Sound familiar?
Start with the symptom. We point to the cause.
Most operational problems are familiar patterns with familiar root causes. Find your symptom below. Each page describes the pattern, the causes behind it and the first concrete steps.
Manufacturing
- Too much waste in production?Waste in production is rarely visible as waste. It hides as “the way we do things here”: buffers that feel reassuring, waiting time perceived as natural, rework that has become routine. The sum is capacity that disappears without anyone being able to point to where, and it can’t be removed until it is made visible.
- Low OEE, and hard to see why?An OEE of 60% means that 40% of the planned production time doesn’t create good parts. It isn’t a grade — it is a map of where the capacity disappears. But only if the number is honest, and only if someone reacts to it.
- Changeover times eating your capacity?Long changeover times are expensive twice: first as downtime, and then as everything they force on you — large batches, high inventory, long lead times and poor flexibility towards customers. The good news: changeover time is one of the most rewarding places to improve, because the gains can typically be harvested through organisation rather than investment.
- The same machine stops — again and again?There is a difference between repairing a machine and removing a breakdown. The repair gets the machine going again; but if the root cause isn’t found and removed, the repair is just a pause until the same stop comes back. Recurring breakdowns aren’t a maintenance problem — they are a system problem.
- Delivery times slipping — again?When deliveries slip, the reflex is to tighten planning: more meetings, more expediting, more frequent status updates. But planning can’t save a flow that is broken. Long and unreliable delivery times are almost always a symptom of too much work in progress, an overloaded bottleneck or unstable processes, and none of that is solved in the planning meeting.
Administration
- Case-handling time too long?A case that takes three weeks to process typically contains less than an hour of actual work. The rest is waiting: the case sits in inboxes, waits for information, waits for approval, waits for the colleague who is the only one who can do the next step. Long case-handling time is rarely a resource problem — it is a flow problem.
- The backlog grows no matter what you do?When the pile grows, effort is increased: overtime, temps, weekend shifts. The pile shrinks a little, and grows again. That is the sure sign that the problem isn’t effort but system: either structurally more comes in than capacity can handle, or capacity is eaten by rework, interruptions and duplicated work that no one has made visible.
Management
- Every day is one long firefight?Firefighting feels productive — you’re solving problems all day. But most of the day’s fires are re-runs: the same stop, the same shortage, the same customer escalation as last month. Firefighting’s real price is not the fires that are put out, but everything that never gets done: the prevention, the improvement and the planning that could have prevented next week’s fires.
- Operations resting on a few key people?The test is simple: what happens if your most experienced employee is signed off sick for three weeks tomorrow? If the answer gives you a knot in the stomach, operations are carried by people, not by systems. It isn’t only a risk in illness and resignations; it is also a daily bottleneck, because everything has to pass through the same few heads.
- Board meetings that don’t move anything?The board meeting is the Lean world’s most copied ritual, and the most frequently hollowed out. The board hangs there, the meeting is held, but nothing moves: status is read out, red numbers are noted, and everyone goes back to what they came from. A board meeting without consequence isn’t management; it is a daily reminder that deviations are acceptable.
- The improvements don’t last?It is the most common pattern in improvement work: the project succeeds, the results are celebrated, the project group is disbanded, and six months later everything has slid back. The conclusion often becomes “Lean doesn’t work here”. But what failed wasn’t the method. It was the anchoring: no one owned the standard, no routine detected the slip, and management’s attention had moved to the next project.
- The strategy never reaches the floor?The strategy seminar went well. The plan is sharp, the slides are polished, and everyone nodded. But three months later the day-to-day is exactly as before: operations run on their own logic, and the strategic goals live only in the quarterly report. The problem is rarely the strategy — it is that there is no chain translating the executive team’s goals into what happens on the floor at nine o’clock on a Tuesday.
Can’t find your symptom?
The operations check asks eight questions and gives a preliminary read in a few minutes, whether or not your problem is on the list.
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