Ran into an old operations director at a coffee shop who called my lean approach a waste of time

I was grabbing a latte downtown last Tuesday and bumped into a guy I used to work with back in 2018. He runs operations for a mid-sized logistics firm now and asked how our team was doing with process improvements. When I told him we were doubling down on lean methods he laughed and said 'you're just shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic.' He explained that most of our gains were eaten up by a single bottleneck we kept ignoring - the inventory check-in step that takes 4 hours every morning. I started tracking it after that convo and sure enough, fixing that one step saved us $1,200 a week in overtime pay. Has anyone else found that chasing small optimizations hides a bigger problem?

2 comments

2 Comments

keith94313d ago

Funny enough, I had a buddy who spent months optimizing his warehouse picking routes only to realize their receiving dock backed up for two hours every truck arrival. Once they fixed that one choke point, all those little route tweaks actually started saving time instead of just feeling busy. Your story reminds me how easy it is to focus on small wins while the real problem sits right in front of you.

patricia_lee13d ago

Is it really that big of a deal though? Lots of places have a bottleneck they just don't bother to fix, and sometimes those little wins add up anyway. I get what @keith943 is saying about focusing on the right thing, but not every small optimization is hiding a huge problem.