Battling the 10-percent factor - Editorial - perhaps only 10 percent of work time actually is dedicated to adding value for customers - Brief Article

Automotive Industries,  Jan, 2002  

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How much time do you spend doing your job? I'm not talking about the total home-to-workplace cycle time, including your commute. And I don't mean the overall time spent at the workplace. I'm talking about the actual time doing the job you're being paid to do, whether it's designing parts, engineering a system, managing a company or, in my case, making a magazine.

Think about it. Maybe your conclusion will be as frustrating as mine. A couple of months ago I realized that, armed with the tools the productivity gurus claimed would make our work-lives more efficient, I was spending less and less time on the important stuff. Less time on adding value to this product and making a difference to you, the reader.

It was time to examine the situation. So I compiled a simple diary for an entire month in which I logged the start/stop points of actively setting up, researching, reporting, writing, editing and proofreading. The results were worse than expected: I'd spent just 10 percent of my time on work that the reader can see and touch-putting valuable information on paper.

And the other 90 percent? It's a bewildering bag of non-value-added activity that some would argue "goes with the job." It varies considerably in its importance and time consumed. But by the tenets of any lean production system, it's waste.

I'm perplexed, but I'm not alone. Frequently I hear similar stories from others in the industry -- engineers, managers, even Wall Street auto analysts who tell me they're spending more time marketing their firms these days than advising clients. It's not a new phenomenon, says Gerald Meyers, professor of Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management at the University of Michigan Business School and former chairman of American Motors.

"The amount of time spent in non-value-added activities rises according to how high in the organization you get," he explains. Meyers believes that design engineers, for example, have a much higher ratio of productive activity than their supervisors, who are more productive than their bosses, who in turn add more value than the ascending order of directors, vice presidents, etc.

"That's my sense of organizational waste -- at the opposite level of the corporation it's all meetings," he notes. "I don't want to call that value-less--it is necessary--but there isn't a helluva lot of value added in sitting around a table making decisions."

The more an organization is in crisis, when values are being questioned and the structure's in doubt, the more non-value activity descends from the top dogs into the lower ranks.

But the increase in non-value-added work is also affecting companies that are going gangbusters. Earl Werner, VP of engineering at Harley-Davidson, tells me his designers and engineers spend just five to 10 percent of an average workday actually designing and engineering.

"A lot of time involved in product development is wasted time," he notes, "waiting for information and tracking it down. If you can raise an engineer's application time to just 20 percent, you can take an incredible amount of time out of the product-development timeline."

Werner, a former General Motors engineer, believes that the issue -- and its solution -- is knowledge management. He says American industry in general has not put high value on capturing, distributing and leveraging current knowledge. That's changing fast at H-D, where a new system of people processes (centers of engineering expertise) and tools (a real-time product-development database) are bringing the coveted 20-percent bogey closer to reality.

He's convinced it will happen, soon. But it may not raise his value-added ratio as head Hogmeister.

"My time is spent designing the organization, putting systems in place, thinking about how to manage information, making sure rye optimized the 'people equations,' knocking down barriers and roadblocks to engineers doing their applications jobs, soliciting resources and building consensus at the management level for support," he says.

Like it or not, that will always be the manager's job.

Lindsay Brooke is editor-in-chief of Automotive Industries

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