I Am Lean LLC

When kids do homework they improve themselves, get better grades, and earn higher paying jobs when they graduate. Likewise, when Daycare Owners do their homework they improve themselves, get better at achieving their goals and get higher profits. But the homework for daycare owners don’t involve reading chapters of text or writing long essays. It involves a deep self evaluation within the eight lean categories of waste: Hoard, Overproduction, Motion, Expertise, Waiting, Overprocessing, Ride, Kinks.

The 8 Wastes are highly publicized and known in the manufacturing communities, but this may be a new topic for daycare owners who spend their time not producing new products, but rather they produce the greatest minds for our future within children.

What are the 8 Wastes?

The eight wastes are the most common things to look out for in your business that is wasting your time, energy, or space. When you eliminate any one of them you get back valuable resources. Ignoring these wastes won’t kill your business. However, if a competitor focuses on eliminating these waste, they can kill your business.

Hoard

This waste is equivalent to inventory. Hoarding means that you have too much stuff that no client has place an order for. This waste is detrimental to the cash flow in a daycare because often times the supplies purchased are not getting put to use or reimbursed for months after their initial purchase.

Think about all the food you have purchased for the daycare. Will it be eaten the next day or do you have so much of it that it will spoil and be thrown away? Hoarding anything is a bad deal. The items take up valuable space, they usually have to be transported to storage locations, then they become defective waste.

Daycares hoard school supplies, equipment, toys, and learning supplies like extra books, pamphlets, kits, and learning systems. Most of items do not fit into the daycare’s current strategy and will never get used. These items sit in storage or closets or on basement shelves taking up valuable space. A good 5S activity may work to clear up and clean up these extra items.

Overproduction

This waste is one of the original 8 wastes. It simply means that too much of something was produced. Anything overproduced automatically becomes a sources all the other wastes. For example, the overproduced items have to be stored as inventory or hoarded. They have to be given a ride somewhere or transported. They require non value added movement. And after they sit unused they develop kinks or defects and are thrown out.

Daycares overproduce copies of pieces of paper for parents to sign. They overproduce the number of art projects or crafts that will be made. They overproduced most of the items sitting in storage: extra balls, strollers, books, etc. The longer items sit, the more likely they are to get damaged, leaked water on, creature nesting site, or expired.

Motion

The waste of motion is one of the original 8 wastes. It simply means that someone or something is using energy to move more than is required to provide value to the customer. Think about how much movement it takes to open the door? Does one have to move a chair, jump over a couch, fix the carpet, and finally they can open the door? Or simply does one have to just walk across the room in a straight line to the door?

What if there was a system to allow the door to open by itself whenever a parent showed up? What if the parent could check in their child and remove their coat. That way it would take zero motion of a teacher to open the door or check in the child or get them ready for the morning. Parents could have an access code to let themselves into the daycare. How much time would this type of system save your daycare teachers in the day? We’ll if it takes 2 minutes to open the door for parents and check in children. And let’s say the daycare has 30 kids, so this process happens 60 times a day. Then 60 x 2 minutes = 120 minutes of opportunity. What would you do if you saved an additional 2 hours of time in the day?

Expertise

The waste of expertise is equivalent to the waste of skills. Any resource that is under utilized falls in this category. This waste doesn’t cost you time. It prevents you from getting ahead faster. It allows your delays to win and triumphant over you. The very first daycare owner I tried to help had this waste screaming at me. Here I was an expert daycare operations consultant, not being utilized as such.

I tried encouraging a strategy, metrics to hit, projects to track, and even kaizen events. But the message of lean was rarely acknowledged or understood. It was this experience that led me to rethink how best to reach daycare owners and speak their language in order to help them.

One thing that could definitely help expose the waste of expertise is a tool called a cross training matrix. Using this tool will help to ensure that staff who could learn how to do a job are trained in to do the job.

Waiting

The waste of waiting is one of the original 8 wastes. It simply means time spent waiting within a process that is non-value added. In a daycare setting what is value added? The teacher teaching curriculum. The children taking a nap. Gross motor play. But what about the time waiting for the cots to be put away before more leaning can happen? Or what about the time it takes for teacher to clean up the dishes before the next activity can start? Ensuring that your teachers are using their time to continue the value added work is essential to quality.

Process improvements like those we spoke about in the motion section can eliminate waiting all together. Also, wisely using teacher aids are another great way to keep teachers focused on doing the value added work, while others in supportive roles are taking care of the non-essentials.

Overprocessing

The waste of overprocessing is one the original 8 wastes. It simply means time spent doing work above and beyond what the customer requested. It it took more energy, more resources, more effort to produce a result, then overprocessing was at work. Making color copies when Black and White would due. Having a door knob made of gold, when a brass one was just fine. Making teachers communicate 10 times a day when parents only needed three times a day or one continuous monitoring system.

Overprocessing doesn’t mean that work was non-value added. It means that value added work was completed to an unnecessary level which is waste.

Ride

The waste of ride is equivalent to the waste of transportation. Unless it is of value to your parents, moving anything from one place to another is a waste of time. Parents may value giving a ride to students to and from school. Buy carrying papers to each table, giving rides to cots, or carrying out toys to the playground each day are all examples of ride waste.

Kinks

The waste of kinks is equivalent to the waste of defects. Having kinks in your process means that something didn’t go right the first time. The kink may have to be reworked or tossed out in its entirety. For example, kinks in printing occur often when we don’t pay attention to detail. I’m the worst at this waste, because it seems like I catch all the errors once I print out something.

Kinks could also be a bad outcome in the license process. You were supposed to have First Aid CPR certification that included children and adults. But your certificate only included that for adults. You license holder found the kink and informed you to correct the kink immediately.

If you are eager to dive deeper into this topic and get results faster I invite you to accept our free gift and book one of our live demonstration sessions / assessments.