As a long time Project Manager and continuous improvement devotee, I’m always looking for ways to make small tweaks that will make things better. Lean Manufacturing principles focus on removing waste from manufacturing processes, but you can also apply those same principles to your services business (and we do).  Lean Manufacturing method identifies a total of eight wastes that can be removed from processes, but for the purposes of this article we will focus on removing defects.

It is easy to understand defects in manufacturing. If you are making a part and it is supposed to be round, you can’t use it if it comes out oval. Each defect has a cost for materials, time and inspection, i.e. what it costs you to find the defect. Produce too many defective parts, and your manufacturing costs go way up. So, defects are bad. There’s even a tool for measuring how bad they are. It is called a Failure Modes Effect Analysis, or FMEA.

While the name of the tool might make your eyes glaze over, it is really quite simple. How frequently will the defect occur? How disastrous will be the result if it happens? How easy is it to spot the failure? Failure of a single grain of popcorn to pop in your batch of popcorn? Not too frequent (less than 1% per batch), no big impact (unless you eat it and crack a tooth), and easy to spot. Failure of an “O” ring on a space ship? Not too frequent, but hard to spot and truly disastrous results.

Let’s use an example from daily life about how to apply this. My family eats a lot of roasted vegetables. They are delicious and healthy, but they are sometimes forgotten in the oven and burn, resulting in vegetables that need to get thrown out. Frequency? About 50% of the time (for me, at least). Easy to spot? Yes, either visually or by the smell. Impact? Significant for that batch of vegetables because the whole batch must be thrown out. My solution to eliminate the defect? I started roasting my vegetables in my toaster oven. I set the timer to 20 minutes and forget them. They come out perfectly every time.

How can you apply this principle to your service business? First, identify a defect that is causing rework, scrap or incorrect information. Get data about how frequently that defect occurs, but don’t rely on someone saying “It happens all the time.” Dig down and get multiple examples to understand the frequency. Then find out who spotted the error? Was it someone at your company, or was it the client? The impact when spotted by the client is significantly higher than when it is spotted internally. Figure out how much time and materials it cost you to find and fix the defect. Then do a root cause analysis by asking “why”, “why”, “why” and solve for that. If a report is sent to the customer with typos, perhaps every report needs to be proof-read by another employee. If different people perform the same service differently, perhaps you need to re-train them to do it the same way.

Fixing defects in your business will improve so many things – your employee’s happiness, your customer’s satisfaction and your bottom line