Phase Seven is characterised by getting more control over your workload.

A Typical Phase Seven Business

In Phases Five and Six, you removed a lot of wasted capacity by standardising and automating much of your work. However, there is a limit to this, you still have people who need to complete the process steps. A lot has changed within your business, but still, the day-to-day output is not consistent.

You often find that ‘waves of work' are proving very disruptive and wasteful. The build-up of queues of work ('wandering bottlenecks') is an issue that is hard to keep on top of, and it is intermittently, or even persistently, hard to stay current with the in-bound demand.

Whilst your people do get ahead on jobs, which is great, they are constantly under pressure to meet deadlines and cut-offs, yet you know your system is not running as fast or smooth as it could.

The consistent pressure to meet deadlines and cut-offs; and the ‘surging’ of work across resources means that there is a lack of time for cross-training and multi-skilling within the business.

The Transition Journey From Phase Six

You can start by identifying whether you have a persistent flow constraint, and when this is not the case, nominating a strategic constraint that will act as your workflow regulator.

Increasingly, you will exploit the constraint by ensuring the constraint’s output is as high as possible, while regulating the release of work to protect the reliability of high output from the constraint over time.

• Work that is not due for constraint processing will be held back, lowering the work-in-progress queues in operations.
• As your constraint output increases, more work will be released increasing overall productivity.

With the constraint in mind, you will implement process improvements and potentially software changes to smooth the flow of work through the business. You will be focusing on accelerating what cannot be eliminated or automated.

Your policies and procedures will become focused on supporting the constraint output to increase performance.

• Measures and policies will be updated to protect constraint output, and thus your overall system performance.
• Sometimes, you'll make team structure and responsibilities more flexible, ensuring business productivity is not sacrificed in the name of the department or individual productivity.

The Benefits of Completing Phase Seven

You’ll notice that work flows much smoother through the business, and your internal lead times of jobs through operations will decline.

• Spare capacity that was previously hidden becomes visible, that allows for training and cross-skilling of employees.
• As short-term deadlines approach, jobs which are actionable are automatically highlighted to ensure that these are handled at the right time (not too early and not too late), even whilst there is a long list of jobs in the queue.

The lower work-in-progress within operations will reduce the incidence of surging workloads, and any waves of work that do form will be broken up earlier. This means that the flow of work will be easier to control.

• Cherry-picking of jobs will decline, preserving the intended delivery sequence.
• On-time delivery fulfilment will improve.

Job costs will have reduced as late penalties decline, and the number of times an operator handles a job reduces.