We had a great experience at the 2019 ASQ Lean and Six Sigma Conference in Phoenix last week. The conference had over 500 attendees, giving us a tremendous opportunity to provide product demonstrations to Lean/Six Sigma practitioners and Continuous Improvement leaders.  It was great to see familiar faces as well as make new contacts. The response was overwhelmingly positive with lots of interest and excitement.

Even if you missed the conference, you are still in luck.  Our own Jim Coleman did a fantastic demonstration to some eager viewers and we were able to record it and add it to our channel.  Check it out below or go directly to our channel for this presentation and more videos.

At the conference we were happy to officially release our latest Client Edition 1.8.9 complete with its latest features.  Click below to sign up for a free trial and see for yourself what leanEdit can do for your processes and business as a whole.

64bit Installer
32bit Installer

leanEdit and the Six Sigma Solutions team will be at the ASQ Lean and Six Sigma Conference in Phoenix next month. Are you interested in finding a simple, intuitive way to remove waste from your processes 60% faster than traditional methods? If so, visit our booth and test drive our simple to use video analysis software products – “Lean Analysis Done Lean”.

In the leanEdit Knowledge Base section we will be adding tutorials to help get you started with your software. In this video we show you the basics of getting video clips uploaded and into your project. We continually process feedback we get from all our users and video tutorials are one of many responses to what we are hearing.

Stay tuned for more tutorials and help in the future.

 I change my cellphone every couple of years. It used to be a pleasant experience, discovering new technology and salivating at the latest that telecommunications had to offer. These days it’s a bit like buying a new car. You know you want it and you may even need it but it’s riddled with so many hidden costs that when you leave with your new purchase you feel more ripped off than special.

I noticed a big difference when I made my last cellphone purchase. I went to the local store with my son to buy the latest gadget and was surprised to be greeted by a nicotine stained, middle-aged technophobe at the entrance with a tablet. He stopped me at the threshold of the store and after asking me for my name proceeded to input it one finger at a time. Our instructions after that were to sit on the bench and wait to be called. So far we were not impressed. This felt more like a vaccination clinic than a cellphone store. We sat around for a minute and then wandered around for a few more before noticing our names popping up on the fifty-six inch overhead flat screen like a flight cancellation notice at LAX. To make matters worse as we were watching our names moving up the list at an excruciatingly slow pace we observed some fascinating non value adding behavior from the store employees. One was aimlessly restocking shelves, another couple were in a two on one situation with a customer while a third sales assistant kept going back and forth from customer to manager with endless questions. The manager spent the whole time obliviously entering information into the store computer while the smoky greeter stood by idle waiting for the next customer to walk in! All this while four customers including us are waiting for service! Someone called Adam was before us on the flight board. When it was his turn a woman appeared from nowhere and called his name. The manager turned around to answer because apparently his name was also Adam, another store employee then called out “Adam”, before the woman shouted “Adam” for the second time. They then proceeded to interrogate every customer individually in a quest to find Adam who, to their disappointment had left the building!

After another ten minutes our names finally popped up on the top of the leaderboard. A sales assistant appeared through the “employees only” door, made eye contact and proceeded to move toward us. We leant forward in a positive motion to get up out of the dugout only to see her glance at the board and make a last-minute ninety degree turn towards the smoke smelling greeter. She then proceeded to scroll her finger up and down his smudged tablet, and glance at the board a second time before moving toward us with a reaffirmed confidence that we were actually the next in line (as if the fifty-six inch flat screen wasn’t enough). She then invited us to sit with her on the nearby high top table and we sat around for another twenty minutes waiting for an appetizer and beer to show up as she proceeded to explain the new phone plans on offer and how she could help us save money in the long run.

The original cellphone store retail model of browsing area with roaming sales assistants actually works well if there’s enough capacity to meet demand. In fact, you don’t have to look far from the tree to find a company in most malls that does this very well. The biggest challenge for the cellphone store is the time it takes to execute the sale and the prepare the phone for the customer once he or she is ready to buy. Then there’s the hard sell of accessories. The personal obligation you feel to buy cases, car chargers and warranties is compounded by watching the sales assistant apply a screen protector to your new purchase. It’s like observing your child going through brain surgery! They need to find a standard way of getting this done more efficiently and without the customer having to review the removal of every air bubble! Why does it take so long to transfer contacts and register the new device? That too is a painful experience. The mission for retailers is to maximize the pleasure phase (browsing and selecting the phone) and to minimize the painful phase of parting with money. Like a samurai sword penetrating the abdomen the latter needs to be sharp and swiftly administered to minimize the agony.

So in summary maximize the pleasure and minimize the pain by relentlessly focusing on the customer experience through the implementation of lean principles including flow, standardized work, mistake proofing, visual control and the level loading of demand. If electronics retail is to survive these changes must happen quickly before the shipping times of online stores drop to a point where it’s no longer worth the cost of the gas to travel to a brick and mortar location.

Some inventions have been with us forever. Wheels, knives, forks, furniture and roads are just a few examples. The “key” is one of them. Keys were first used in Ancient Babylon and Egypt in the form of wooden pins used for opening locks. Over the centuries the key has taken many forms and has served many purposes from starting cars to opening doors. I didn’t have a locker at school but I was desperate to have one. There’s something about having that private space where books, chewing gum wrappers, blunt pencils, incomplete homework and rotting food reside and only you can access. The key is the device that unlocks the magic (or the smell depending what was left in there!). Why then, are we in such a desperate hurry to replace it with Lean technology?

During a recent visit to a well known theme park I was lining up to experience one of their most popular thrill rides. As we entered the attraction we stumbled over a locker room. A great idea I thought, since I was the official pack mule for the day. A place to unload, decant, and disassemble myself with security and peace of mind! I quickly realized as I was making my locker selection that this was no ordinary locker room. Instead of the archaic, medieval, simplistic key there was a modern, high tech, state of the art booth ready to accept fingerprints and the credit card of choice! Always willing to experiment and experience new gadgets I jumped at the opportunity of playing secret agent. Unfortunately after several tries the fingerprint scan failed to read my profile and I was left helpless with a line of technology hungry tourists impatiently growling behind me. Before I had time to fret along came a theme park employee ready to assist. He politely darted in-between me and the unit and proceeded to enter a series of “top secret” commands before flying over to the next booth like a grounded version of Superman to save another stranded member of the human race. I proceeded to repeat my bio-transaction, this time my indentations were in alignment and the locker popped open.

So is the key threatened with extinction? I’m not sure, but here is something I am sure about. Lean technology doesn’t always work. From a Lean thinking perspective the fingerprint controlled locker room is definitely a step in the wrong direction! Let’s examine the facts. In the stone age locker room where keys are used to open and close the cabinets the process for selecting and occupying the spaces was cheap, simple, reliable and intuitive with no need for any kind of emergency hotline or on-the-ground technical support. In the advanced tech version of the same, the cost to purchase and install the lockers is dramatically higher and the unreliability of the technology requires a full time troubleshooting technician to keep the area running! This is a classic example of how automation has actually increased the costs and decreased the efficiency of an operationwhere the initial goal was the complete opposite. We are always looking for ways to decrease labor content and human intervention but in this case the labor content required to run the process went up from zero to one, really an unforgivable step. Add to it the cost of maintenance and spare parts and the business case is dead and buried.

There are similar scenarios, however, that do increase productivity. The self checkout process in the supermarket may seem analogous but in that case the ratio of machine operators (checkout attendants) was one to one when they were operating their own checkout. With the self checkout kiosks in place only one attendant is required to oversee four stations therefore reducing the labor content by 75%. In this situation the improvement is viable even taking into account some maintenance load since three operators have been removed. By the way, world class is between twenty and thirty machines to one operator. In order to reach this bar the thinking needs to be injected way up stream and Lean principles applied to equipment early in the design stage.

The default remedy of automation and technology is a very dangerous concept. It’s power is without question but like Darth Vader’s “Force”, if used in the wrong way it can facilitate a deterioration in processes and services very quickly. The high tech locker room is an admirable idea and could work well once the reliability and usability problems are eradicated but until then redeploy the attendant and go back to Ancient Babylon!