Visual Instructions

Lean Manufacturing in many companies is priority one to eliminate waste, improve efficiency, and reduce inventory, but I’m baffled when I see it all come to a crawl in the hands of the consumer.  In reality, almost every product assembly continues through to the customer and yet most instructions fail to follow the most basic lean principle, Clarity.  Take a product that sells 20,000 units annually in 37 countries, you’d think the instructions might be a priority because it’s going to be assembled at home by a thousands of untrained people where most would have problems even if the instructions were in their native language.  But it’s our world today and that’s nothing new. When I walk into any Costco or Sam’s Club, the line for returns is almost as long as the line at the cashier; sad to say I think the trend is growing worse. Returns have become a way of life, while the skill levels in the public domain are dwindling fast. Ask any trade worker or watch any kid.  The solution for many suppliers is to offer Installation Service. What???  for a shower tree, a clock, or a $95 BBQ?  Sorry, these lower priced products are typically purchased by those who “think” they can do it themselves and that population is getting more and more scary over time.  Perhaps the argument in some cases is that the cost of returns is covered by the installation revenue, but I ask, “Does this sound Lean to you?”  And don’t think for a minute that the 3rd party contractor installing your Home Depot product is keeping all the money. Someone once told me it’s split 50/50 which sounds about right because I completed their $2,500 garage flooring installation myself in less than 2 days for about $250 including materials and rental equipment.

I had a discussion with the Marketing Manager of a major ceiling fan manufacturer (in fact I’ve have many of these talks with executives in numerous companies, so stay tuned).   Their comment was that “a Ceiling Fan is a complex installation and we don’t want customers to install it themselves, besides we install most of them for our customers (for a fee).”  The store employees, however, claim that nearly 50% of the fans sold are to consumers that install it themselves.  This was nearly the identical story given by a major barbecue company and by the same players.  So first of all, there seems to be confusion as to whom actually installs their products… maybe its denial, maybe a goal, or maybe Chandler Arizona has a very unusual demographic, I don’t really know.  The fact is that in this economy, people need to save their dollars and because of these weak instructions, many don’t make the purchase or mess up the installation in high numbers.  Almost every person who sees 3D instructions offers a story of how they wish they had that for some XYZ product and about 20% of those stories end with “so I returned it damaged” or “I’ll never go there again”  Does that sound Lean?

So the trend has been lower skill levels by consumers, more assembly required (because shipping from China is cheaper in a box or a “flat”), and dollars are becoming more scarce.  What that spells for me is reduced sales, lower quality products, and even more returns in the future.  I do have to give credit to one major furniture provider.  The official response from their CAD Engineering Manager was that “We’ve been discussing this (animated instructions) for a few years but we don’t yet have the IT infrastructure to manage the process.”  This is in stark contrast to another unnamed CEO (who makes a lot of OfficeMax furniture and more) who stated “Do you realize how many new products we produce each year… about 400!  Can you imagine what it would cost to create this for all of our products?”  So obviously it’s a tough road to graph the ROI.

So let’s now look at the cost of not creating clear instructions, a component of “External COPQ”.  First, you’d have to know what percent of the returns resulted from poor instructions.  When I researched how IKEA collects this data, they have some general categories with the ability to notate the customer’s reason.  Let’s say I’m the average Joe and I just broke a panel for a shelving unit.  Do you think I’m going to tell IKEA “Yes I was the idiot and broke the shelf because I didn’t read the instructions”?  No, Joe will claim “it was that way out of the box” or “the part was missing.”  IKEA will gladly provide you with a spare shelf or screw from their spares “inventory” (a scary word in Lean thinking).  So it’s difficult to accurately gather the data needed to quantify the cost of mistakes or where they originated.  Even if this were performed in controlled experiment, you would still need a wide variety of products to get an average.  Perhaps it’s done and unpublished, but that kind of data doesn’t come cheap.

This reminds me of a common problem in the training industry – what is the cost of poor training.  This gets into level 4 analysis ($ impact on the business) which in my field has been the most difficult analysis on earth.  I’ve only seen solid data a couple of times and it’s mostly derived from reduced labor but almost impossible to quantify the cost of errors stemming from a lack of training.  Corporate need for training is inherently reactive and is actually only the true cause of a performance problem 10% of the time. All other training is merely an introduction to a machine or system with a heck of a lot of tribal hand-holding.

So there’s the problem, we don’t know how much it costs to have poor instructions, so we make up for it in the cost of the product and service.  Although it’s been the de facto standard for years, soon I’m going to share why this is going to change.

Oh, one more observation. I’ve been maintaining my 1963 Buick for 25 years and the original GM service manual was good enough for me to rebuild the Dynaflo Transmission top to bottom. I have yet to see a manual like that ever again because it was product specific and full of great pictures and graphics! It even had a color coded hydraulic process diagram that came in read handy to understand what I was actually doing and to know that I was addressing the right symptoms to problems. So what happened?