Organizations do not run into problems because they are doing wrong things as such. They drift into problems because they too long continue doing things that used to be the right things years ago.
Mikko Kosonen (Nokia, Sitra)
This profound finding might mean transferring management focus to other kind of things. They may be unusual, even strange. Fortunately, we don’t know anyone doing so, so why would we bother neither.
It often seems, and many of us also have personal experience as a customer, that the execution of a service or a commodity is very fast, often in hours, but the customer sees the result only after weeks or even months after the order. Examples are listed in other sections of this site.
A typical dilemma is that things become stuck in a queue or, in the case of commodities, also in inventories. A decision not made yet also forms a work queue, including a regulatory decision. Why is the order not progressing fast, but it sticks to the work queue? Do we certainly reach for the right things? The invoice is sent after the delivery has taken place. Why not hurry to get client’s money in quicker by eliminating the work queues?
No-one is to be blamed for work queues. They are a built-in feature of a traditionally managed silo organization. The pursuit of silo-specific productivity, low unit cost, leads to sub-optimization. Could it be that if the ‘productivity’ of an organizational unit is improved, the systemic speed and the overall productivity will deteriorate, as well as the financial situation? However, this is not automatically the case, but in real life often seems to be.
What’s the cost of time spent in a queue? In earlier days nobody cared and still not all care today. However, each day waited in a queue always generates costs for someone.
The queues are therefore a severe slowdown for performance. Within organizational units, the bustle is often intense, but if the outcome of one unit is not taken under processing in the next unit right away, but remains in the queue, the local speed, “productivity”, will not bring much delight for the customer. Local speed, e.g. manufacturing lead time, exists and is energetically further improved, but the systemic speed slows down in the work queues between the organizational units.
As an example, a company in textile business: the manufacturing time in the factory was an hour and forty minutes and delivery lead time to the customer was eight weeks. If the company had determinedly developed its production and shrank its manufacturing time to an hour and twenty minutes, this would have been a significant improvement for the production itself. From the customer’s standpoint, the new delivery lead time would have been 8 weeks minus 20 minutes. The customer would have been thrilled! But when the focus was transferred to the removal of work queues, not touching the manufacturing, the delivery lead time fell to two days. The customer was genuinely inspired and added his orders. He had finally found a supplier to send the deliveries quickly, without ordering them for weeks in advance.
Who is responsible for the work queues and how to get rid of them?