Saturday Matinee: The Lunchbox

As I was writing yesterday’s post, I was reminded of a film I saw on DVD a few months ago.  The movie was called The Lunchbox and it told the story of an unhappy housewife, hoping to revive her marriage, and a widower nearing retirement, who form an unexpected connection when Mumbai’s lunchbox delivery service mistakenly starts delivering the lunches meant for her husband to the older man’s office, instead.

I thought of the movie because essentially the lunchbox delivery service–known as the Dabbawala–poses a massive logistics and operations problem, delivering 400,000 lunchboxes each day from homes to offices all across the massive and crowded city.  The Dabbawala service has been held up as an example by the Harvard Business Review as a model of service excellence and NBC News has described it as the envy of Federal Express.  In the movie, when the housewife, Ila, contacts the service to complain that her husband’s lunchbox is being delivered to the wrong person, the person with whom she speaks insists that she must be mistaken, that the service is highly efficient, and was even the subject of a case study at Harvard Business School.

Given the high accuracy and success of the Dabbawala system, such a mistake happening over and over again seems very unlikely, and yet it makes for a good story.   Ila is a very talented cook, and over the course of the story, the man, whose name is Saajan Fernandes, looks forward to the amazing meals he will find in the lunchbox.  The two begin exchanging letters where they talk about their lives.

As they form an unlikely connection, Ila muses about the happenstance that has led them to communicate with each other in this way: “Sometimes the wrong train will get you to the right station” (a bit of folk wisdom which is repeated by Fernandes’ young colleague later in the film).

At another point, Saajan Fernandes makes an even more poignant observation when he notes that “I think we forget things if we have no one to tell them to.”

And that brings me to my questions of the day.  Have you ever found that the “wrong train” got you to the right destination?  Maybe you were doing something wrong for a long time and despite that you found what you were looking for?  We talk often about learning from mistakes, but I wonder what we learn when we don’t realize we are making a mistake and yet we still, somehow, manage to find the right answers?

Or, on the other hand, are there things you have learned that you worry about forgetting if you have no one to tell them to?

Learning from Business: Lean Production

In a previous post about the business model of prospect research offices, I mentioned that, as a result of efforts to increase productivity several years ago, my office started validating many more prospects than the development directors could meet with in a reasonable period of time.  We eventually developed such an oversupply of prospects and potential prospects that we scaled back on validating many more names for a while; in the meantime, we tried to figure out the best way of identifying and validating prospects to ensure that they ended up moving into the prospect pipeline.

As it turned out, concurrent changes in our division brought along changes in the way prospects were assigned, and that, in turn, gave us a new opportunity to reconsider the issue.  One of the changes we came up with was to start handling some elements of the prospect identification and validation process more like the reactive research request process.  While we continued doing proactive research and recording recommendations for assignment in our database, we started worrying less about pushing out names to development directors until they said they needed more names to work with.

Where in the past, we would have set a goal to identify or validate a large group of names and then push them out for assignment in batches as we finished them, now we identify and validate some of them as we go about our daily work, and we keep development directors apprised of the most interesting ones through e-mail alerts and our department newsletter, but we don’t focus on working through specific batches of validations until those batches are needed.

“Toyota Manufacturing UK – Assembly” by Toyota UK licensed under CC By-NC-ND 2.0

About two months after this change in our process last fall, while taking a course in business operations, I was introduced to the concept of lean production and “just-in-time” manufacturing.  Toyota engineer Taiichi Ohno is generally given credit for having initially developed the principles of lean production in the years after World War II, though others have further refined them since then.  There are several definitions of these concepts available online, as well as many websites devoted to teaching the principles, but for the sake of simplicity, I’ll just use a definition of “just-in-time” copied from Investopedia:

An inventory strategy companies employ to increase efficiency and decrease waste by receiving goods only as they are needed in the production process, thereby reducing inventory costs.

This method requires that producers are able to accurately forecast demand.

A good example would be a car manufacturer that operates with very low inventory levels, relying on their supply chain to deliver the parts they need to build cars. The parts needed to manufacture the cars do not arrive before nor after they are needed, rather they arrive just as they are needed.

This inventory supply system represents a shift away from the older “just in case” strategy where producers carried large inventories in case higher demand had to be met.

While the shift in my department’s work flow patterns hadn’t been inspired by the principles of either lean production or just-in-time, I couldn’t help but notice the similarities with the more efficient process we had recently adopted.  That, in turn, has gotten me thinking much more lately about how I can adopt more of the principles to effectively guide the work of my department.

Below is a list of ten basic principles of lean production that can be applied to any sort of work process:

1. Eliminate waste
2. Minimize inventory
3. Maximize flow
4. Pull production from customer demand
5. Meet customer requirements
6. Do it right the first time
7. Empower workers
8. Design for rapid changeover
9. Partner with suppliers
10. Create a culture of continuous improvement

Looking over that list now, I can identify areas for potential improvement, but more importantly, I see a list of topics and questions that can be asked regularly as I examine the flow of work through my department, or on a more general level, as I plan or structure days or weeks, both at work and at home.

The concept of lean production has a great power to transform the way we work and the way we use our time.  Writing about it again now, I think it is something I definitely need to keep exploring, and, where possible, applying to my work.

Have you applied any of the concepts of lean production in your workplace?  If not, what principle(s) do you think you would choose to focus on first?  And if you have applied the concepts, what changed as a result?

Prospect Research Questions: What is your business model?

When I started in prospect research many years ago, the idea of a business model or even the applicability of business concepts to the work I was doing was foreign to me.  After attending my first conference and hearing from experienced and successful researchers, my view of the matter began to change.  I took what I learned at that conference (and subsequent ones) and applied it, and eventually became skilled at tracking all sorts of metrics for the work of my office.

Tracking productivity is one of the first steps towards analyzing your department’s business model.  Most researchers already track things like the number of requests they receive, the number of profiles they write, or the number of prospects they validate.  It takes more of an effort to track things like capacity confirmed or increased capacity identified, but it is not difficult to do.  Beyond that, there are things like prospects identified, or prospects identified by different researchers, as part of different projects, or through the use of particular resources.

The important thing is that once you start tracking these numbers, the way you think about them changes.  Many years ago, it was very easy to justify the change in the work produced by my office from a profile-centered model to one that focused more on validating screening data and producing fewer profiles, simply because it was easy to point to the differences in productivity judged by the number of prospects and potential prospects that could be identified, researched quickly, and assigned out to fundraisers for initial contact.

It was easy for us to point to and justify our productivity based on the metrics we were tracking.  But as is often the case, the numbers we were tracking, only told one part of the story.  In reality, my office had became so efficient at validating and identifying new prospects we eventually discovered that we had an oversupply of prospects and potential prospects who weren’t being contacted.  And that, in turn, has required further adjustments in our business model.

I have written in several posts already about the shift in the profession to a focus on prospect development, but one of the crucial reasons for the shift is–again–a change in the business model to one that is more focused on maximizing the efficiency and impact of our work.  Analytics offers a way to help do that by making sure we are directing our efforts on identifying and assigning the right prospects; likewise, taking a more active role in relationship management helps to insure that the work we are doing is having an impact.

In my most recent post, I wrote about customer service and smartphones; it may have seemed like a shift in focus for my blog away from topics such as research, data analysis, and prospect development; in some ways it was, but in other respects, the idea of customer service is something that prospect development offices always want to keep in mind when going about their work. In future posts, I plan to say more about how thinking about customer service can further transform the prospect development business model.

If you work in fundraising, how would you describe the business model of your prospect research or prospect development office?  How has it changed over time, and what drove those changes?  Please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments below.

Do Smartphones Undermine Customer Service?

As we head into the Independence Day holiday weekend, many people will be going away on trips, and when they do, they will be bringing their smartphones with them so they can keep up with e-mails and business contacts.  It sounds like a great plan, right?  What could go wrong?

Lately I’ve had some frustrating experiences trying to take care of some personal business with people who were pursuing that very strategy.  It has led me to wonder if smartphones and other technology have caused too many people to disregard long-standing customer service practices.

“Love (of technology)” by Streetmatt licensed under CC by 2.0.

What do I mean?  Well, instead of people making arrangements to deal with their business clients while they are away or out of town, they just don’t respond or they take a long time to respond.  Instead of assigning a back-up who can handle things while they are away, or instead of making it clear to their clients when they will return and what they will or won’t be able to do in the interim, they just figure they can be reached on their smartphones and let things slide for a while.

So why am I blaming it on smartphones?  I think that for some people, the fact that they have a smartphone makes them believe that they can always be connected and so they don’t have to figure out a backup plan for the times when they are away or busy.  And, yes, some people really do stay connected like that all of the time, which is admirable (if not necessarily always wise), but few are that devoted.

Likewise, I’m sure many of us have had the experience of going into some business where service staff were preoccupied with their smartphones instead of being focused on or attentive to customers.  Now while that can be blamed on poor management–if they were not instructed to do otherwise–the reality is that such behavior even occurs in commission-driven businesses.  I’m not suggesting smartphones are the only reason for a decline in customer service, but they can be one of many contributing factors.

So what is to be done?  Those who work in a field where customer service is a key part of their responsibilities need to regard their smartphones as a useful tool, but one that can help them do their jobs better,  not one that alleviates them of responsibilities that they would otherwise have to worry about.

What are your thoughts?  Do smartphones contribute to a decline in customer service?  What have your experiences been?