Continuous Improvement - The Humidifiers (Part I)

by Don Harkey

Everyday, every single of one of us engages in multiple processes. We drive to work, make our breakfast, open our email... there are countless processes throughout the day. At work, this is especially true. Many times, these processes are repeated over and over again.

Have you ever thought about how much time you actually spend on a process? If you spend 5 minutes per day doing something, you will spend 1825 minutes doing it per year, which is over 30 hours. That's almost a weeks worth of work! Most organizations would really think hard about offering their employees an extra week of vacation, but few think about adding 5-10 minutes or more to a process that is repeated.

I want to give you a simple example of continuous improvement. Our office has 3 large humidifiers located down a long hallway. These humidifiers must be filled at the start of each day. I am at work pretty early, so I am often the one who fills them. Each humidifier has 2 tanks on it that can be removed. At one end of the hallway is a janitor's closet with a hose where the tanks can be easily filled.

The first time I did this, I went to the far end of the hallway, picked up both tanks, then carried them to the janitors closet. I then collected the 2nd humidifier's set of tanks, and then the 3rd set. I removed the cap on the first tank, placed it in the closet, and filled it with water. I stood and watched as it filled. When it was completed, I took the tank out of the closet, placed it on the floor and secured the cap back onto the tank. Then I took the next tank, removed the cap, placed it in the closet, and filled it up. I again waited as it filled (takes about 30 seconds). Once it was filled, I shut off the water, removed the tank from the closet, placed it on the floor, and replaced the cap. I then grabbed the 2 tanks, walked to the farthest humidifier, and installed them. I then repeated this process two more times for the remaining sets of tanks.

One problem I ran into early on was involved the fact that there are left-handed tanks and right-handed tanks. The difference can be seen easily, but its not overly obvious (especially to someone who is a little sleepy!). One morning, I wasn't paying attention and I carried two left-handed tanks to the farthest humidifier. I realized my mistake immediately, and carried the wrong tank to the other humidifier and then returned to the closet to fill up two right-handed tanks.

While I didn't time the process (although I plan to soon as a great example), I probably spent 10-15 minutes filling the humidifier each morning. Considering that the humidifiers run for 6 months of the year, this means that company employees will spend 25 hours per year filling the humidifiers.

So how do we improve this process? It is too easy to say that we purchase self-filling humidifiers (let's say we don't have the capital). In a future entry, I will share some of the simple process improvements I made. Meanwhile... any thoughts?