ReThink Productivity Podcast
In this exciting podcast, Simon Hedaux from ReThink Productivity shares his insights and strategies for improving productivity and efficiency in the retail and hospitality industries. With the help of clients, partners, and the ReThink team, Simon covers everything from measuring and tracking productivity to developing and implementing effective strategies.
Whether you're a business owner, manager, or employee, this podcast is a must-listen for anyone who wants to learn how to get more done and improve their bottom line.
Here's what you can expect to learn:
- How to measure and track productivity
- Proven strategies for improving efficiency and reducing waste
- How to create a culture of productivity and innovation
- Tips for motivating and engaging your team
- Real-world examples of how other businesses have used ReThink Productivity to achieve success
Don't miss out on this opportunity to learn from the experts and get ahead of the curve with your own business.
ReThink Productivity Podcast
ReThink Revealed - Ep4. Measure What Matters: The Techniques Powering ReThink’s Insights - Ed
Productivity specialist Ed unveils the science behind different types of studies that transform raw data into powerful insights for businesses seeking to optimise their operations.
• Activity studies break processes into elemental detail, identifying best practices and opportunities for simplification
• Efficiency studies use rated activity sampling to categorise tasks as value-add, essential non-value add, or non-value add
• Role studies follow specialists throughout their shift to determine how effectively their time is used
• MTM studies break movements down to microscopic detail with predetermined time values, ideal for revealing small improvements
• The right study depends on client needs, existing process knowledge, and desired outcomes
• Successful studies require proper timing, representative sampling, inquisitive analysts, and thorough scoping
• Real productivity insights often come from the frontline colleagues themselves during observation
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Welcome to Rethink Revealed, a podcast series from Rethink Productivity that will delve into the minds of our productivity specialists to ask the deepest of productivity questions. And I'm your host, james Bradbury-Willis, head of Business Development at Rethink. I'm a marketing and sales professional and I'm keen to get the inside story from the people powering productivity. On this episode of Rethink Revealed, we're joined by Ed, one of our brilliant program managers. With six years under his belt, ed's journey has taken him from analyst to project lead, building models, guiding insights and now managing project delivery end-to-end, from scoping and planning to making sure the data gets captured just right. Ed plays a key role in ensuring studies deliver maximum value to our clients.
Speaker 1:In this episode, we dig into the different types of productivity studies. We offer activity studies, efficiency studies, role studies and MTM and uncover when we use them, why we use them and the kind of powerful results they deliver. If you're wondering which study is right for your business or just want a behind-the-scenes look, at how we capture the data that powers productivity, this one's for you. Let's get into it. Hey, ed, how are you doing?
Speaker 2:Hi, I'm good. Thank you, james. What about yourself?
Speaker 1:Yeah, good thanks. We've had a nice warm stretch here now, but it's a bit cooler today, so I'm pretty grateful for that. But I'm excited to get stuck in to this podcast with you.
Speaker 2:Have you been on a podcast before? Yes, years and years ago. I think we did one in 2020 where it was the entire T, so I did one there. But yeah, it'll be the first time in five years. So see if I've got any better.
Speaker 1:Let's get cracking. So can you tell us a bit about your background and what led you to start the global productivity paradise that is Rethink?
Speaker 2:Well, if we go back to when I was studying, I did geography at university and whilst I was doing that degree I also had a part-time job in retail. So that's sort of the background that gave me a bit of a basis for the work that we do at Rethink. And then, once I'd finished at uni, I went and did something that's called land referencing, which is a bit of an obscure one. It's part of the process that companies go through or councils go through when they're compulsory purchasing land. So think of all of those bits of HS2 which seem to get into the news a lot in terms of costs spiralling. A lot of it was probably me sitting at a laptop working out who lived where and how much houses were worth.
Speaker 2:It was that sort of process that we did there. It was good, fun, but it was a bit boring, to be honest with you, in terms of not being able to see much. I saw the inside of an office, I saw an excel screen and, if I was lucky, I got a site visit. But after being at uni and studying geography, I wanted to do more on-site work and see the world, see different places. So the opportunity came up in 2019 with Rethink, and I went for it after spending a day with Phil and he very much sold me the dream in terms of being able to meet loads different people, go and see loads different places and so, most importantly, make a difference to a lot of businesses so in the UK, but then globally as well. Right, so a lot of businesses sort of in the UK, but then globally as well.
Speaker 1:Great. So a mixture of adventure and professional productivity, that sounds excellent. In that sense, then, what's the most rewarding part of your role? It sounds like you may have answered that already.
Speaker 2:I enjoy seeing the data and I enjoy seeing the story come together. You sort of see build as a project progresses and then there's the final presentation piece back to back to the client, and that's where you see all of your hard work pay off in a in a sense, because you see how much it means to clients to have this data. In a few, quite a few instances, it's the data that we produce is what they've been waiting for to enable key decisions within the business or to take business onto sort of the next level ed.
Speaker 1:We're gonna go on to the highly anticipated quickfire questions round now. I don't want any long answers, it's quick fire. Let's get through these really really nippy, really fast quick fire questions. So first of all, what's more satisfying finishing a slick data capture scoping plan or presenting the final results?
Speaker 2:something I've already answered, this one haven't.
Speaker 1:I've already presented the results back for me if you can swap roles with one of your rethink analysts for a day, where would you go and what would you study?
Speaker 2:um, I would go to ireland. I can tell you that I love it over there and I love studying over there because the people are great for in terms of what I do I'm not that first, maybe diy store, because they're quite varied in terms of what you deal with.
Speaker 1:I thought you're going to say you'd like to study a fishing spot of some sort.
Speaker 2:I was trying to work out how to get that in. They like fishing in Ireland and they like Guinness, so I'd be sorted.
Speaker 1:Good man, good man. Yeah, Would you rather have a perfect Wi-Fi on every site visit or an extra day to prep every project?
Speaker 2:I'd go extra day every time. You can never have too much time really on the setup piece and there's always a McDonald's around the corner, that's got free Wi-Fi if you buy coffee.
Speaker 1:Let's move on to the general Q&A and bit of discussion. Rethink offers several different types of study. Activity, efficiency, role and MTM are typically some of the core ones that that we offer. Can you walk us through the purpose of each of those and when you would typically use them.
Speaker 2:If we start with the activity study, then this is the sort of study that springs to mind when someone says time and motion in terms of its direct observation. You follow in a process from start to finish and you get a time for that process at the end of it. It really excels in determining that time for a process and you can do it across the sort of businesses it's in its entirety or you can just focus on individual processes that are of interest at that sort of moment in time. That's the core piece of work that it does, but you can also use it for a little bit of different methodologies. So we've used it before to follow customers and follow and capture customer journeys. So when different things have been implemented and introduced, it can help validate or highlight issues with those sort of new ways of serving customers that stand out for that. Self-checkouts and using it to identify how long a journey takes through a self-checkout, how many interventions happen per transaction, and you can get that sort of data from it as well. The benefit of using it really comes down to the level of detail that you can get from it. So each task is broken down into individual bite-sized chunks that we'll refer to as elements, and that elemental detail allows you to identify best practice really easily, and it also allows you to identify opportunities for process simplification as well. So, rather than getting a time for how long it takes to serve a customer, the activity study data will give you. Well, this is how much time it takes to say hello to the customer, to scan the products, to take payment, to say farewell and give them a receipt, so you're able to really deep dive that process, see which areas are taking the longest and potentially then where your focus should be to make some improvements in that process.
Speaker 2:Then efficiency studies. This is utilising a technique that's called rated activity sampling, and it's completely different to the activity study because we're not following a process. We are in a location for best part of eight hours and within that eight hour period we continuously do laps of a location and during those laps we're recording what people are doing, where they are within the location and how effectively they're working. And that's sort of the three fundamental pieces of the rated activity sampling. Alongside that, we'll often capture customer data as well, in terms of how many customers you've got in a location or if you're in a warehouse it might be you're tracking the number of forklifts that are on charge or in operation so you can capture data in in sort of that way as well. That layers on top and combines with the sort of core of those efficiency studies and these ones are really great for getting an overview of an operation and identifying areas to focus on and zoom in on to optimise, so you could identify areas from a efficiency study that you're then wanting to go and do an activity study on, because you know that takes the biggest proportion of time. What's also really valuable with the efficiency studies is the ability to we call them bucket book group the different tasks into value add, essential non-value add and non-value add chunks so you're able to see the value add which is directly contributing to the business and profit and turnover, the essential non-value add that's got to be completed to be able to do the value add piece, and then the non-value add, which is all of your lost, unproductive and waiting time. So that can be good at identifying low hanging fruit and ones to really make a beeline for. But it can also be helpful to shape how you move some of that essential non-value add into your value add time and then increase your profit as a result from that. It also offers the ability to benchmark across competitors or different industries as well, which can be, again, helpful insight to take businesses to the next level in terms of what it is that they're doing.
Speaker 2:Role studies these are sometimes called production studies, or definitely would have been when time and motion was really popular in factories. We call them day-in-the-life-off studies as well, or they can occasionally be week-in-the-life-of studies as well, or they can occasionally be week-in-the-life-of studies. These would typically spend the duration of a shift with a specialist role, or eight and a half hours, whichever one comes soonest and we're getting a feel for what that specialist does on a day-to-day basis. So these are often the roles like managers, supervisors, team leaders, but they can be roles such as pharmacists as well, where there's less definition about what it is that they're there to do, but there's an expectation that they're managing or they're doing tasks that only they can complete. Analysis can be great to shine a light on actually how much of that essential time that only they can complete are they focusing on versus how much time do they get pulled into everyone else's processes, and it can be good to get that to see the challenges that those roles face and also to help define various sort of almost job descriptions for those roles and see how closely one matches the other. So how close those real life matches, the, the theoretical, that you want that person to do.
Speaker 2:And the last book, by no means least, is you mtm studies, and these are a form of predetermined studies. When we say predined, it's broken down into movements and these movements already have a time value attached to them, whereas all of the other processes, all of the other study types that we're doing it's we're capturing the time value as it's happening. So it almost flips the methodology on its head in some respects. It's designed to really break down and get into the nitty-gritty of processes that typically have shorter cycle times, but you can use it for longer processes as well. It just takes a little bit longer to do the analysis. But what it's amazing at is process improvement and identifying it. Because you're breaking it down into such a small level of detail, you're able to make small incremental changes to a process that build up to a big time saving at the end of it. So that's where MTM really comes into its own and I think that's everything covered, isn't it?
Speaker 1:I think. So you've absolutely smashed it out the park head. Yeah, I was. I was here just taking notes and I was just like crikey. That's why it's so good to have you on to talk us through all of it. You really say it in a nice concise way. So, in terms of MTM, obviously for someone who's never come across it before, you've described it briefly what it is. But in terms of the data that we get out of it, how does it differ from the other studies? I know you said you kind of flip it on your head, but if you were considering, say, an activity study versus an MTM study, what would be your like? How would you find the differences between choosing those two?
Speaker 2:I'll start off by signposting you to an earlier podcast, so another one that was done back in 2020 with simon taylor, and if you're interested in mtm after listening to what I've got to say, then go back and listen to that podcast because he will explain it better than I ever could in terms of the actual theory behind it and where it comes from. The easiest way to signpost the difference is on a time study, we will be typically getting in a in a minute window, depending on the process you're looking at, sort of between between three to 20 elements normally per minute, depending on the. On the process, you're 20 sort of at the top end of what can, what you can really achieve and get accurate ratings and things like that. I discussed that mtm is sort of breaking it down into smaller chunks. We measure in mtm in something that's called a tmu, which is a value of time. But to give you a perspective of how much detail MTM gives you versus the time studies, there are 1,666 TMUs in a minute versus our normal studies where you're sort of looking at 20, 30 elements max. So that sort of gives you a bit of a feel for the level of detail that you get down to Now to get to that level.
Speaker 2:Mtm is based on individual movements and it's not like, oh you know, going from one location to another and picking something up. You might say, oh, that's a movement MTM. For a lot of people, a movement for MTM is actually like the closing of fingers or the extending of an arm over a couple of centimeters. So it's really breaking it down into that level of detail In terms of those movements is then each of those have got TMU value attached to it. So you're unlikely to get one TMU values, but you'll have a movement like a pinching or a grasping that might be seven or eight tmus. We don't have to time that because you just can't. It's done in the blink of an eye. But all you've got to be able to do is identify that movement. So if you can spot someone closing the fingers, then almost you can do some of these MTM processes. And you say, right, I've seen them close the fingers. Therefore I'll code it as this and get a time value attributed to that. So what you end up with is you repeat that for an entire process and you're left with a long, really detailed descriptive analysis that you just would not get from a, from a time study and it's evolved over time. So actually you get that descriptive method but you can apply it to different processes as well. So traditionally it's great for widgets in factories, but actually now they've wrapped it up to a level that means producing cars. You can apply a different set of building blocks to that. You can apply a different set of building blocks to a warehouse and picking. You can apply a different methodology again to um, to even retail or food production.
Speaker 2:Where you've got a fixed and sort of fairly well-defined process. You can use MTM to actually break that down as well. It's tilt transactions people have used it for. People have used it for burger assemblies and things like that. So it's got applications that are sort of wide and far-reaching. But it's based on that. Everything's a basic movement and everything's predetermined. So the it goes back to that sort of core building block of mtm. And the last bit just to mention is that because you've got that level of detail and that descriptive level, you're able to really identify small process improvements that then build up to a big picture. So things like counterweighting tools to reduce the weight of them that could have an impact on the, on the total time, and things as small as whether you're using a phillips screwdriver or flathead screwdriver can have an impact on the codes, which will then impact your your time. So it can get down to that sort of level for you, for your improvements that it generates what I'll do in the show description.
Speaker 1:If I can find that podcast, I'll link it in. And also, I think people should probably, if they're interested in the mtm. I think we've got the uk mtm association, so it's uk mtmcouk. Let's go and check them out and find out a little bit more. So, ed, I think, in terms of when you're scoping a new project, how do you determine which study or potentially a combination of studies quite often is the is right for the client?
Speaker 2:so the main thing for this is being able to see a process and you can build it from from there in terms of what the what the requirements really are. But it's what level of insight people are after plays a role, plays sort of a role in in that. So if people are after sort of a high level overview and don't have a huge amount of detail already on a process, then those efficiency studies are really useful. Otherwise, if you've already got a process and people are wanting a time for it, those activity studies sort of come into their own as well. That's the main sort of standout points in terms of what helps define each of them. It's a lot of yeah, a lot of what the client's sort of looking for and then picking the methodology that will match up with that.
Speaker 1:From your experience, what kind of impact can the right study have on a client's operation? I guess in your mind what's a standout example that comes to mind when trying to talk to clients about finding the right study.
Speaker 2:It's a little tricky because each of the studies have their own strengths so you could actually have multiple studies that really work for a client and it's the combination of the work In a way. The worst case scenario is you get data that you already knew or already had. So there's never sort of one where you think, oh, I've done a study and things have gone backwards or regressed off the back of it. The activity studies they can be great at quantifying opportunities and quantifying additional steps added to processes, find additional steps added to processes. Shrinkage has become a big thing in in retail, especially in the last sort of three or four years. It's definitely sort of increased in people's minds and one of the results of that is tagging has increased the activity studies. We've done some in the past where we've just timed people tagging products and what that's given is sort of the actually the visibility of how much time and how much cost goes into tagging products versus how much cost is being lost through shrink. So it gives you that sort of offset and the ability to go back with a proper business case for all of this tagging that somebody's decided is a good idea because shrinks too high If actually it costs you more in somebody tagging everything. You're not really willing, are you? So that can be really valuable for those sort of operations.
Speaker 2:Role studies we've done a few in the past three years where actually they've really helped define a role's description and be able to sort of build from that description into where do we want that role to be in the future. So for a for that sort of middle in again in a store or warehouse, typical structures is you've got the manager, assistant and supervisor. There's been a trend of maybe de-layering some of those and especially in some of these smaller retailers. Then the role studies help sort of define what that new intermediate role is going to look like and what they should cover. We did one, we did a revisit of a role study this year on a trial of a different way of setting up so that they got the most out of that role in terms of the time they spent managing people. And it was amazing to see the difference between the pre-study we did and the post, to see how the change had impacted those roles for the better and led to them spending a lot more time managing and a lot more time being productive as a manager and not backfilling into colleague task or chasing and the efficiency studies.
Speaker 2:They can help guide clients towards a more consistent approach and ensure that a colleague's experience or a customer's experience is going to be the same if they go into a store in London or if they're working in a warehouse down south, versus if we took that same operator and put them in Ireland, put them in Scotland, put them in the northeast.
Speaker 2:They'd have the same experience in terms of the level of work that they complete and the type of work they complete as well. That can be one of the benefits you get out of that efficiency study side of things as well. I think it's also important to say that none of the studies will give you a magic solution or a golden bullet to all of the problems that that businesses facing. What we do tend to get is actually whilst we're on site studying. Some of those magic solutions are given to us by the actual colleagues that are in these organisations. But it does give you that ability to leverage powerful data and answer questions off the back of it, and I think all of the studies have the ability to to give that um, to give that sort of facility to whoever's got that data now it's time for top three tips based on your experience running activity studies, role studies, efficiency studies and even, obviously, mtm projects.
Speaker 1:What three pieces of advice would you give to ensure a successful study and scoping through delivering the results?
Speaker 2:In three.
Speaker 2:There's very little value in studying a process that's been in place for a week, let's say, because nobody's used to it.
Speaker 2:So making sure that studies are happening at the right time and in the right place or with the right people as well.
Speaker 2:So if we do a study that is in a new store that's all brand, spanking, new, shiny, everything works, but that doesn't represent the rest of the estate, or we're studying a store full of high performers or a warehouse full of high performers where they've got amazing pick rates, I can time that and get you a time for it, but actually how does that then relate back to the rest of the business?
Speaker 2:So getting those middle of the road sites or getting a variance of some of the high performers, some of the low performers, most in the middle, is really important to making sure that you get a useful set of results at the end and nothing that's misleading either one way or the other. In number two, you definitely need a good team of analysts as well that are willing to think about processes and ask why a lot? So why are people doing whatever it is that they're doing? Do they need to and have that ability to talk to colleagues, talk to team members and find out more about the processes and their experiences from working on it day in, day out. That can be really valuable at the results stage for us as well.
Speaker 1:And number one tip.
Speaker 2:Number one would be that scope. It's got to be done and it's got to be thought about and set up carefully, because that's your one big chance to influence what the outputs are going to be in terms of how easy it is for analysts to then go and collect the data.
Speaker 1:Ed, that's the end of your episode of Rethink Revealed. I hope you have enjoyed your experience and I wasn't too mean to you or anything.
Speaker 2:No, it's been good fun, thank you.
Speaker 1:You're very welcome. It was great to have you on and I'll catch up with you soon.
Speaker 2:Yeah, great.
Speaker 1:Thanks, james, take care, bye-bye. Well, that's it for Rethink Revealed. I hope you found it insightful and, like me, you learned something new. You can find great podcasts from Rethink Productivity on our website, which I'll link in the show description, along with the music we used today. I'll hopefully catch you again soon for the next episode of Rethink Revealed. Until then, bye-bye.
