Work Centre Design - Change Table

With Monkey transitioned to her big girl room and the nursery still intact, there was little to do to get ready for Baby Bear's arrival.  In the spirit of  continuous improvement, there was one area of the room that felt inefficient, the changing station.

The changing station - table, mat, shelf, whatever the physical manifestation - is a classic example of a work cell.  An area specifically designed to perform work of a similar nature.  There are many work cells in your home.  The working triangle of you kitchen is used to produce meals.  The vanity in the bathroom is used for personal hygiene.  The busiest work cell in your home is likely your entry way or mud room, housing everything you need to get out the door.

At a changing station, the product is a clean and dry bum, securely covered in a clean and dry diaper. Emphasis on securely.  The process requires speed, agility and needs to be completed primarily with one hand.  The non-working hand used to secure the baby.  Repeat, one hand on the baby at all times.

When we started out, the cell looked like this.

It really wasn't ideal for a few reason;

1. The work surface was crowded.  It was also serving as an end table and held an assortment of books, toys, a clock and a small lamp.  All items not related to diaper changing.
2. The garbage pail is across the room from the baby.  In order to keep one hand on the baby at all times, you had to find a place (on an already crowded table) to put a pile of dirty wipes.
3. You had to walk to the bathroom and back twice.  First to flush the biodegradable liner down the toilet (we cloth diaper), then back to put the dirty diaper in the pail, then out again to wash your hands and back again to finish dressing the baby.

The Toyota Production System has a focus on neatness.  Disorder hides problems; it makes work harder.  Workplace organization begins with 5S.

Sort

Straighten

Shine

Standardize

Sustain

SORT

To begin, I removed anything that wasn't related to changing a diaper.  The books, toys, lamp, clock, water bottle all found a new home. This left me with the essentials: wipes, cloths, cream, diapers, trash can, laundry bin, change pad.  Once I had eliminated things that weren't required, I found more space for things that were.  The laundry bin and trash can could all be moved within arms reach.

STRAIGHTEN

Next, I looked at the layout of the change table.  Both my partner and I are right handed, so I made the right hand side of the table the working side and kept all tools and supplies there.

A word of caution - do not place the working side towards you.

If you choose not to heed this caution, this could happen to you:

Yup.  That's me.  With baby poop down my front.  Live and learn, right?

Here's the new layout:

The trash can is now on a shelf in easy reach and below it the laundry bin.  Wet clothes can be removed and immediately put into the laundry bin.  Wipes, creams, cloths and clean diapers all have a home in easy reach.

You may notice the diaper pail is missing.  This is not because we switched to disposable diapers for baby number 2.  It's because I moved it to the bathroom, near the flushing toilet and running water.  No more walking back and forth, to and from the bathroom, carrying dirty diapers.

These simple changes improved efficiency in two ways.  First, it reduced the excess movement, primarily back and forth to the bathroom but also across the room to the trash and laundry.  Second, the efficiency came from not double handling material like laundry and dirty diapers.  They could be disposed of immediately instead of collecting it in one place and then moving them again for disposal.

SHINE

I could say I gave the shelves a thorough cleaning, wiped down the trash can, disinfected the diaper pail.  But who are we kidding, I went over everything with a Swiffer cloth and called it a day.

STANDARDIZE and SUSTAIN

With everything newly arranged, I brought in the team (my partner and Monkey, the dutiful big sister) and showed them around.  Everyone knows that only diaper changing stuff goes in this area, and which bin is for which supply.

Two months in and things are still in their place.

Until next time,

Kaizen your Life.

The Power of the Checkmark

Checklists.  The simple, often forgotten tool relegated to pilots and nuclear power plant operators.


A checklist is just what it sounds like, a list of things you check off.  It serves as a memory aid for repetitive yet important tasks.  Like preparing a commercial airliner for take-off.  Or packing for a road trip.

You would be amazed, actually you wouldn't because you've all been there, at how many people forget to pack simple things.  This is why hotel "gift" shops exist.  No one wants to spend $5 on a tiny tube of toothpaste to bring home for their loved ones.  You buy it because it's midnight, you've been travelling all day and you just realized you didn't pack any toothpaste.

Twice I have forgotten to pack, and subsequently had to buy, underwear.  Something that is much easier to do in downtown Toronto than in cottage country.

Sure, we try to make a packing list.  It is a scrap of paper that sits on the kitchen island and we write things on it as they occur to us.  The Monkey's potty seat is never on that list (replacement courtesy of WalMart).  Underwear is never on that list (thanks Winners!).  Why?  Because we use them so often we forget they exist.  Our day-to-day lives are filled with repetition that fades from our conscious mind.

This time I was going to do it better.  13 hours of travel, 4 days in rural Quebec, 2 small children.  I was going to do this right.

I created a spreadsheet and put it on our family cloud site so both my partner and I could edit it.  It was broken down into categories for each person.  It had a column for which bag things were going to be packed in.  It was a thing of organizational beauty.

It started off well.  I was confident.  We had this. (You see where this is going...)

Then we left.  I couldn't shake this nagging suspicion that we forgot something.  Halfway there, I learn what it is.  Monty, Baby Bear's favourite sleep toy.  Okay, no problem.  We can make do, "look here's your elephant!".

Then we stop for dinner.  No bibs.  No problem, my dutiful sister stuffs the plastic St. Hubert bibs in her purse.

Then we arrive, settle in, get the kids asleep.  Open up the bag of food.  No flask of scotch.  It's going to be a long weekend.

Of the 70 items on the checklist, there were issues with 7 of them.  That's 10%!

So what went wrong?

1. We stopped checking stuff off the list.  It was working well until I had to pack up the laptop and ran out of juice on my smartphone.  Sometimes nothing beats a good ol' clipboard and pen.
   
2. I didn't verify the quantity of items, just that they were there.  Thus, I only packed 4 pairs of underwear instead of 8.  Luckily there was a washing machine.
   
3. We underestimated the number of pajamas Monkey would need for the trip.  2 pairs for 5 nights, not sufficient for a 3 year old.

Turns out, all these errors are pretty common.  NASA did a study in 1990 of the human factors associated with checklists during normal operations on a commercial airline flight.  They read accident reports, interviewed pilots and watched them in action.  And saw all three of these errors.

Sometimes pilots will look at the checklist and verify the correct setting, EVEN IF IT IS WRONG.  They get so used to seeing the switch "on" that when it is "off" they actually see it a different position then it physically is.  I swore I saw Monty in the backseat of the car when we left.

Pilots who were interrupted mid-checklist by air traffic control or other aircraft and didn't have a physical way to mark off where they left off were more likely to forget where they had were.  Thus, the last three items on the kitchen packing list were forgotten.

The checklist is only a good tool if it is well designed.  Some checklists had too much detail or were not ordered in a way that made them easy and efficient to use.  Not having enough PJs for the Monkey wasn't because we didn't follow the checklist, it was because we had the wrong number on the list.

So what did I learn from this?

Save the list as a template and adjust on a per trip basis.   Keep improving it.

Print it out.  Because at the end of the day, there is no more powerful tool than a checkmark.

Bon Voyage! 

Welcome Back!

Hello Readers!

Welcome to the Second Edition of OPS@Home.  In April, my partner and I were thrilled to welcome our little Baby Bear into the world.

With the weather turning cool here in the Northern Hemisphere and Baby Bear's nap's lengthening, it's time to head back to the keyboard.

Keep an eye on this space as I bring you new stories, tips and tricks.  Starting next week with a post on checklists.

Kaizen your life!

Wayback Wednesday - The Importance of Ease

I know... it's Thursday.  Late Thursday.  This should have been posted yesterday, but let's pretend it's still Wednesday.

Welcome back to Wayback Wednesday, the day we look back in time at the works of Christine Frederick and other pioneers in home economics.

In New Housekeeping: Efficiency Studies in Home Management, Frederick performs an in-depth review of the ergonomics of washing dishes.  From the height of the sink, to the placement of the tools, to the specific motions of each hand.  The idea being that for work to be performed optimally, it needs to be done with ease.  Physical straining cause by poor ergonomics makes work harder.

Included in her study was a table showing what the proper work surface height should be for people of various heights.

Frederick noticed that many of the working surfaces in her home were not optimized for her height.  This meant that every task she performed was taking more effort than it needed to.  She also tried to ensure that tasks didn't require any unnecessary bending or lifting.  All of these are modern elements of ergonomics for work centre design.

To calculate the correct working surface height, Frederick provided a table and a formula.  I've converted it to a graph here for ease of use.

Ironing is one task that Frederick's suggests would benefit from a proper work surface.  Not only height, but also sturdiness.  She writes;

"In ironing, I found that my boards just like the sink, was not at the right height. It was so high that I couldn't obtain enough purchase on my iron without extra effort. I simply lowered the board, made it very steady, and thus helped my efficiency." (Frederick 1912)

I decided to put her principle of a proper work surface height into practice when I did the ironing this week.  This was a qualitative study, I really should have measured the time it took to iron a shirt with each working surface height.  I might recreate it during another wash day.

Now, I am not a tall person.  Okay, that's probably an understatement, I'm short.  My suggested working surface height is 28 inches.  I have been setting up the ironing board at 32 inches.

The difference can really be seen in the angle of my elbows.  At the lowered working height, my arms are almost straight down at a more natural angle.  At the original height, I had to hold my arms in a bent position.

Sure enough, the lower board felt much more comfortable.  It took less effort, less strength and I was able to finish quicker.  

So how does this compare to present day ergonomic standards?

Ironing these days is very different than ironing in the early 1900s.  Electric irons were just being released.  You were lucky if you had one that was self-heated using coal or gas, these novelties were considered great time savers.  Frederick wrote that an electric iron in 1912 would have cost $6, that is a cost today of almost $150.  Would you spend $150 on an iron??

Needless to say, using a coal heated iron, or a metal one that needed to be heated on a stove is a lot heavier than a plastic one from today.

The Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety has a good graphic that shows the different standing work surface heights for different types of jobs.

http://www.ccohs.ca/oshanswers/ergonomics/standing/standing_basic.html

In this case, heavy work isn't just lifting.  It's defined as work that requires applying a downward force.  It doesn't matter which iron you're using, you need to press down on the iron.

The CCOHS guideline says heavy work should be performed on a surface 7 3/4 - 15 3/4 inches below elbow height, which for average people works out to 25 1/2 - 37 1/2 inches.  My elbow height is about 36 inches off the ground, so a work height of 28 inches falls nicely in this range (for a short person).

So for the last 18 years, I've been setting up my ironing board 4 inches too high.  I'm guessing this is because my father, who is well over six feet tall, taught me to iron.  

I wonder if he knows he was setting up the board two inches too low?

The Importance of a Safety Stock

Last month, my husband and I did what only seems sane to sleep deprived new parents.  We embarked on a trans-Atlantic airplane trip with our 7 month old... who was on the verge of crawling.

In preparation for our trip I polled all my Mommy friends for advice.  The one common thread:

"Bring more diapers than you think you'll need."

Everyone had an urban legend-esque story of someone who knew someone who got stuck on the tarmac for 8 hours or who's kid came down with a stomach bug somewhere over Greenland.

So we packed a lot of diapers.  30 of them in our carry on for our 6 hour flight and another 25 in our checked luggage to get us through our first day until we could go shopping.

I can see some of you nodding along; yup, that sounds like a good amount.  Had we been backpacking through a Costa Rican jungle, it would have been a good amount.  We were travelling to a major metropolitan area in an English speaking country.  And we were staying with family.  And we were only gone for 10 days.  It was more diapers than I thought I would need.

We ran out of diapers the day before we came home.  And being the diligent parents we are, bought 30 more for the flight home.  We typically cloth diaper, so three weeks later we used the last vacation diaper.

This got me thinking.  What is "more than you think you'll need"?  Really, what we're talking about is Safety Stock.

Safety stock is the inventory you hold to insure against a stock out situation.  Stock outs can be costly, especially if they bring production lines to a standstill or incur customer penalties for late deliveries.  In this instance, running out of diapers midway across the Atlantic could be disastrous, we would want to ensure that our safety stock protected us 99% of the time.

When picking your safety stock you need to think about the holding costs of the inventory vs the costs of a stock out.  In my case, diapers are small and light and infants get their own baggage allowance.  We had plenty of space so the holding costs were small.  The cost difference between buying diapers at home and buying them abroad was negligible (<$10 for the week).  There was the lost opportunity costs associated with packing other items, it could have saved me having to do laundry half way through our trip.

Running out of diapers is far more costly than bringing lots of diapers.

So the more diapers the better.  But maybe there is a more realistic estimate than 55 we schlepped across the ocean (and the 30 we carried back).

Our total travel time was going to be 12 hours, but we didn't want to have to go shopping as soon as we landed so we'll assume we wanted a full 24 hours worth of diapers.

Using the tracking data I covered in the Sleep Post, I generated a histogram showing the daily demand for diapers.  I had 75 days worth of data and it graphed like this:

As expected, the data more or less has a normal distribution (the red line on the graph).  The median value was six, 27% of the time six diapers were enough to get us through a 24 hour period.  The standard deviation was 2.  What this mean is that 10 diapers will suffice for a 24 hour period 99% of the time.  The caveat being that this only holds under the conditions seen during the 75 days of data.

So let's make some assumptions on what the worst case scenario would be.

1) The flight is delayed.  We had one connection, but it was also in a city where we had family.  If we weren't on the plane, we would only tolerate a 6 hour delay before it would make more sense to leave the airport.  If we're stuck on the tarmac, well lets assume that can't be more than 8 hours.  So now our 12 hour transit time becomes 20 hours.  Still within our 24 hour assumption, so we wouldn't require any additional diapers, but we'd have to go shopping shortly after arriving.

2) Our diaper usage in a 24 hour period is higher than expected.  So let's say the little monkey comes down with some sort of virus and we're changing diapers at the rate of 1 an hour.  24 hours, 24 diapers.  And we still don't have to go shopping upon arrival.  But we may want to find a doctor...

So the 55 I packed... More than twice what I would ever need.

Turns out what I needed more than diapers was a change of clothes, for me.  There's nothing quite like being thrown up on at 30,000 feet.

Blue Skies and Tail Winds.

OpsMama