Category Archives: Lean 6 Sigma

COMMUTING AND PROCESS ANALYSIS PART 3 – TOOLS

car3Welcome to Part 3 of my discussion of Process Analysis & Commuting.  In Part 1 we introduced the idea of starting your Process Analysis by first looking at the large picture.   We then moved on to a discussion of some of the resources that are involved in the commuting process.  In this post I want to take a look at some of the tools that can be used in the Process Analysis as we start diving a little deeper into the Analysis.  I am still trying to stay at a relatively high level so will not go into great detail but any of these tools can be used at a much deeper level than I will go into during this discussion.  Also, just as a reminder, the answer to my original question was – The purpose of the commuting process is to move people and products from one point to another point as effectively as possible using the minimum of resources possible. So, if we are trying to analyse this process we would obviously need to look at the pros and cons of each possible method or resource (as discussed in Part 2).  To a large extent this is a customer service type of analysis since the resource supplier (government in most cases) must decide what services they will make available to the customer (commuter) and at what service level.  As with any customer service situation, in the end the customer gets to decide what service they wish to “buy”.  So what are some of the tools to analyse this process?  While not an exhaustive list, here are a couple:

Lean – Actually this is a tool set rather than a specific tool and there are many possibilities inside the set but I wanted to bring your attention to the 8 wastes concept.  If we look at each of the resources discussed earlier, which ones generate the most waste and how do these wastes interact?   Two of the wastes listed are waiting and unnecessary movement.  With this in mind an analysis of the length of time for each method and what makes up the time involved would be a good start.  For example, when driving during “rush hour”, the time involved could be 60 minutes but the same drive an hour later may only be 35 minutes and on a Sunday afternoon may only be 15 minutes.  Perhaps a staggered start time would spread the resource requirements and speed everything up.  Of course that does leave the question of how to co-ordinate that type of program.  Some additional questions that this brings up would be: What is the capacity usage of the resource (road), What is the cost of expanded resources, What other ways are there to decrease the resource requirement…?  Similarly, we know that in most cases it takes longer to use mass transit then to use your car, but what makes it longer?  Most of the time is expended in getting to the mass transit entry process and then waiting for the resource (bus, train, etc).  Does the efficiency of moving large numbers of people at a time outweigh the time spent waiting to use the resource?  What could be done to shorten this queue time?

Theory of Constraints – The basis of theory of constraints is that one part of any operation will be the bottleneck that sets the speed for the entire process.  Only changes to the bottleneck can speed up the process since changes anywhere else will still not allow the process to run any faster than the bottleneck.  The trick here is to identify the bottle neck and to make effective changes (which is NOT as easy as it sounds).  Let’s take a somewhat simplified example of using the bus – The steps in this process may be: Leave house, walk to bus stop, wait for bus, board bus, ride bus to desired stop, get off bus, walk to work.  This is simplified as I am not considering many of the complications such as transfers, etc.  So which step is the bottleneck?  The longest time is the ride on the bus but that is not necessarily a process bottleneck as there are a string of buses with a new one coming on a schedule (let’s say every 15 min).  The bus carries many people at one time so the number of finished units (people) arriving at the end of the operation is actually relatively high.  You could make it higher yet by adding more buses to the line (reducing time between buses) or using bigger buses to carry more people per bus.  The problem with this is, if there are not enough people at the various stops, what you will have is partially filled buses which would be a waste of the resource.  In actual fact the bottleneck in this example is the number of people arriving at the bus stop to catch the next bus and this is a factor of the total number of people using the bus and the time of day.  How do you increase the number of people using the bus and flatten the cyclical pattern at the same time?  Perhaps, rather than adding more buses to a specific line it would be better to add more routes and split smaller buses across them.  Shortening the walk (especially in inclement weather) and the wait time might encourage more ridership which would increase revenue to offset the cost of the increased drivers that would be required.

Continuous Improvement – This one is pretty self-explanatory but is probably best applied to the customer experience.  It is a proven fact that people will pay more if they perceive value to a particular product or process.  One way this can be used in practise is to remember that people will almost always pick a better experience over a poorer experience.  This can be used two ways. Degrade the process you are trying to move people away from and/or improve the process you want people to move to.  I strongly suggest using positive reinforcement as negative reinforcement (degrading service) has all kinds of nasty side effects, such as very grumpy voters in an election.

House of Quality – I am actually not going to go into House of Quality in this post though the idea of using this tool to better understand what the customer wants and how to provide it is very intriguing.  If anyone else wants to follow up with a Quality series on this topic I would love to see it.

I am going to cut off the tools at this point.  As with many of the other thoughts raised in this series we could write books about each of them.  Instead, please join me in Part 4 where we can summarize this entire discussion and maybe suggest a couple of possible (partial) solutions.

COMMUTING AND PROCESS ANALYSIS PART 2 – RESOURCES.

car2Welcome back to our discussion on Process Analysis of the commuting process.  As a quick review I had suggested in Part 1 that just mapping a process was not sufficient.  Instead you need to start with a big picture view of the process and then “peel the onion” with progressively more detailed views of the process.  At the top level you should first be asking “What, ultimately, is this process meant to accomplish?”.  We then applied this question to the commuting process where I suggested the following answer – The purpose of the commuting process is to move people and products from one point to another point as effectively as possible using the minimum of resources possible.  I then closed off the first posting after introducing some of the possible resources (money, roads, transportation modes (cars, buses, trains…), time, political will (yes that is a valuable resource), etc).  Before we go any further I would just like to repeat that at this point we are still at a very high level so it is entirely possible that as we get more detailed new resources may become apparent and the relative importance of each of the resources may change.  This is not a problem, just something to be aware of.  Remember, never become so enamoured of your ideas and solutions that they blind you to other possibilities.

So let’s take a quick look at the various resources listed starting with Time.  Again, this is usually the first one that comes to mind because, to the commuter, this is their primary consideration and more than likely the major decision point on how to get themselves to work.  Let’s look at some numbers – according to Stats Canada, in Toronto, the average commute in 2011 took 32.8 minutes.  On average the people commuting by inner city bus took almost 50% longer to arrive than the people that drove.  (Does anybody think the situation has improved since then?  Not really, if anything it has gotten worse.)  One other piece of information from Stats Canada – 70% of the commuters drove.  Do you think there is any sort of correlation between the relative lengths of the transit and the choice of most people to drive?  Admittedly, ease and comfort enter into the equation as well, particularly if the commuter is in a suburb without easy access to mass transit.

This, of course leads us to Transportation Modes – what alternatives are available to the individual commuters?  If you live in downtown Toronto you may not even own a car so this is not even an option.  Basically you are left with mass transit as your only choice unless you live close enough to walk (4.5%) or bike (1.2%).  Using a taxi or one of the newer services like UBER can be a possible option but they are expensive as a daily option.  Suburbanites usually have more choices in that they can choose between their car, car-pooling, bus, train, light rail or some combination of these choices.  As discussed in time resource, various factors will influence which choice people make.

One of these factors is a resource as well – money.  Very few people would say they have all the money they need (and most of them do not commute) so commuters also need to balance the relative costs of the various transit choices.  What is the actual cost of using the car (including parking) as balanced against the cost of rail, bus subway or a combination, particularly if that means double fees if you get charged a new fee as you change from one option to another (eg: rail to subway).

Of course, one of the other resources listed was roads.  The more cars on the road, the more congested they get and the slower the average speed will be.  Also, keep in mind that the roads are not only used by commuters.  They are also used in the transit of products being moved through or to the same area as the commuters.  This is why products were included in the answer to our original question.  If they are going to share the same resources they need to be included in the same equation.  The same is true with product being moved on rails that they share with the commuters.  While generally this is more of a scheduling problem than anything else, what happens if there is a problem with any of the trains whether moving product or people?  Instant rail gridlock and, often, very long delays.

The last resource I want to touch on is Political Will.  By this I do not mean politicians but rather the entire political process.  This process is, by its nature, both extremely conservative (if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it) and short sighted (no further than the next election).   While this may seem like a strange resource it is important to keep in mind that infrastructure creation and maintenance is very expensive and time consuming.  If there is no urgency to drive political will it is highly unlikely that any changes will occur, either in new, or maintenance of, existing infrastructure.  The first instinct of the political process is to study something to death in the hope it will go away without the need to actually commit anything to it.  Strangely enough this is one of the best arguments for sponsoring large extravaganzas like the Olympics or the Pan Am games.  It tends to create a requirement and a fixed date for all kinds of infrastructure improvements while at the same time providing a politically acceptable reason for spending the money.  Not that all the changes are an improvement but at least some of them will be.

So there we have a quick visit to some of the resources involved in the commuting process.  Each of them is easily worth an entire posting just on their own but I need to move on to a discussion on the tools so hopefully you will move on as well to Part 3 – Tools.

To go to Commuting and Process Analysis Part 3 – Tools click here