Time Tips: Fix Problems Early

This is easy to illustrate with a short case history involving a person who is the secretary for a professional organization. He takes the meeting minutes and then sends them to the Webmaster. But, the minutes come with such intense and crazy formatting that they are unusable. This formatting was never an issue until this person began taking the minutes. Now, the problem isn't that he's an idiot--he's actually quite bright. The problem is in his method. In talking with him, I suggested he use the "Paste Special / Unformatted" feature. He had never heard of it. His solution had been to have his secretary at work re-key the entire document! This is a huge waste of time.

It's "fixing the problem after the product is built," rather than eliminating the problem at its source.

Just so you get the context here, this is one difference between Porsche and Toyota. The Porsche people fix the problems after the cars are built, but the Toyota people eliminate the source of the problem. That's one reason why Porsches are very labor-intensive and productivity at Porsche is lousy, while Toyota is the highest productivity automobile maker on the planet. You can find details about this in the book Lean Thinking. Get it here.