought a huge turbo fan and situated it at the exit of the bottling section. Whenever any empty box pass by the fan, it gets blown off the belt. It will never get to the weighing scale and the belt will never stop. Cost of fan $225.

Many times, the processes we put in place falls flat because it’s too complicated. Keep it simple. Next blog, I will focus on some of the key areas and ideas that will help us build simplicity into our business environment.