A Day Without Digital
Wawa (London), always has a range of sales and production activities for their sofas and chairs in progress, as these are the core designer-maker products behind their business.
When things get busy it’s often difficult to know what to prioritise and who should do what to keep this stream of work flowing smoothly. It’s not unlike the challenges in digital product development so we recently leant a hand for a day to smooth the operation by drawing on our experiences in digital.
It’s been fun and very informative doing non-digital for a day! In a nutshell we’ve taken existing ideas from enterprise resource planning (ERP), digital product management, and software development to manage this process in a style that suits Wawa.
And best of all we can start employing these big ideas in a small way, by simply using a whiteboard!
How it works
The first idea is to use Lean principles. These originate from the manufacturing industry and focus on the smooth flow of work, constraining the quantity of work in progress, and eliminating wasteful practises. One of the main tools we can utilise from Lean is the idea of the Kanban practise which literally means scheduling what to produce, when, and how much. Another is the practise of ‘pulling’ an item of work once its ready into the next step in the process.
Our whiteboard supports these by displaying a framework of the main tasks from left to right through the sales and production cycle. We then identify the work by using post-it notes for each item.
This is a mockup we made in Omnigraffle to check out how it might work…
The second idea is to use Agile practises. These originate from the software development industry and focus on the continuous inclusion of key people, collaboration and iterative time-boxed cycles of work.
Agile practises help us to manage the whiteboard. Firstly using the idea of a stand-up meeting where everyone gets together for ten minutes each morning to discuss the status of work on the whiteboard and update it by agreeing to pull work items into the next activity.
Another aspect we borrow from agile is time-boxed iterations where each task is given a duration of time for delivery. For our purposes we will start by keeping this simple using a task duration of 1 week elapsed for each task e.g. when an item goes into the Frame task we expect the sofa frame to be built and ready in the complete column one week later. This cycle frequency of one week can be controlled by limiting how many items are allowed in a task at any one time, another key Lean principle.
Here’s Richard checking out the new sales and production whiteboard for useful information while talking to a customer, before we’d even finished migrating work in progress to the board !
Summary
We want to manage our sales and production activities for sofas and chairs with some sensible limits and better visibility on what’s going on. The whiteboard and the visible process framework set the basis for this and then the post-it notes quickly identify task item volumes and progress. We can write other controls directly on the board e.g. the limit of items allowed in any one task at a time, the name of the person owning a task item etc.
And finally because its on a whiteboard together we can easily keep improving the idea, and of course we’ll progressively begin to migrate elements of the process to Digital as and when there is justification !
If you’re interested in knowing more and think your business could benefit from sharing in these ideas please email me at: ben@cautionyourblast.com
Wawa sofas and chairs can be seen at: www.wawa.co.uk
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