Work Pace Disorder

Lean afflictions abound in the continuous improvement workplace. One such ailment is Work Pace Disorder.

With this disease, people cannot keep a consistent pace to their work. Typically, their pace depends upon the size of the pile in front of them, but it can also be impacted by other factors.

The general symptom is a seemingly random amount of time to complete the same process.

Low variation is essential for efficient operations. When inputs to your processes have a lot of fluctuation in them, it is hard to plan. If your parts deliveries have high variations in their lead times, then you have to plan for the longest times. That means more inventory. If you have a lot of variation in incoming quality, you have to carry a lot of excess inventory.

And if the time it takes to complete processes changes a lot, you will have trouble planning. You can’t predict when things will be done, and you won’t be able to accurately plan how many people you need on your staff.

You also won’t be able to create a flexible, responsive work force. If you have good cross training in the office, you can shift people around to help each other out when they complete their work. If people are slowing down their work as their piles get smaller, they will never be available to help others.

This ailment is uncommon, or at least less pronounced on assembly lines or in other production areas that are closely linked to other processes. The interconnected nature and the use of takt time makes it hard to deviate much from the prescribed pace of work.

One of the reasons that office work is easy to alter pace on is that there is a lot of variation on the work coming in. Imagine you are entering a customer order into a system. You might have 5 line items on the order, or there might be 50. If something takes longer than normal, it can be hard for an observer to tell if the change is due to the amount of work, or the pace of work. Treating this affliction is best done with daily management in the office

Daily management breaks the day into buckets of time where a mathematical principle known as the central limit theorem takes over. Basically, it says that when you average out the times, those averages approach a normal distribution, or a bell curve. Each bucket of time ends up looking fairly similar. Individual times will vary a lot. Average times for each bucket should not.

With daily management, when the bucket shows up as an outlier on the bell curve, you investigate. That scrutiny on problems that impact production tends to drive people to follow the process properly. I want to stress that most problems are process problems. One exception that is a people problem is when there is a process in place and people don’t follow it. Not following a process is a symptom of Work Pace Disorder.