Cooking with Continuous Improvements: Lessons from the Kitchen

What inspired your journey with continuous improvements?

I’ve always felt that the kitchen is more than a place where people cook and eat. It is a gathering place where friends and family come discuss things that are truly important. In addition, it is the place where significant collaboration occurs. For these reasons, it would make sense that many of the lessons that I have learned about continuous improvements began in the kitchen.

These experiences taught me to look for ways to:

First, streamlining in the kitchen is a satisfying endeavor. My mother taught me how to cook, and I can still hear her telling me, “If we clean as we go, then we won’t have to at the end.” We would do this by looking for windows of time where we could clean, and this would typically occur while we were heating something in the oven or on the stove. In order to know where the optimization windows are, the process needs to be understood from end to end. The visualization of the entire process allows the team to see where there is a point in time where activities can be overlapped. It is typically, a point in the process where there is waiting. Lean practices teach us to identify and eliminate waiting, because it creates waste in the process. If there is a point in the process where we cannot eliminate waiting, then we can maintain activity levels by overlapping tasks. Streamlining processes is important, because it allows time reductions to occur.

Second, eliminating steps out of the process is a great way to save time. Recipes are often passed down from generation to generation, and this adds to the magic of preparing any dish. We never minded mixing the batter when we added the eggs, then we mixing it again after we added the butter. We knew that we didn’t have to mix it twice, but it was part of the tradition. On the other hand, this is not the case for business processes. It is a good thing to ask questions and to make adjustments where needed. For example, a team could make an update to data in an application, then extract it out of that application to make a hand-off to a different team. After that, the new team, uploads it back into the very same application to make a new update. Due to the silos, the 2 teams never had the opportunity to communicate the whole process to each other. Therefore, they didn’t know that they could eliminate the step where that data is extracted and re-uploaded into the same application for the hand-off. Eliminating an unnecessary step reduces the overall time of the process while maintaining the quality of the end product.      

Third, there are many innovative inventions in the kitchen that contain automation. For example, the self-cleaning oven, the dishwasher, and the electric mixer are huge timesavers. At one point in time, they were just ideas, but someone had a vision of the way that things could be. Similarly, a continuous improvement program provides the teams with principles and practices for executing innovative ideas. In addition, technology often evolves more rapidly than business processes. There are several factors that can contribute to this, but communication is key to resolving them. Creating a collaborative environment allows organizations to remove silos, gain rapid feedback, and obtain visibility to processes that can be optimized through automation.

In conclusion, executing a process improvement program is rewarding, because it gives teams the opportunity to be innovative. My appreciation for continuous improvements began in the kitchen. It is the first place where I learned to streamline eliminate, and automate tasks. In summary, the kitchen is a place where we get to prepare meals that bring amazing people together, and it is also a place where we get to learn more on our continuous improvement journey.