Parenting and operations management

As you may know, I have just become a father for the first time. My son Ekagra is now a week old. I find it useful to apply a few fundamental concepts of operations management to streamline the way we interact with him

Take nappy changes for example. My brother Prashant used to say that the key to a successful nappy change with the least amount of crying is SPEED. I had forgotten his words but came to the same conclusion myself. For a quick nappy change, everything must first be in position – the baby on the plastic sheet, the packet of wipes at hand, the trash can all ready, and the new nappy all spread out. Then you must move very fast to minimize the touch time from operation start to operation end. It’s a little reminiscent of Shigeo Shingo’s Single Minute Exchange of Dies (SMED) approach for quick setups (trivia: the “single minute” here actually means “single digit minutes” or less than 10 minutes).

From Wikimedia, we have the following explanation of a few of the key points of the SMED approach.

1. OBSERVE the current methodology
   
2. Separate the INTERNAL and EXTERNAL activities. Internal activities are those that can only be performed when the process is stopped, while External activities can be done while the last batch is being produced, or once the next batch has started. For example, go and get the required tools for the job BEFORE the machine stops.
3. Convert (where possible) Internal activities into External ones (pre-heating of tools is a good example of this).
4. Streamline the remaining internal activities, by simplifying them. Focus on fixings – Shigeo Shingo rightly observed that it’s only the last turn of a bolt that tightens it – the rest is just movement.