Affected by the economic
recession, Starbucks started to look into the well-known lean process. As a
result, Starbucks was able to reduce its costs by $175 million in the third quarter
of 2009 [1]. The lean process is a method of cutting the waste and doing the
job in an optional way.
There are few details
in the article that convinced me Starbucks would succeed from the lean transformation.
First, Mr. Potato and
his team went to local Starbucks to observe/count the
time every process time takes in that particular store/activity and draw a
"spaghetti diagram" to track the movement of employee. In the lean
theory, this practice is a good first step in identifying action items to
optimize layout. Like Shoichiro Toyoda, the
president of Toyota said, waste is “anything other than the minimum amount of
equipment, materials, parts, space, and worker’s time, which are absolutely
essential to add value to the product.”
Second, Mr.
Potato and his team were able to use these process times to identify bottleneck
of the critical path, which is the resource that requires the longest time in operations.
The lean team were able to identify the drink preparation as bottleneck and
elevate the performance of the constraint.
At last but not least, Mr.
Potato has a lean philosophy of continuously improvement, which means there is
always room for improvement. There are some resources
which can you explore the lean process. You can get more information from Minimizing
Wasted Movement [3] and learn more about Lean Manufacturing Systems [4].
The lean theory is more
than just cutting expense, it is about how to make the job more efficient and
increase the overall value to the customers. However, employees are sometimes resistant
to the changes. Convincing the purpose of their work and making them confident
in the change direction will help. What else can help the company to create a
unified lean commitment?
Reference:
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