Sachin Gopalakrishnan

used to be an avid Age OF Kings player. For those not in the know, it’s a multiplayer game played on an online gaming portal. You can form teams and compete against other teams. If you prefer you can also play a one-on-one i.e. two players compete.

Over the years i realized that a few concepts really stuck on to me even after i quit the game years ago. The reason i list them here is because i would rather jot them down here than anywhere else. Also it helps me give myself a perspective.

Here goes ..

1. Start Early

One of the most important aspects of the game was managing your economy. If you last the initial battles, then the strength of your economy alone will decide the course of the game.

Translated into life, this means start saving small but start saving!! The longer period you can save the greater the time your interest accrues to provide higher returns.

2. Give It All

Put in the maximum effort that you can in each and every battle, you might just win by a small margin, but a win is a win at the end of the day.

3. Salvage

The real good players never fought a losing battle and salvaged whatever they could, whenever they could.

This strategy might be slow and boring but in the long run it works.. and it works well!! Don’t batter yourself on a lost cause. You have to live to fight another day!

4. Controversy Is Short Lived

Kids quite often used to curse and call each other names just to garner attention.The name/fame associated with such incidents quickly fade from public memory.

Only true skill, ability will stand you in good stead over the long run.

5. It’s All In The Mind

I remember feeling very low before a game and totally exhilarated after a win just 15 minutes later. It was only a case of mood. He agrees.

6. Develop Good Habits

Habit yourself to always protect yourself (in game) and you will naturally construct a wall even without thinking every time you play.

Develop good habit in your daily life and you shall never go wrong. This is very similar to my stress on developing good processes than relying on people.

That’s it.

I was going through my RSS feeds in google reader and realised that i needed to either change my reading habit or remove a list of feeds which i never read. I went through these lists to check if there was anything which would interest me enough to not give them the cut!

Finally i removed a few, added a few and left alone a few. This made me think about the type of content i wished to see daily. I seem to prefer people with action items more than people with ideas. For example, i read the Microsoft Excel Blog a lot more than Seth Godin. This is not to say that iam not interested in ideas, i really am. But little Tid Bits do not seem to water my appetite any which way.

Also i preferred The Web Urbanist to Guy Kawasaki. Guy seemed more of a sensationalist even if brilliant on occasions with his mix of humour and intellect. I stick with the urbanist.

I realise that my preferences have changed over time. I preferred ‘Ideas’ in B-School and ‘Action’ now. Maybe my routine has got me more about thinking how to get things done rather than ponder on ideas which may or may not materialise in the future.

Top 5 Reason Why The Customer Is Always Right Is Wrong got me thinking on how many times we have had customers who are nothing but a cost to the company.

These customers generally form the Long Tail;

The phrase The Long Tail (as a proper noun with capitalized letters) was first coined by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article ^[1] to describe the niche strategy of certain business such as Amazon.com or Netflix. The distribution and inventory costs of those business allow them to realize significant profit out of selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers, instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. The group of persons that buy the hard-to-find or “non-hit” items is the customer demographic called the Long Tail….

Credit Card Issuers face such people all the time. If you were in a business of non standard products; how would you tackle this situation? Some software product companies circumvent this problem by trying to route support calls from rare customers and customers who only call never ask for paid support to the paid line.

What about a real tangible product like ours? The only thing they can do is to reduce the carrying cost of such customers to as minimal levels as possible. This helps them retain market share (credit cards are a highly competitive market) without being a burden on the bottom line.

There was a time when i used to work for a BIG company. I was paid a decent amount of money. I could afford a reasonably good lifestyle. But it was also a time when i had few pals and i had to drag myself to work 60% of the days.

I had colleagues then i had friendly colleagues then i had one or maybe two friends! Now i have almost all the staff as pals and i have never ever dragged myself to work. I enjoy the banter, the glib talk, the little fun we keep having over tea.

We have also posted a healthy growth over the past few months. I think the above two aspects i.e. we having fun and accomplish good work at the same time have been instrumental.

The clinching factor is not “fun + work“. It’s all of us coming to work with our own personalities. We are much likeable and agreeable in person than our work lives! This way we like each other and enjoy each others company. Which indirectly makes us more productive!!

Not having a work mode translates into living a better and happier life. We display the same emotions which we would have displayed out of work. We crib openly about work load, sometimes about pay. I know i get to hear the most of it as iam the boss!!

This might be a lop sided view of my world, but hey i still love it!!

An Information System should at the very least avoid duplicate work and keep processes as simple as possible.

A thumb rule to gauge the level of simplicity in any organisation is to consider the time and effort involved in training a new recruit!

The faster a new hire can be trained the higher are your chances in being effective and thus competitive.

We have a couple of hundred customers. Some of them work on about 5 - 10 projects at any given moment i.e. the projects which have a bearing on our production.

When the customers call us, they tend to use their project number as a reference code. This is very natural as they use the same code internally in their company and is easily recalled from memory.

We need to cross check each project and tally them with their purchase order numbers. Then tally the Purchase Order(PO) number with our Order Acceptance number(OA).

Once upon a time, this OA would have to be tallied with our Process Chart(PC) number.

PN - Used by Customer

PO - Used by Customer

OA - Used by Administration (our side)

PC - Used by Work Center (our side)

The arrows indicate “flow of thought” as in, using PN we know PO, using PO we know OA and so on..
#1

Later we changed the equation;

#2
[OA and PC numbers were made the same]

Now we could directly substitute PC for OA.

#3

I recently asked a customer to quote his PO so that we could easily pick up his order and provide him the requested information (status) quickly.

Now #3 has changed to,

This way the only loop the customer has to jump through is provide his PO.

It is extremely easy to teach someone to use the autofilter OR use “cntrl + F” in a spreadsheet. It might take us a few seconds.

Now try teaching the older system to a new comer!!

On the other hand the older system is cumbersome and confusing, especially to a person who is new in the organisation.

In an age when every person who comes in has to hit the ground running, this simplicity could give the company the ability to stay ahead of the curve!!

There is an update please see below.

We have a man in our machine shop. He has been working with this company for more than a decade. He began as a ‘helper‘; then graduated to work on the drilling machine and later in assembly. Now he is a staff member and is in charge of assembly.

He was promoted time and again in spite of other people being around because he was diligent as a worker. He took pride in his work. He was honest and a man of integrity.

His job now, is to collect materials and make them available for assembly. We call them collectively, Assembly Items. The items are scattered throughout the factory floor due to different processes and thus different machine work and thus different locations.

His job takes him hours just to collate one set. Imagine the productivity hours lost.

Collation of items should be imbibed into the process rather than have someone find and then collate it. Basically his job is redundant and is a useless activity. What we have done by promoting him is KILL his productivity. His job is a ‘pseudo job‘.

There are numerous such instances of productive people turned unproductive due to an un thoughtful promotion. In the above case if we decide to rectify the process and change the layout and in general make changes which will eliminate this pseudo job, his job will be rendered useless which is undesirable for such a worker.

This is a classic case where appreciation has become a bane for the incumbent.

update: There is a name for such phenomena, The Peter’s principle.

The principle holds that in a hierarchy members are promoted so long as they work competently. Sooner or later they are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent (their “level of incompetence”), and there they remain.

Peter’s Corollary states that “in time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out his duties” and adds that “work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence”.

How to not forget where you kept your keys. How to not forget paying any particular bill.

Now this is what most people do,

They keep the keys in the same place everyday, some place easily in sight while on the move.

They either pay it as soon as the bill arrives or keep a particular day of the month for paying bills.

The first one is the most effective because it almost always works. The second one is contingent upon our disposition to do the earlier assigned work right away.

Almost always its the process which is at fault and not people!

It’s been seven months since i have moved back to Bombay. Fiscal 2007 has been one hell of a year so far.

The Small Yet Significant Hits

• We have our new office ready for production. It will seat three more people.
• We have a new manual Crane setup, it has already chopped off considerable cutting time of rods and pipes.
• We have a new rack which eases up the storage problem even if only by a infinitesimal margin. Need more work here.
• We had a meeting with our subcontractors at the beginning of the first quarter. These were mostly about Quality Improvements and reduction in double work and waste. Baby steps to a high quality product. The effect is there for all to see albeit with an undesirable side effect (Increased Inventory).
• A semi-finished system is in place with controls. Now we need more checks built in. We finally have dealt with Roles and Responsibilities, there is still much to be done on this front but we have a start! Tracking has been achieved to a large extent. We still want more transparency with the production file.
• And finally the one BIG HIT .. GROWTH!!!

Figures are Year On Year[YOY]

24%

Our growth in ‘07 since April to September as can be seen is 24%. I have crossed out the rest of the entries under the ‘07 column as they do not take into account actual production during the period.

The blue line tapers down from month 7 as there has been no production since September. (October figures are pending as of the time of writing this post.) Note that the rise in month 7(October) is due to poor performance in the corresponding month in ‘06 (previous year).

Also note the sharp dip in the beginning of the fiscal and compare it with the red and the green lines. Production has shown negative growth in those periods until finally picking up in the following months. This is due to abnormal growth witnessed in April for ‘06 and low base in ‘05.

We expect the production to pick up in second half though not at the same growth rate. This possible deceleration is due to the high production rate during the previous years in the second half.
Other Changes
An Cad Operator has been hired for faster processing of designs. A new Manager has been hired for facilitating and co-coordinating efforts across the process chain.
So much more to do..
The changes in the offing are multifold,

EFFECT SHORT TERM

• Employ shifts in our bottle neck areas, to ease out traffic.
• Hire one more draftsman.
• Assign helpers to a particular set of machines to prevent unavailability. This will also allow the helper to be trained on his particular set of machines and thus breed skills in house.
• Create racks for Piston Rods for easier pick-up.

EFFECT LONG TERM

• Get people to document policies concerning their particular function. Redefine and revalidate if necessary.
• Create a new assembly area to facilitate faster Assembly and to separate assembly from the production line.
• Get a crane on another side of the shop floor, this should free up helpers.
• Standardize.
• Device a faster Assembly Line, time the current one.
• Have a design policy in place.

The journey finally begins…

One of our customers recently remarked that he wanted to reduce his follow up visits to our plant as it wasted his as well as our time.

Another of our customers sent us mail asking us to instruct our bankers to accept a 3% penalty on our bill for late delivery.

The Connection

The first one is obvious.

Each time a customer calls or visits us, at least, one resource has to attend to him or his call. The objective of the call is just to inquire about the status or for a follow-up of a particular order. e.g. Thee last time a customer walked in we had planner + manager + production in charge in attendance.

This means our resource is basically rendered useless by one engagement instance with the customer. If it’s a phone call it lasts for 3-5 minutes, if it’s a visit, it lasts for anything between 3-4 hours.

Some customers call as well as visit, some customers only call.

Now multiply this figure by a couple of hundred customers each year! So by any scale, we have already lost hundreds of productive hours.

So each customer blunts our ability to serve them by a penalty on our productivity.

Graph is for demonstration purposes only.

Reducing Productivity over increasing amounts of Phone Calls and Visits.

All the more reason to improve delivery schedule; don’t you think??

We had been facing a peculiar problem; Even though management gave clear instructions regarding priority of work orders inevitably a few units get into Assembly ahead of priority. This was the point when we realized that

WE DO NOT HAVE CONTROL!!

Production was controlled by the process and not by people. This might be because,

1. There was no mechanism in place for control.
2. There was no task and sub-process ownership.
3. No check and verification system in place.

How do we gain control?

We tried to pinpoint the problems. So we came up with a small list.

1. Process Opaqueness There was no way to find the status of the production for a particular order.
2. Ownership problems Sketchy work-roles/profiles.
3. Imbalanced Workflow One or two people in the system were overloaded with responsibilities.

We realized that disseminating information regarding any change in our priority list was critical. Since we were the ones to initiate it we made sure that henceforth we will distribute copies of the list too all parties concerned.

Transparency In an effort to make things a bit more transparent we realized, we need to allot tasks, duties and responsibilities and lay them out clearly. This will clearly show up any lapses in the system.

We decided that a bit of Overlapping of roles was ‘OK’ in case of special circumstances and is also desirable. Special circumstances generally meant absence of the incumbent.

Multiple Stages We separated and divided the process into multiple stages. Each stage was signified by a file and each file was allotted to different people along the process. We also made a proper indexing mechanism for ease in retrieval of data.

For e.g. If product ‘X’ is produced using 10 components and each of them has to pass through the following processes in the depicted order;

Cutting + Subcontracting > Follow-up > Inspection > Assembly > Dispatch

Ownership A file was made for each of the stages above thus dividing it. Each file was designated an owner, in short the owner was responsible for the file and thus that stage in the process.

Essentially the work order document will pass from file to file until it reaches the dispatch file.

This provides two kinds of information,

1. To which stage a component has progressed.
2. Where is the bottleneck?

Now we work on multiple work orders at a time, so at any given moment there are multiple work orders (we process almost 1200 a year) lying in any given file. This means to find out where each work order is we need some kind of indexing system. This is what we came up with.

[The colors are only indicative and do not form part of the actual sheet.]

The top row contains the work order numbers from 1-300, 300-600, 600-900 and finally 1200+. The left hand most column contains text which says 10th September, 20th September & 30th September. The rows are self explanatory, the left hand most column indicates the approximate dates when the particular work order arrives into this file

Each owner will fill in work order numbers in the appropriate column against appropriate sections 10th Sept, 20th Sept, 30th Sept. Each time a work order passes on to the next stage, the appropriate numbers are written down against appropriate columns and sections. This gives us the following information;

1. The ’stage’ of the Work Order.
2. The approximate time it was put in.
3. Bottleneck.
4. Control.

I sort of liken the system to a pipe with a series of taps at intervals. Each tap can be used to control the process, if assembly is loaded, slow down production, if production is loaded, reduce at subcontractors level so on and so forth.

As always we would need to fine tune the system to our needs and remove any chinks and consider modifications to it as time progresses.