The danger of sticking plasters in the workplace

How often do you see people creating additional tasks to solve problems at work? New checks are introduced, items have additional labels attached and additional meetings are added to the schedule to review problems. You see signage displayed across the work area warning people of potential problems. Instead of identifying the true-root cause of the issue and then addressing it at source, people create new and often onerous tasks that mask the real problem and introduce process wastes.

I call these additional and often unnecessary tasks “sticking plasters”, as they don’t solve the issue but instead deal with the symptom. And, I frequently come across many examples of sticking plasters being deployed to address business problems.

At Argos, I helped to resolve a nationwide stock-loss issue that was haemorrhaging £2 million a year. The issue was that multi-pack outer-cartons of items were being picked and sent to stores instead of the single packs inside them. In some multi-pack outer-cartons, there would have been as many as 12 boxes of 12 small items, so the unsuspecting customer may have received 144 of an item instead of one.

These multi-packs were sometimes identified at store but also sometimes sold to unsuspecting customers who, when opening their purchases at home, would find that instead of one single item, they had multiples of them. Of course, some customers were kind enough to return these items to the stores, but others didn’t.

This sounds like a simple problem to solve, however, across the UK, the distribution centre teams were trying numerous things to address it, with limited success. Despite continual nationwide efforts to resolve the issue, they were unable to significantly reduce the stock-loss.

I was asked to help. I arranged and ran a workshop with representatives from all distribution centres, members of the distribution audit team and representatives from retail stores.

I got the group to: go, see and understand what was happening on the shop-floor. This is a lean technique called Genchi Genbutsu in the renowned Toyota Production System. They observed in detail what was going on and collected data on process wastes. They identified the following sticking plasters, which had been deployed to deal with the symptom:

• Warning signs were displayed to warn pickers of pick locations where there were SKU’s with multi-pack outer cartons, however, there were so many warning signs that pickers often ignored them. To make matters worse, the warning signs were not always updated when a different SKU was allocated to the pick-slot.

• Voice-picking audible prompts were deployed to warn pickers of multi-packs but as above, they were used excessively, so people ignored them. They were also not always updated correctly, resulting in pickers having little confidence in them.

• Some multi-packs were allocated to a separate area. Items were then decanted from their outer-cartons. This double-handling of products was extremely costly and not fully effective, as multi-pack items first needed to be identified.

Root Cause

I used structured brainstorming and a fishbone (Ishikawa) diagram to confirm the root cause.

The root cause and solution were very simple. The specification of the packaging that the products were being shipped in, had limited indication on the boxes that they were multi-packs instead of single items. Importantly, most of these brown outer-boxes were from direct-import suppliers in the Far-East.

There was a common perception across the business, that changing the packaging would be extremely difficult because many of Argos’ suppliers also supply the same products to other businesses. The supplier base was huge, and it was therefore believed that introducing a change to packaging across all of the suppliers would be almost impossible.

The fact that most of the SKU’s were direct-import, however, meant that Argos had a great deal of control and influence on the specification of these products including the packaging. They had already set-up offices in the Far-East to work directly with the factories on Argos’ requirements. This was therefore within Argos’ control and something that could be resolved relatively easily.

Solution

I implemented a group mail distribution list for all site teams to use to communicate the details of SKU’s that were not easily identifiable as multi-packs. All emails sent to this email address would be sent to champions at all sites, so they could make their teams aware of the risk on those items. The emails were also sent to key people within the team at Head Office that managed Direct Import lines. This team would then contact the offices in the Far-East asking them to change the packaging, so that multi-packs would be easily identifiable.

Within a few months, the £2 million a year problem was reduced to £1 million. We had limited the use of sticking plasters. We had instead, focused our efforts on dealing with the root cause.

So, I hope that you now understand the danger of sticking plasters in the workplace.

Next time you have to deal with a business problem, don’t just get a sticking plaster and then leave it on. Identify and deal with the root cause. Sticking plasters should only ever be a temporary fix!

I hope that this has been an interesting and useful read. Please feel free to contact me to see how I can help you approach change.