Mizen Boushi is a Japanese term (Used in Toyota Product Development Systems and others in Japan) for Mistake Prevention or "designing in quality". It seems to be a cousin of Poke Yoke which is on a smaller scale, "mistake proofing", on physical things. The notch in your Mobile Telephone SIM card is a Poke Yoke method to make sure that you can put it inside the mobile phone in only one way!

Mizen Boushi in Product Design is making sure that manufacturing mistakes or assembly mistakes cannot be made by altering the product design itself in such a way that mistakes are not possible. For example, car platforms and subsystems like chassis, drive trains, engine assemblies are standardized and tested in so many models that by now you have a very good idea of how reliable they are and how easily manufacturable they are without making quality mistakes.

Then each year for a major automobile model redesign or minor redesign for that model year you just redesign the external appearances, body, etc leaving the component systems the same. This way you are reducing the total number of mistakes that can be made in the whole design and manufacture of the car.

Mistake proofing or Mizen Boushi is just as applicable to business processes or service processes just the same way they are for product design and manufacturing.

People, Process and Tools can be addressed systematically for mistake proofing business processes.

Mistakes are made with people with respect to capacity or capability. In a business process if there are not enough people with the right skillsets at the right time to meet demand at that time, capacity mistakes are made. If enough people with the right skills are not available in a business process or service process, then capability mistakes are made. Multiskilling of people is a very effective way of addressing both problems. The more the breadth of skills of people involved in a business process, the more the organization and the individual get out of it. For the organization, they can leverage people in other business processes that do not have enough to do in those that have peak demand. For the individual, being useful in multiple parts of the organization, and needed, results in higher morale!

Process mistakes can be avoided by initial and ongoing training and extensive on the job training with periodic skill upgrades. Extensive documentation of the process as well as easy and ready access to these while doing the job (like online PDF documents, for example) can all be good ways to reduce process mistakes.

Mizen Boushi can be implemented extensively in Tools. Most business processes use software applications or products as tools. Extensive onscreen validation of what is being typed in, as well as clever mistake proofing can go a long way. For example, instead of asking for the city and then the zip code, have the person type in the zip code, the system pulls up the city and is verified. Mistakes made in typing in the city wrongly can be avoided. They can all be simple things by themselves, but together, they add up to more prevention of mistakes! Monitoring of system availability, usability studies, monitoring of system response time, monitoring of network availability can all be other mistake proofing techniques.

Mizen Boushi can just as easily be applied to business processes and services!

It’s always helpful to learn from your mistakes because then your mistakes seem worthwhile! - Garry Marshall

Accidents and Traffic Jams have a lot to teach about Capacity Planning for Business Processes!

Whether it is Claims Processing or Home Loans or Help Desks, processes invariably deal with traffic jams.

Usually, there could be long, serene periods, when things are flowing smoothly; no customer is waiting on the phone long enough to be annoyed, and the people providing the service are not overworked and cranky!

Then there are peak periods in a Year when processes see Peak Volume - Day of the week, Month ending, Quarter ending crush or Annual crush (like Tax return time for tax preparers!) when peak volumes of work are seen in short bursts confounding the most diligent of capacity and work force planners!

Traffic Jams have taught traffic planners that when 70% to 80% of the capacity of any road is fully used, any small perturbation will cause massive slowdown for everyone. If an accident happens in one lane, every lane slows down because cars in the lane where the accident happens slow down to merge with the lane to their right or left whichever is available. This makes the entire traffic slow down even if you have five or six lanes each way!

The effect of any perturbation is less and less felt as the capacity utlization at any time is less than 70%. There is enough spare capacity for the other lanes to take up the slack and you may not have a traffic jam that requires everyone to slow and stop.

In a Business Process, capacity planning can always benefit by keeping the overall utilization less than 70% at any time. Novice managers may look at this and say that this is a waste of resources. But compared to the agony and customer dissatisfaction that may be caused by traffic jam equivalents in Business Process, and the consequent delays and waits you may subject customers to, this may be a small price to pay.

One of the things striking about Toyota or even many other Japanese automobile factories is that for the first two years they really do not care about the production throughput that much. They are using that time to fix problems by addressing root causes permanently!

When these factories are in full production, unlike other automakers they may not run their assembly lines in three shifts! Most of these plants do only two shifts and the third shift is used for finishing up planned production for the other two shifts as well as addressing root causes of problems faced in the assembly line as well as preventive maintenance of the facilities.

This ensures that everyday’s production schedule is met, you may have fixed problems before they occur, permanently. Preventive maintanance ensures that machines are inspected, lubricated and ready for the next day!

Business Processes should use the same concept and never plan for using capacity any more than 70%. This way, in the long run they may come out ahead rather than attempt for more utlization than the 70%. You may come out ahead on efficiency, but your effectiveness may have suffered irreparably!

Something to think about!

He who fails to plan, plans to fail - Proverb

Automobile design is a very intense process in a very intensely competitive industry. Design of new cars used to take five years or more, even as little as ten years ago. Now the industry average is closer around three years and the Toyota Prius design cycle was slightly less than two years end to end.

These days, automobile design has been greatly helped by building different versions of cars on the same standardized, tested, proven platforms of chassis, engine, etc, The design is more about mixing and matching slight variations of basic designs with more expensive cars getting better fit and finish, reduction of noise with better mountings, doors more flush, etc.

Design tasks for completely new automobiles are mixed in with updates for current model years, and you can see that the design people are kept busy throughout the year. Plus, it is a highly sequential process where the basic design paper is converted into clay models, the specs for different sub systems worked out and then the setting up of the manufacturing preparations like stell sheet stamping Dies (for doors, body panels, etc), etc to be done before production starts. So just like a business process, different steps are very sequential and deadlines are to be met without any letup. Missing any process step may mean others downstream may miss their own crucial deadlines putting an entire product line in jeopardy.

This is where project management systems like the Toyota Product Development System can teach us two major lessons:

a. Interweaving of Process Steps Reducing Waste of Time of Resources, especially people’s skills.

b. Multiskilling and emphasis on Breadth of skills in addition to increase in Depth of skills.

When one specialist in Die design is done with the design of a totally new stamping die for a new model, may immediately get a die review and redesign assignment for a Model Year update (minor changes if at all from one model year to another). This is to ensure that the resources down the Design Production Line always have something coming down the assembly line for them to work on.

No waste of time of highly skilled, valuable resources.

The second major aspect about the Toyota Product Development System is the incredible DEPTH of skilled people in one discipline plus increase of the BREADTH of skills in other automobile disciplines also, without fail. This will ensure decrease of mistakes in process handovers and also incredible empathy for the downstream people, A design engineer may have also spent lots of time on the manufacturing floor before coming back to design. So when they pass on designs on to manufacturing they are already aware of the potential problems and pitfalls in the next steps.

What does this have to do with Business Processes, especially in Services? Everything. These lessons are very applicable and valuable in any business process. Most business processes are like assembly lines in that they may already be using a queue approach to managing peoples’ time within the business process.

However may call centers’s holy grail is First Call Resolution - resolving the customers’ problem over the phone, chat or email, the very first time. This is not possible without multiskilling. If the first level call taker can resolve problems also in addition doing call routing, in case they don’t have the skills to resolve a problem. Many problems are repetitive ones with simple answers that can be closed by the first or second level support people.

Providing more autonomy and equipping them with multiple sets of skills goes a long way in achieving First Call Resolution.

Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely. - Auguste Rodin

Steven Arbogast has written a seminal article about Process Towers and how they can spoil the Process Improvement you can effect in any part of an end-to-end business process.

Steven uses an excellent example of a waiter taking your order at a restaurant with many variations, and special requests you may ask for, after looking at a menu. They usually have very little time to take down all these variations on a little slip of paper that they pass on to the kitchen. Between your order and the eating, many things can go wrong in the handoffs between the waiter, the kitchen, and the one or more chefs that may prepare what you ask for!

End-to-end processes may have many process towers in between, that can make a process go horribly wrong. In the end, it does not matter to the end customer, who among the process towers got things wrong about your order! Handoffs between processes are very sensitive and may need as much watching, as the process itself!

Process measurement is where these process towers can make sure that these handoffs are handled properly. Upstream Metrics and Downstream Metrics may need as much watching as the Process Metrics themselves. Each process may need to make sure that the handoffs from the previous process tower is done according to expectations - For an order management process to work properly, the previous order taking process tower may need to make sure that they handoff things properly. This is done by the Upstream Metrics. Once the order management process tower is done, handoffs to the production process tower may need to be handled properly. These can be ensured by the Downstream Metrics.

Process Towers are scary. Handoffs between them could wipe out any gains you may effect in any one single process tower. However, with proper management of metrics, Upstream and Downstream, from a proper process tower can ensure that handoffs are managed properly.

There’s many a slip twixt cup and lip - Proverb

The Futility of Call Center Coaching is a very interesting and thought-provoking article on how spending more money on coaching individual agents in a Call Center or on other business process participants is essentially a waste of money!

The author says that spending more money in improving the entire system, adding money to improve systems and call flows (or process flows) for the entire set of agents is actually money better spent than on coaching individual agents.

The author starts out quoting Edward Deming and his famous experiments that proved that perturbing a system introduces more variation and does not help in achieving greater quality. The same thing happens when one of the Call Center agents gets trained individually.

Improving the entire system with expenditures on better systems, automation of call flows (in case of Contact Center processes) or processes help improve the end result, for example, Customer Satisfaction Scores (CSAT).

The author also does a mathematical simulation of the above situation and proves his point. In practice, it is quite impossible to avoid individual coaching of agents, given employee turnover and new employees joining. The author makes a point that even in organizations with very modest turnover, the situation is still the same! So no point in wasting time on training individual agents if you want to improve end results!

The above study also makes a subtle case for applying lean techniques to business processes first. These improve the flows at the process level and improves things for all agents, eliminating complete steps in some cases.

Elimination of waste is always a better idea than training agents on skills that are spent on wasteful activities,anyway.

A system is a network of interdependent components that work together to try to accomplish the aim of the system. A system must have an aim. Without an aim, there is no system. ...A system must be managed. The secret is cooperation between components toward the aim of the organization. We cannot afford the destructive effect of competition." - W. Edwards Demindg, The New Economics