HOW NZ POST MADE ME LOOK LIKE A GENIUS

[NOTE: Parts of this article are based on true events; namely Toyota's implementation of LSS and my experiences with New Zealand Post]

Sometimes I’m a freaking genius!

Yes, it’s all about the proverbial ‘glass half full’ approach.

You see, I work for this monstrous-sized organisation and everything we do is done on a grand scale.

But when everything is done like that – it costs bucket loads of money. And let’s face it, the world’s contemporary CEOs like everything to be done on a massive “we’re better than everyone else” scale; but they want to do it on a budget equal to the price of a McDonald’s Happy Meal. So we have this kind of mismatch between what our bosses want us to do and how they expect us to do it.

Yes… I hear you chuckling smugly – you know exactly what I mean.

And in my organisation the bosses are always crying out “we want value for money” and running around looking for ways to cut costs. For example – if we didn’t have customers draining our front-end staff’s time imagine how much that would save the business. And if we didn’t have to manage all those contracts for which we get paid millions, we wouldn’t need to have people sitting in back-room offices whose job it is to actually develop and manage contracts.

In short, if we didn’t have paying customers and we didn’t need to run profitable contracts; we’d be able to reduce business costs and be far more efficient.

Brilliant!

Recently my company sent me on a training course to learn how to be a Green Belt in the art of Lean Six Sigma. Yes I know what you’re thinking, why would they want me to learn Karate? Well, although it does sound like a martial art, Lean Six Sigma (or LSS) is actually a Japanese business model designed to generate efficiency. It was invented by the Toyota car company who wanted to make their production lines as lean and as efficient as possible.

The basic premise of LSS as used by Toyota was that they could measure things like how many times did you have to turn the wheel nuts on a car before they were tight enough? And could the number of turns be reduced without compromising customer satisfaction?

What Toyota found was that ‘yes’, you could reduce the number of turns without compromising customer satisfaction. You see, a satisfied customer only wants to see that the car has four wheels on it. They assume that the nuts are tight enough – but the assumption isn’t related to customer satisfaction; only the expectation that the car has four wheels on it.

So they worked out that they could implement a LSS improvement by reducing the number of turns. Sure the car isn’t as safe - but the labour cost is reduced and this means that profits are higher while costs to the customer are lower. So not only does the car have four wheels on it, it now has a cheaper price tag. And that means the customer is even more satisfied.

Until the wheels fall off… but hey, you get what you pay for.

Anyway, I digress. As part of my LSS project I had to find a business process that I could improve. And my boss actually had one in mind. You see, our organisation has a lot of paperwork that it is required by law to keep – tonnes of it in fact. And we have to store it all in massive warehouses that cost a fortune to keep and maintain. It’s ridiculous!

And my boss wanted me to reduce our storage costs.

My problem was logistical – the amount of material we needed to store couldn’t be reduced but most storage spaces available for lease at the size required were generally around the same price.

What a headache of a problem.

Then my moment of genius…

It happened by accident really. I wasn’t even at work. I was at home one evening browsing on-line and I saw a DVD that I’d been looking for for quite a while. So I purchased it over the net.

Well the DVD retail company was good, got it in the post the next day and sent me a tracking number so I could monitor its delivery progress through New Zealand Post.

Three weeks later and I was still waiting. According to New Zealand Post’s brilliant online tracking system – they’d collected it but it hadn’t moved since.

I contacted them.

They began an investigation.

They sent me a letter to say they’d begun an investigation.

I got the letter. Still didn’t get my parcel.

Two more weeks…

And that’s when it hit me – the solution to my company’s problem...

So I went to work the next day, contacted our storage warehouses and told them to package up all our files and post them back to our own company. Two months later and we have emptied out all our warehouses and cancelled the leases. New Zealand Post has all our files trapped in their system indefinitely and we’re saving a fortune on storage costs.

Thanks New Zealand Post, I might get a promotion thanks to you.

Anyway, that's what I think and usually I'm right