The misuse of lean manufacturing tools in service is rampant.  There is a risk of getting the ire of the toolheads for not promoting what systems thinking is about and instead attacking blatant errors in thinking in lean.

John Seddon has written an important article (Why Management Tools Don’t Work) on the subject of takt time that follow up from his book “Freedom from Command and Control.”  In the srticle John makes important distinctions between manufacturing and service.  With takt time in manufacturing Taiichi Ohno (in the Toyota Production System) was trying to make cars at the rate of customer demand.  But in service industry we do not have this problem.

The use of takt time in service is to maximize productivity of the individual and not to focus improvement  efforts on the system as both Mr. Ohno and W. Edwards Deming advocated. 

John Seddon points out the three things that make takt time flawed for service.  In my words, I summarize these thoughts.

  1. Demand is the greatest opportunity to improve.  Takt time ignores the fact that in service we have failure demand (demand caused by a failure to do something or do something right for a customer), instead it treats all demand as work to be processed.  This paramount to being efficient with waste.
  2. The variety of the work.  We are not processing standard pieces of material like manufacturing.  Each demand is unique in the way it comes in and how it is handled.  To treat each service transaction the same is to create more failure demand.  Focus of the work by the worker is on the standards using takt time and not the variety.
  3. Command and control is perpetuated.  The use of takt time is used to wield control over the worker in service.  Something Mr. Ohno would have disliked, yet, lean tools and their users ignore saying things like “we have to convince management first.”  The problem is they are perpetuating the problem.

The takeaway from what John Seddon is (and has been) sharing with us is that service is different than manufacturing.  Service is different by the variety of demand offered at the points of transaction and building standardized systems where variety is great is a costly mistake.

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Make the new decade a profitable and rewarding one, start a new path here.  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about how to get started at tripp@newsystemsthinking.com.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

Tripp Babbitt is a columist (Quality Digest and IQPC), speaker, and consultant to private and public service industry.