Devise smart solutions
Seeing patterns and trends can help you generate creative, valuable solutions to problems.
- For example, suppose you learned that an auto maker had found a way to improve its operations—in real time, as people carried out their work. Perhaps the company stopped work processes each time a problem arose, identified the cause of the problem, and devised a trial solution that it then tested immediately on the job.
In this case, you might decide to use a similar real-time experimental method to address process problems in your own unit.
- For instance, perhaps your customer call center has a goal of answering calls within three rings. Yet representatives often have difficulty meeting this goal.
With the auto manufacturer's method in mind, you decide to conduct a simulation: One of your employees poses as a customer and makes several phone calls to a service representative within an hour. Every time the representative can't answer the "call" within three rings, you stop the simulation and ask, "What kept you from answering on time?" You hear responses such as "I couldn't resolve the current call in time to pick up the next one" and "I didn't hear the first few rings because of a distraction in the next office."
You and your team design potential solutions to these problems, then restart the simulation to test your ideas.
- For example, you reconfigure office space to reduce distraction, and discover that the change enables the representative to meet the goal more often.
Thanks to your ability to see that a process-improvement strategy could work in two organizations as different as an auto manufacturing floor and a customer call center, you enable your group to provide better customer service.