Process Mapping Explored with Sara Hanks

What in the heck? For the unclean, unwashed is process mapping.

Yeah, and in my era, it was called industrial engineering. It still is. And we used to do process flow charts, which is a very similar thing, much more rudimentary than the tools that we have today. But process mapping is, I think it's absolutely critical. And the reason I say that is if you go back to the 80s and the Japanese arrival of the total quality management, continuous quality improvement, whatever, that was almost revolutionary. And yet it's been around for hundreds of years. And the Japanese term of Kaizen, continually improving something every day, even if it's one one hundredth of a percent, as a cultural truth. is totally different than America. We teach people how to do things and say, okay, get faster, fewer mistakes, congratulations. But we never really get down to, why do we do that? It's true, isn't it?

So how do you initiate these things? How do you get a company, a business, a department, an individual's attention saying, hey, George, you really need to do this? How do you stimulate the interest?

Yeah, I call those triggers. Yeah,

So in essence, if I could wave a wand, if you could wave a wand, we would want to have every process of every business mapped with precision. In great detail. Absolutely. Who's supposed to do it? So if we went into an organization, instead of looking for a policy manual or a procedure manual, I want to see the process map store.

I agree. A visual is always easier. So you get a company, somebody identifies a problem. And we're agreeing we're going to go forward and do this. Who should be involved?

So can I call them owners?

Yeah.

So we start having different jargon. process owners of steps. We have process owners of the business process. And then we have champions who are going to be the folks that we're going to rely on to implement. Is that a fair?

So we come in, we've identified there's a problem. We're going to identify that we're going to solve the problem by doing process mapping. We've identified the people that are going to be involved in the deal. And it could be a large crowd. It could be five. It could be. It could be 10 people. It could be 20 people, depending on how big the process is. Do you try and limit the size of the audience that you're dealing with?

So one of the things that you bring up is we should have a glossary of terms, shouldn't we?

We were just talking with a school this morning about classes and curriculums, and we have a reading list at the front end. And one of the deans that I was talking with said, you know, I need a glossary of terms because there's so much jargon here. I said, OK, I'm going to put that as part of the reading list at the beginning, and I need to make it compulsory now. because we don't want to have them misunderstand what that term means. He said, that's excellent. So I said, do you mind if I make a compulsion? He said, no, no, it should be.

Exactly. So now we have. You know, can I help you? Little bubbles floating all over the place. It's interesting. So we have a glossary of terminology so that we don't get lost in jargon. We limit the audience by how we define the scope of the project. Yeah. I try not to have more than a dozen.

Yeah. Okay. And the reason a dozen is dirty dozen, I always have to have some kind of, you know. anchor on which I can hang things. But it, okay, so that crew, every process, in my view, needs to have a goal statement. What does this process do?

It's well, it's I think we mentioned I mentioned this when we started our chat today. I use the term guidelines instead of policies. And the guideline is campaigns, for instance. When we run a campaign, here's a description, two, three, four paragraphs of what we mean by the campaign. OK, who owns the campaign? The person responsible, your process owner. Then. Is there a financial implication? If not, if there is, what is it? Is there a efficiency? What's the metric? Who owns it? Who can make changes? What data is involved? What formulas? And when was it last reviewed? So that there's clarity. And it always confused me because like you said, you go into a process mapping, six people do the job and they don't do it differently. Chaos is a perfect word. And what we're trying to do with the process mapping is also identify the skills that are required for the tasks within the process. True?

And I don't think you could do a very good job at that.

It's interesting, isn't it? Because I don't, even in your manufacturing days, the job wasn't around skills, was it?

And in the case of the specialization, though, the skills that you acquired were given to you by the person who trained you, correct?

And there were no native skills required to facilitate or accelerate the training.

Right? Yeah. It's kind of upside down. Yeah. It's, you know, we have SAT tests and ACT tests and all manner of different IQ tests and EQ tests. personality profiles, all kinds of things. But we really don't get down to what are your latent skills. You have really good organizational skills. You have really good interpersonal skills. You have really good analytical skills. We don't know a lot about that, do we?

People say that about our assessments, especially in the education community, that, you know, we have a 96 question multiple choice assessment of the job function skills. And they say, wow, nobody's ever done this before. And of course they have, but we don't find it's not generically used. Yeah. Okay, so we got the owner, we got the problem, we got the process identifier we're going to play with, we got the team, we know who's going to be the champion. What do you do?

One of the things I find intriguing about what you do is that I don't believe there's a lot of people that are doing this. And I believe that this is absolutely critical. It has been critical, but going forward, it's going to be even more critical. And we've talked about this. With COVID, we compressed people's thinking, hopefully. Working from home as an acronym, as causing all kinds of angst problems for people. Really, the only folks that can work from home. are in major corporations. You know, a mechanic has to go to the job. An accountant has to go to the job. Somebody making food has to go to the job. There's no question about those things. Right. The big corporation jobs that can be done from home, I would submit to you that those are the first jobs that are going to be replaced with robotics.

You know, so process becomes even more critical down that end.

You know, robots can do an awful lot of things and robots in the manufacturing circumstance can do an awful lot of things, but there's limits. Right. And unless we get serious about what that process is, we're going to make big mistakes. Make a mistake with a robot, it's going to be a very costly mistake.

Guys, one of the things that I have a strong belief in is you slow everything down at the front to speed everything up at the back. You do your planning, you do your detail work. And if you've got it all done, everything is easy. If you don't have it done, like you say, implementation becomes an unbelievable mess.

Oh, so it's not fun. It's not fun. So what do you have any tools that you use to facilitate the process mapping? Like you do wall burning or. You know, anything along that line? Have you got any tricks that make it easier?

In my day, we used to call them process flowcharts. We had five icons. you know, decisions, you know, filed.

So, you know, you can monetize that. You know that.

It's a tool that facilitates the process. You know, culturally, the difference between Japan and ourselves, Kaizen and not. If I could wave a wand and satisfy a dream of mine, that we'd have the same process improvement culture here that they do in Japan. And that everybody in a company would be tasked with, asked to identify what I call sacred cows. Is there something you do that doesn't make any sense?

Or I flip it. I have a thing I call five things. Give me five things. that would make your life easier in your job. Give me five things that are a pain in the butt to do in your job. Give me five things that'll make your job more productive for the company. So we got three different areas, five steps each, and I do this in groups. And at the end of the day, two or three of the five things are common on all. And you know what my question is going to be. If it's good for you, good for the company, and it's a pain for you to do, why don't you fix it? We don't have that motivation in our organizations.

Yeah. You know, it's, and I think it's an upbringing thing too, you know, in our families do this, don't do that. And we're trying to protect the child. Then we get to school, do this, don't do that. We're trying to accelerate the learning. And I've often said it's the troublemaker I want to pay attention to. The individual is saying, well, why are you doing that? That's crazy. I want to hear what's in their head. And then, you know, it's too expensive to fix a problem. That's a horrible answer.

Exactly. But the other side of that is that that goes back to is your employee an asset or expense? Yeah. They're assets. We want to have them do the things that can't be done by anybody else. Yeah. And we don't know what those things are just yet. And unless we do a process map, we have no idea what functions are out there. It's kind of remarkable, isn't it? Yeah, it is. So we've sold things. We start with a cart. A couple hundred years ago with produce from the farmer. We go out in the street and stand in the corner and sell my apples and corn or whatever the devil it might be. Now we've got a supermarket. The cost of food,50% of it is transportation. It's weird. You process map that sucker or any supply chain issue. or particularly now with supply chain issues, what are we doing?

We've been doing this stuff forever, haven't we? Yeah. Yeah.

You know, I sometimes use parallels of airports and let's just think of Dallas, Fort Worth or Chicago or New York or LA, major airports, Paris, Tokyo. and you and I are going to start a competitor, and we're going to build an airport 50 miles from DFW, and we're going to compete with DFW. Where in the world do you start? That spider web is so complex. Yeah. Rental cars and hotels. The story that I can reserve a car, a specific car, before I get there. And they got these cars all over the darn place. And I'll be able to go to a specific location and find the car. And then you go across the street to the hotel and they can't find the room that you've reserved. And the room doesn't move.

How the heck do we get there? And again, isn't that a process deal?

You know, my wife got really cranky after 9-11. didn't want to go anywhere near France because of their resistance to our desire for help. And we finally went to Paris after a long number of years. And we get to the hotel and we're greeted. The guy comes out to the taxi and sees us. And I've been there before. He says, well, welcome back, Mr. Slee. Good to see you. You're in room 1402. And my wife looks at this guy and looks at me and says, what in the hell happened to the people in Paris? That never used to happen before. Again, it's the recognition of a problem. And then somebody spent the time to determine what the process was and what the changes need to be. And the champion was going to be named and it was going to be implemented. And that person would ride off into the sunset and go do it somewhere else. Yeah. Which is what we do with process mapping. So you've been in private practice how long now?

Working freelance with different companies?

Okay. Every single client I've ever had needs process mapping. And very rarely have I been successful at getting companies to map processes. How successful have you been?

so you introduced your software for a second why don't you take a moment and explain to us exactly what that software does for you what you're using it for why you're using it and give people a better idea of what what it does okay so

So you have a big data collection element that ties to the software, correct?

Okay. Yeah. That's the next step.

And just so you and I don't get caught, AI is artificial intelligence. You're letting the computer make it. that come to conclusions, make recommendations for you?

For a forward thinking person, you're behind the curve on that one. There's a new AI driven computer program that plays chess that for five years has yet to be beaten. And all they, the computer was taught were the moves of the chess pieces. Nothing else. No games. Nothing was loaded. Like Big Blue had every single game loaded. And that's how they beat Kasparov because they could process all of what he had in his head faster. This time doesn't matter. They're coming up with arcane approaches that are just, what are you doing there? Which is really, really radical. I don't think we're ready yet in the human. side of things. Chess is a nice exercise. It can prove the point. But to make a determination, we're going to go from Farmer Bob to Farmer Joe because the quality of his kernel on his corn is better based on analytics. I don't think we're there yet.

you

That's right. Yeah, you're going to take away the bread and butter. The other thing is typically we don't have enough data points. We don't have enough data. No. You know, it's

Yeah, it's the old Poisson curve that 90% of the activity is in the other leg of the graph. Yeah. So in manufacturing, process mapping is reasonably straightforward. And a lot of continuous improvement projects did the manufacturing base. Distribution is slightly different, maybe a little bit more complex because you've got disparate locations, disparate functions, and maybe even disparate corporations. People need to have the ability to see that something in manufacturing would work in distribution or something in manufacturing or distribution would work in selling. Like CRM is a good case in point. Somebody bought a car 10 years ago. It's got 150,000 miles. Maybe somebody should be in touch with them saying, hey, don't you think you want to change your car? Yeah. We don't do that today. Alex Kraft, who is part of Heave, and he writes, he's got a software package that puts buyers and sellers together. So a customer says, I want this.

And salesmen that subscribe to Alex's service or a part of it get an email saying, George over there is looking for something. Kind of simple.

really does. It really does. I'm excited about process mapping. And I like your illustration of post-it notes. So if I want to have somebody who's listened to this do a process map with post-it notes. And forgetting about the ADA type of circumstance, colors and shapes are dynamic tools that you can see. I'm going to get those post-it notes. I'm going to put them all around the room, right?

Oh, sorry. Go ahead. That's pretty easy to do. Yeah. And you started to say the nice thing.

And that's what I call the aha moment. They look at this and say, why didn't we see that? Yeah. It happens a lot that way, doesn't it? Yeah. It's a remarkable truth. We've been doing these things for so long. And when we go back and revisit it with a clean blackboard, I call it fresh eyes. We get stunned. It's remarkable. Why do we do that? Because we've always done it. You know, my dad and I used to argue about shoveling snow. If I'm going to have to throw snow, I only want to throw it once.

And dad had his way of doing things. And I finally said, look, I'm not going to do it that way. I'll do it all. You go into the house. He said, no, no, I'm going to do it my way. So I said, OK, see you. And he did it himself. And he was a lot older than me, obviously. And the only way I resolved that is I bought him a snowblower. It was so inefficient, but he was so stuck on it. He could never change it. He was comfortable doing it that way. He'd always done it that way. It was almost robotic. And we have that with a lot of people. That's why I say, oh, my, that's as plain as the nose on my face. Why didn't we see that? Yeah. We're almost blind to it, aren't we? Yeah, we are. And same thing's true in your home.

It's the old process that one of my clients shaved his face in a different room every day to condition himself before he went to work that he was going to look at things differently.

Well, yeah, and I looked at him and said, you're an idiot. You don't need to have a visualization like that. You know, go to work and think differently. I'm not going to interfere with how people make it happen, but I want them to make it happen. He was a very successful change agent, but it was very, change is very hard for people. Process mapping helps with that, I think.

Yeah, that's really true. The other thing you mentioned earlier is that not everybody's outspoken about things. And the people, we want to give a voice to everybody. So that silence is a really good neutralizer of influence. Everybody participates in that sense and everybody is empowered in that sense. Another important feature of process mapping.

You know, I did a lot of computer systems work, and I can't imagine designing or passing off an analytic process to a programmer without having really clear process mapping system flowcharts. The Post-it notes is such an easy illustration. And maybe for everybody, look at if you've still got one, the telephone operator, the receptionist. How does that work? And then the process that we went to to have everybody have their own phone number. How does that work? Yeah. And the process we have now that if you don't answer your phone and X number of rings, it goes somewhere else. How does that work? Right. And just using that as a silly example, we. make iterative changes, which makes it easier for us, I think, rather than the big leap.

So process mapping takes, segments the solution.

And the more powerful. that people want to continue because they're experiencing success.

So with the work that you did at GE in here and the last X number of years, what would you do after process mapping? What's the next step? Is it automating it?

So if it's not manufacturing, it's distribution. And I want you to come in and do a determination of what needs to be mapped. In other words, I don't know the problem. I'm going to give you the opportunity. Here's the door. Come on in. Here's our business. I want you to snoop around and identify places where you believe we can make improvements. Where do you start?

So you interview people and find that. Yeah.

Let me, let me stay there for a second. Most of those things are going to come from financial statements.

How often have you seen management reporting as opposed to financial reporting? That's a different ballgame, isn't it? Yeah. It always bothers me that we drive everything that we do off financials. Why don't we drive it off productivity? Why don't we drive it off market share? Why don't we drive it off customer retention? And none of those are in financial statements.

And yet they're critical to our health, aren't they?

Huge problem.

It was really funny. One of the things that I've done over the years is, We work with standard times on repair, just like manufacturing, right? And I was manic about I'm going to give everybody eight hours of work today of standard time work. Standard time always has a buffer. Yeah. Okay, always. So what I would say to people was I'm going to give you a choice. If you beat the standard time, I give you eight hours of labor, you're finished after seven. Do you want to be able to go home after seven or do you want me to give you another hour of labor? And I'll pay you nine hours today for the eight hours of work you did. Or do you want to go home after seven hours? What do you think they chose?

It was remarkable.

It's split on demographics, Sarah, as to be expected. The younger people that have a young family need the money. They would work the extra hours. The older guys wanted to spend more time with mama or older gals, more time with papa. It's remarkable. And until you open up that door, the owners, they looked at me, go home, you're nuts. Right? I want the older, more experienced, more talented guys leaving early. And the young guys seeing them leave early saying, gee, when I grow up, I want to be like that. What do I need to do to get that?

It's remarkable. It's absolutely remarkable. And the same thing's true with process mapping, I believe. Interruptions, critical. Idle time, critical. Rework, critical. How do we limit the 20 minutes you're talking about? I love it. And when you say we can make a 10% improvement, think about that.

I don't know that there's anything bigger. No. You know, when we got that 10% looked after, then we'll find something else that's bigger, but that's fine. Yeah. What's the next step for the audience relative to process mapping? Your blog goes up tonight that explains it, explains RACI and some of the other terminology used today. This discussion, I think, will help people understand where they could start. Any advice you'd give at this point to say, okay, this is what you do next?

I'm going to change the term from facilitation to communication.

Communication skills are something that are not that common. It's kind of remarkable. We communicate with each other, talking all the time. Our families, our children are co-workers, but we don't really necessarily communicate. It's all kind of floating around up there. And the other thing that, you know, the top of mind, what keeps you awake at light? I think that's a brilliant approach. That might be something that you could focus on on another blog. What is it that motivates? What is it that initiates? What is the stimulus to get us to do a process map without you having a problem that asks you to stick your hand up? I need some help over here. What are those things that are bothering you that, you know, are hiding the problem? What keeps you up at night? That's hiding a problem.

As a younger person, I didn't study enough, you know. That's keeping me up at night because the exam's tomorrow. Darn, you know, it's a little late now, isn't it? Oh, yeah. But executives have the same dilemma. There's a whole bunch of things that are sitting up there. Welsh in his book, Straight from the Gut, identified that. Here's the red items and here's the orange items. It's like a stoplight.

It's a good one. Peter Senge is even better. Okay. I think we've pretty well beat up process mapping, yeah?

Go for it. I don't limit anybody. Let's go.

Yeah, business systems. I tell everybody that's involved, I want to know the frequency that the reporters run and who gets it. Yeah. And, you know, Jennifer Albright does a lot with purchasing and suppliers and buying. I used to go into companies and say, okay, I want every company form. Have you got an inventory of the company forms? What? You know, and then, you know, we got these 300 forms. Some of them are six part forms. Some of them are chemical. Some of them are carbon. I mean, wait a second. You know, what's going on here? There's so many things and process mapping identifies a lot of that too. Yeah. This is such an important subject. And it's one that I have a really hard time getting traction on. Getting companies to acknowledge that they need to have a look at how they've done things forever because it isn't necessarily the right way. Prove me wrong. Do the process map so you can confirm that that's the right way to do something.

Every now and again, somebody takes up the challenge and says, I hate you, Ron. Right? You see that all the time. Yeah. I wish it could become part of our normal way of doing things that everything that we do, we challenge at some frequency, not all the time, but it's enough frequency that you stay current.

you, Sarah. This has been great. I hope everybody who's listening has got something from this and I look forward to having you again, Sarah, and everybody else with us again for another candid conversation. Mahalo. Thank you for listening to our podcast. We appreciate your support. Should you have any thoughts or comments, please don't hesitate to contact us at www. learningwithoutscars. com. The time is now. Mahalo!