Warnock: Untangling Efficiency

There's a particular irony in the fact that one of the most useful tools for achieving more plays efficiently is named after the messiest dish in the kitchen.  A spaghetti diagram—so named because the lines tend to resemble a bowl of cooked pasta—is a brutally honest mirror of how workflow actually occurs as opposed to the perception of how it occurs.    

The Gap Between Process and Reality

Every team has a process on paper.  It’s where idealized versions regarding flow efficiency (tech efficiency) reside; then reality hits.  

While working late one night at one of my shops, I wondered how many steps it took to get to the oil filter rack and back. I wondered how many times we were doing that throughout the day, the month, and the year and whether it was causing efficiency pinches. It was then that I began researching Lean Six Sigma data-driven methodology and spaghetti diagrams to increase efficiency.

Drawing the Mess

Efficiency should be at the forefront of what we should all be looking at in terms of how we can improve and create a better work environment. A spaghetti diagram begins with a map of a floor plan.

Whatever your shop looks like, trace actual paths that techs and team members travel throughout the day and plot them on the floor plan. The beauty of this approach is that it removes abstraction; instead of talking about inefficiencies in theoretical terms, you map it with physical representations of wasted motion. And quite honestly, there is a reason why spaghetti diagrams are sometimes met with resistance.

Tangled lines mean tangled processes!  

Before and After

What makes spaghetti diagrams especially powerful is their ability to generate a clear before-and-after story. Once you've mapped out the current state and then implement efficiency improvements by rearranging the floor plan to reduce handoffs and consolidate tools, you can place the two diagrams side by side and compare and contrast the results. The findings are often dramatic, and you can continue to refine them until you define a handful of clean and direct paths.

The Lesson in the Tangle

There's something philosophical about the spaghetti diagram as a concept because it asks us to stop pretending our processes are as orderly as our org chart suggests and starts paying attention to what actually is happening in the shop. Efficiency isn't achieved by layering speed on top of disorder; it's achieved by seeing the disorder clearly and then working patiently to straighten it out.

Over the past three years, I've used spaghetti diagrams and two of my three shops increased in efficiency. They’re especially useful when you take over an existing floor plan that you cannot alter, but you can find a better system that works for your team.

I used to take stopwatches along with spaghetti diagrams to tell me where my pinch points were, and whether I was setting my team up for failure because my floor plans were inefficient. I would encourage all of us as we continue to push the envelope from good to great in our shops to look at spaghetti diagrams. If you think that your technicians are inefficient, is the floor plan the reason?

We should all be striving to be efficient for the people that we work for and that starts with our shops’ efficiency.

I would be happy to help anybody that needs a hand in mapping out a spaghetti diagram in their shop space. Please reach out to me if I can help.