Santa Claus Has Everything Wrapped Up Now
by Arne Roock and Henning Wolf
Rudy was in a bad mood! Once again, Christmas was around the corner, and he was pretty sure he couldn’t go on sick leave again this year. Last year, the doctor had already looked at him with a wary expression when he had come in to pick up his sick note. Granted, a Christmas depression was not exactly common among reindeer, but he had simply no longer been able to bear the time pressure, the countless overtime hours, Santa Claus’ constant bad mood and the increasing number of complaints from children because they had received either the wrong or damaged presents.
A grumpy Rudy entered the Christmas-gift workshop to punch the clock, but as a matter of fact the time clock was gone, and when he glanced around the hall, he didn’t believe his eyes: In the past, this place had always been a zoo. All gnomes, elves and reindeer used to run around frantically while a crimson-faced Santa Claus yelled tasks at them which they tried to fulfill as fast as possible. Now a quite relaxed atmosphere dominated the workshop. Everybody seemed to know exactly what to do. No one appeared to be stressed or overwhelmed with the workload, and Santa Claus himself meandered through the room holding a cup of mulled wine, making smalltalk with his employees here and there.
What happened next rendered Rudy completely speechless: A bell rang in the break, whereupon all the reindeer put aside their work, unstrapped their sleigh bells, and took out their moss lunch packs. Breaks? At Christmas time?! This was unheard of! At once, Rudy rushed over to his buddy Reinhart and asked him what had happened. Smacking his lips contentedly, Reinhart began to talk:
“After Santa Claus had suffered his third heart attack, we received an order from the ‘top management level’ that something has to change here. Well, you know Santa – until recently he has successfully waited out every initiative for change. Therefore we had to employ a different approach this time, ideally one that involved taking extremely small steps at a time. Renate came up with the idea to place all wish lists on the wall and visualize our workflow. This is what it looked like:
Some people were positively gawking when they saw how many things we have in process and what is listed in our Packlog! First Santa Claus insisted that it had to be like this, because after all everything has to be ready by Christmas. Then we discovered that this is actually not true: Due to the different time zones, Christmas is celebrated a few hours apart around the world. In addition, the gifts are not given on the same day in each country. In the United States gift-giving takes place on December 25. The small items that are slipped into children’s boots on Saint Nicholas Day in Germany need to be delivered on December 6, so we glued little post-it notes in different colors to the wish lists to visualize the different delivery dates. Last year’s returns were labeled with a yellow star – we wanted to deliver them first to increase the children’s satisfaction.
Then something unexpected happened: There were left over wish lists! We noticed that several items had actually been produced for the Easter Holidays or even for next year’s Christmas! This may be efficient if you have the capacity for packing many items at the same time, but of course it delays the delivery of really urgent goods that are currently yielding the highest Christmas Value. Therefore we put these wish lists aside. We then agreed that no one shall work on more than two gifts simultaneously (we call this WISH limit) to ensure that the individual packages are completed faster, and also to avoid mistakes. Moreover, our Wish Board made clear that the gnomes tend to fall behind with the gift-wrapping, causing unfinished jobs to pile up in their department, so we spontaneously dispatched two reindeer from the production department to support the packing team. Thanks to this step, we were soon able to reduce our Time-to-Christmas-Market significantly.
At last we convinced Santa Claus to introduce a brief, daily meeting for the entire team to discuss work-related topics, talk about which wish lists are being processed and how we can make further improvements – this process is called kaizen.
Eventually Santa realized that we can work very well without his yelling fits and constant barrage of instructions. His task is now mostly limited to periodically deciding which wish lists we have to process next. And he has begun to enjoy putting together diagrams which show our continuous improvements – he is particularly fond of his Cumulative Snow Diagram. Of course our customers benefit most from this development: For them, the Read Time has been reduced dramatically, which means now they have to spend less time reading Christmas stories while waiting for their gifts to arrive.”
Rudy was speechless. Originally, he had planned to beat it as fast as possible. Yet after what Reinhart had told him, he began to feel a strong urge to wrap a couple of gifts.
Merry Christmas and a happy new year!
P.S. You can download a printable version of this Chrstmas Story here
P.P.S. Do you want to learn more about Visualization, Pull and Flow? Attend our Kanban class with David Anderson
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