CAS Cast: Value Stream Map your GTM Process to improve Salesforce use in Life Sciences
Life Sciences professionals have a very specific use case for their Salesforce instance.
Using the Value Stream Mapping approach will help you to right-size your People, Process, Technology golden triangle, so you can see revenue and results even faster. VSM experts John Tjahjadi and Ian Gotts show you exactly how to use the VSM approach to improve your Salesforce instance.
Cloud Adoption Solutions is a 100% woman-owned registered Salesforce partner, specializing in implementation, integration, and optimization for Technology, Healthcare/ Life Sciences, and Financial Services/ Professional Services organizations in the small and mid-commercial sectors.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
John Tjahjadi 00:00
My mentor used to tell me, you know John, if there is no standard there is no improvement.
Ian Gotts 00:05
The only place automates becomes comes before simplify is in the dictionary
Shannon Gregg 0:24
Hello everybody and welcome to today’s webinar Value Stream Map your go to market process to improve Salesforce use in life sciences. I am thrilled to be with you today; we are going to hear some really spectacular things from our two speakers and you had better get ready, buckle in because you’re going to learn a lot of things today. If you love to take notes, if that’s the kind of learner you are, please do that. If you want to take screenshots, please do that. But also know we are going to send you the recording of this webinar once it is finished. So if you want to sit back and relax and enjoy the show, we welcome you to do that. Please feel free to use the q&a box because we will have live q&a At the end of the webinar If you want to put your questions in there. As we’re rolling along, we will make sure that they get addressed at the end. Today’s webinar is sponsored by s docs, cloud adoption solutions, Capstorm, elements cloud, steady state media, and fido Seo. I am so thankful for all of our sponsors for bringing this wonderful webinar series to you. Our webinar series will culminate next month where we have a really fun Live Demo Jam. That will be same time same place March 16 At noon Eastern and after that we are followed up by some incredible live events. That will be in April, May and June in Philadelphia, Boston and Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. And this whole entire series is going to end with a two day event called Life Sciences dreamin in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It’s going to be wonderful, full of spectacular learning amazing sessions, a beach party, it’s going to be a good time, more information is available for you at LifeSciencesDreamin.com. I am not going to take any more time, because I know you are so excited to hear about this process and how you can make everything so much better in your Salesforce Org. I am thrilled to introduce to you Ian Gotts. Ian is the founder and CEO of elements cloud, which is a change intelligence platform that provides the intelligence to make changes faster. Ian has been a Salesforce customer from 2002. So forever and ever. And he was a speaker at the very first UK Dreamforce which was Marc Benioff, three customers, and 120 delegates, so an elite crowd; since then he’s spoken at the Dreamforce and World Tour multiple times. And he’s written 11 books on Salesforce business analysis, change management and compliance. Ian, welcome to the show.
Ian Gotts 2:55
Thank you, Shannon, very excited to be here. So thank you for that introduction. I think that could all be summarized by I care passionately about business analysis and helping people change the way that they operate. Which is why I’m delighted to have John. So John is going to spend some time talking about value stream mapping. So for those of you who are unclear about what it is, don’t worry, John’s going to explain it. But he’s got three years as a lean practitioner. And again, lean is another of those terms that if you’ve been in the business analysis world, you understand really well, it came out of Toyota management systems, it’s the whole idea about how you drive out waste. So John’s worked at Toyota global engineers, but also the other companies who really have bit spearheaded this idea of driving out waste people like General Motors, Whirlpool, GE, and syrups. Health. So there are companies out there when, over the last 130 years, John Scott had experience of applying these principles. He’s tried to boil those down into what comes out of the webinar. But again, that if you have questions, as we go through, chuck them in the chat, and we’ll have some discussion afterwards, and then we’ll try and pick all those questions up. So don’t hear from me. Let’s hear from John and his experience of what what value stream mapping is. So John, welcome to the webinar. And thank you.
John Tjahjadi 04:17
Thank you. And thank you, Shannon, for the wonderful introductions. So let’s get started. People usually want to find out why value stream, right? Why we cannot use any other methodology or tools, because Value Stream Mapping is because you’re going to take a value stream perspective, meaning working on the big picture, not just individual processes, and improving the whole not just optimizing parts. So before we go any further, there are only 12 slides, hold down to your questions, take notes, and then we’re going to have plenty of time at the end to address all of your questions that you have. I have, okay, so this is based on the Lean Thinking fundamentals, there are five of them, right? Number one is about the values, everything is about the value, what your customer actually values of your products, your services, the one that you deliver to them. And then what you need to do after that is create a value stream, identify those values, and then within the value stream to create efficiency, you create a flow, if you cannot create flow, then you create. And the reason you want to create pools so that you can establish efficiency of your resources, right, because the poll, basically, you do not want to have, you do not want to have one person to do more than the other person, because you’re going to have the work sits between the two people, that is not going to create that transaction going through your value stream. And then lastly, you continuously improve the process to perfections, which in my experience, there is no such thing is perfect. But you have to continuously improve that to better your business process. The House of Quality, if you look at the foundation of the house, is that visual management. So the visual management is the value stream mapping in the world of Lean Six Sigma. And that will build up into your customer focus, you know, through all of a different step from the basement up all the way to the pillars, and everything in the middle the one that you’re going to involve people, and also going through the teamwork, just keep that in mind that the value stream mapping when you go through this exercise is also involved, change management is so important for the culture to be able to adapt so that when you’re done with it, the continuous improvement can take its own journey without anybody actually looking over their shoulders. Right. So it’s the relentless pursuit of the perfect process through waste elimination that create capacity for growth. So how do you do that is by creating higher throughput and lower defects. So in the in the in the world of sales, what is your ratio of success and failure of making a sales to your clients. And that is very important. One of the experience that I had in the past working with the company, the one that also use Salesforce, we were able to improve, I don’t remember the numbers, but we were able to improve the rate of success, success, success, sales to our client, by streamlining all the processes that they have. So this is the structure of the value stream map. So if you see, you always start with the customer understanding who your customer is, or your customers are, sometimes you can have a multiple customer in your value stream, right you have internal external, sometimes you have external you have a different categories of customers, you need to identify that, and also identify the product or services, the one that you deliver to each one of those customers, right. And then you also dealing with a system now system one system two system, one could be your Salesforce system two could be another type of system or platform. And then you have the manual process that the one that goes through from the left to right. And each one of those process types might or might not connect directly into your system or your platform. Now what my experience in the past is that you always have input output relationship, right? Sometimes one process step during the input into a system and the upstream process during the output or interactions to the system do want that previous step pulling the input into the system. Now, if you don’t have a understanding what data that you need to be inputted into the system, that’s where the the upstream process is going to experience all of this rework and defects that need to be managed in order for the mate for them to be able to pass on into the next process step. So, the value stream basically is a pictorial view of value added and non value added activities. Right. So an in value stream cut across functional boundaries, my experience outside of the manufacturing with it that my in my first 15 years of experience with this one here, when you do transactional processes. In most cases, you involve many different functions or departments within your organization. That’s why it’s so important for you to have the scope just right and identifying the problem statement. So you can identify the functions and the department that have to be involved for them to be able to create the current condition and identify opportunity for the future statement. So the three values, number one is a value add activities is basically it’s value, and then what is value as activity is a value that the customer is willing to pay for it. And I had a lot of discussion with my clients is that okay? What do you mean by that? Well, what I mean by that is that in the world of complicatedness, if you only have supplier, you really don’t care. But if you have many suppliers, and your customer can pick and choose, they will decide which one that gives them a better value for the surfaces that you provide to them, right. So and then solution provided at the right place, right quantity and right time. So that basically is to create effectiveness and efficiency in the entire process. Now, the last one is activities that add no values or waste is called Muda. So non value add activities is something that one that you actually doing transactions, the ones that do not change the Fit form and functions, you just pass it over to somebody else. And then non value add activities, but essentials, and give you an example safety, finance, regulatory, all of those are activities that are essentials. Now level of value stream map, usually there are three major level of management company wide at the top level of the organization’s usually is very simple, you know, like a few blocks, few process steps, and you go down into the business unit, you get more complex, and you go down into the process level, you get more details and more complex. And usually most companies start from business units, I hardly see company that start from the company wide. So I do not know whether that is the pace or the flavor that the company would like to do, because they don’t see any value during the company wide. So let’s start with the business units. So identify the value stream. Okay, so according to Mike Rota, and John Shoop is that your customer care about this specific products, not all of your products, right. So that’s mean, you have to focus on one product, service or transaction family. So you need to be able to group them and trying to see what common processes all of those products or services going through your processes. And then you need to identify from the customer and to the value stream, not from the upstream process steps. So one example that I have in there is that scheduling physician timely, and then inquiry to order. So in the use of Salesforce marketing and sales, you know, you you’re going to have 500 inquiry, not every single inquiry is going to turn out to be an order. Now, you got to find out exactly why is that. So my experience in the past, we figured out you know the process is broken, there was no communication between one functions to the other, the data, the one that resides in the system is not fairly accurate, nobody maintained it. And therefore you always hit and miss the to translate the inquiry to order. So this is the the tools, the one commonly used to identify that product family is called the process product matrix. As you see on the left, I call it the products or your services or your different transactions, different type transactions. And on the top is basically is the process step the one that have to go through. And then you begin to see the commonality of the of the process step for each one of those products or services they have to go through. And then you can decide how we’re going to create a product family so that we can create a value stream map within that product family to start, because you cannot boil the ocean to solve anything that you need to solve. But you got to start something. Now people say, Well, John, what happened if we have this as part of that, but there’s only one step, the one that’s going to be involved in that final step. Don’t worry about that. Because when you start solving the problem at the higher level, some of the lower level would likely be impacted as well. But you don’t know until you go through the process. Now Value Stream Map prework always identified the stakeholder is so important for you to have the stakeholder analysis, because as I said earlier, is going to go through the change management. So make sure that stakeholders are okay with that ahead of time because change is coming. Right because when you going from the current state to the future state of the industry map, you begin to see all the changes that has to be made. And some people do one has been comfortable doing their job in the last 1020 years suddenly like why you want me to change my job now I had to learn something new. Well yeah, because by doing that you make the entire process more efficient data gathering. So avoid analysis paralysis. Do not get hung Now on the final mission, we need accuracy not positions. And you got to do the gamble, see the word, watch the flow, work the process. The reason I enforcing the fact that you need to do the gamba, you’re trying to avoid or eliminate opinions, right, and who does better to to the gamma is the people who will actually do the work. If somebody that doesn’t do the work, have somebody that do the work to walk you through the process, so you begin to see it. Now, the advantage of doing that this new person is going to have a fresh set of eyes, that he or she will be able to identify something new, that the operator itself, you know, since they got so close to the process, they might be missing something. Level loading is basically to even that the process throughout the entire organization so that you can actually use the resources more efficiently. And then you start with the waste analysis. So what the process I explained you a little bit before, right? Can you observe the process in the real time scenario, if it’s not used empirical data, this helps guide everyone in the flow. So in the world of transactional value stream mapping, I usually give between four to eight weeks of gathering the data from the from the moment that the team is trained how to get the data, and from the moment that the team understand what the problem statement is, and the scope, and the first step in the value stream and the last step in the value stream. And usually, we take about four to eight weeks before we get into the week of workshop of the value stream mapping. So once you do that, and then you start collecting the data, because what happened in the transactional world is not like in the manufacturing floor, right? You can sit there and watch three hours. And you see so many iterations of reputation, repeatability processes going through in the in the first three hours, but in transaction is that sometimes you have a review process, that review is only taking place once a month. So you will not be able to see that gamba. After one month, that’s four weeks. So you have to give yourself some time to get enough data points, so that your data is going to be somehow solid for you to be able to build your current state. So my experience in the last 30 years, people say like, Well, you did and we’re going to have all this technology, can we do it virtually as like not in the beginning? Right? I just did my Google search this week that, you know, from different type of learner, the visual learner is about 60% 65% of the populations and the auditory learners about 30% of the population and kinesthetic learners, about 5% of the populations. And that’s why in the world of Lean official management is the foundations of everything going forward. Right? Because it’s very easy for you to audit if the visual management is nearby. So you can see whether the whether the upgraders actually using the standard process that was given to them, if you have the visual management nearby. So when it’s made electronically, it’s easy to lose sight of it while I I’ve been going down through this road many, many times eventually. Do you remember what happened in the middle of that section? Well, no. So now we have to go back and open the value stream map, but I do see it and somebody tried to digitize it. And it’s very difficult because when you try to digitize it, you can only see it within your screen, but you cannot see the entire value stream map. Because when you start doing the value stream map, you’ll see a lot of interaction between step one and step five, step three and step seven, and you want to see that holistic approach so that you can actually make the connection between input output of one step to the next step and one step to the previous steps. Okay, so the first time hellsten is very critical and possible in a follow up, then you can probably use the future. Lessons learned from many, many years that I’ve done Value Stream Mapping right in most cases, you do not identify the true customer demand or objective the Value Stream Map always require a closed loop. So when I look at the value stream for some reason and JT take a look at my call history Value Stream Map is it the first thing I say like there is no closed loop? How do you know if you deliver something to the customer what the customer requested you to write. So without this you cannot drive improvement to improve quality and this is things that I learned over the years to improve quality when you look at your value stream map from right to left where the customer is on the right side. If you want to drive if you want to improve quality you drive from left to right, with the with the focus on yield. And the reason is I followed the concept of GEICO okay G IG o garbage in garbage out. So the quality always start from the initial input into your value stream mapping. If you have defects can come in into your value stream if you don’t fix that that defects can be carried out over until the end of the value stream. Now to drive cycle time, you look from right to left to reduce the process time, because that’s where the customer feels first, right? Because you suddenly just producing the product faster. Regardless whether you have a lot of defects or not within your fantasy map, and follow the just in time principle, appreciation is not important. Unless I mentioned that before, I can see it, because it drives people into analysis paralysis. Ideally, when you know, customer time, you can confer to tack time. Okay, lead time versus tack time and potentially determine resources needed. All right, so the basic formula of TAC time is the number of available time within the organization’s not multiplied by the number of resources divided by the customer demand within the same period of time. Right. So if you have a 40 hours a week, and then you have a 20 demand per week, that’s mean, you have to deliver 20 minutes per 40 hours, two hours per product to your customer. The next one is the zone controller. Right? So as you develop your fantasy map, as you go into from the from the current to the future state. So you got to think about the sim controller, where can you start building the zoom control so that that particular process step or a group of process steps will not accept defects, nor create defects and pass no defects? Okay, this is about the waste elimination is not reallocation of waste. So, I’m done with this. So now open for questions.
Ian Gotts 21:53
So, first of all, John, thank you. I think for those people who are steeped in Lean Manufacturing, this all makes lots of sense, I think, for lots of people who are maybe just dipping their toe in the water of business analysis, this feels overwhelmed is probably unfair. But actually, there’s there’s quite a lot of terminology there. So can I just kind of just put some context. First of all, for people who are in the Salesforce world passionate about business analysis, there’s a whole certification called Salesforce certification for business analysis. And we’ve talked about the concepts there, about capturing requirements, mapping processes, understanding the business, and so on. So what Jon’s been talking about is at the heart of how do I understand how the business works. So that’s the first point. The second thing is, this is a way of thinking about waste, we’re thinking about driving out ways to way of thinking about a business. So there’s that hierarchical approach of going from from the company level to the business unit level down to the process level, that is completely consistent with everything that the Salesforce business analysis certification talks about. So if you’ve thought about UPN, universal process notation, which is the notation standard that Salesforce talks about, that is completely consistent with what John’s been talking about, John’s been talking about some principles about the way you go about doing the analysis. UPN is the way that Salesforce isn’t getting you to document what you’ve discovered. So they’re not at cross purposes, they’re actually completely coherent and consistent. So I think I just want to set that as soon as expectation if you’re thinking about okay, so how does this work? Do I have to choose one or the other none of the principles that John’s been talking about have been proven in company after company, and a completely irrelevant to manufacturing but but even more so relevant to the life sciences industry, where not only do we need to drive out waste, but we also need to document what we’re doing because of the regulatory background of overview that we have in the life sciences world. And again, that is completely consistent with with UPN, and the business analysis processes, approaches that we’re talking about in the Salesforce world. So I just want to set that up, before we’d sort of logged insight into some of the questions. So I think one of the questions that has come out here is what is the you talked about? The benefits, but can you quantify some of those savings? So if I’m an organization looking to apply these principles, is it 10% 50%? What? What sort of savings Do you start to see from this work? I know it’s very difficult to come up with some specifics, but some general principles.
John Tjahjadi 24:32
So in general, I would I would say about 30% improvement. But the last, the last event that I did on the onboarding process, the onboarding process, believe it or not, they use Salesforce as a data driven activities. And then before we did the the value stream mapping, identify the opportunity and get into and they were able to reduce the own onboarding cycle time from 210 days to 70 days. Now that obviously more than 30%, right? But again, you need to understand your current conditions, your current value stream map, in order for you to be able to move forward and see how big of an improvement that you can get. Now, there is no guarantee whatsoever, right? I, I always, people ask me, like, can you guarantee this? I cannot, because I do not know the culture of your organization. I work with the organization that the culture is so Gangu. Look, I need to this is just crazy. It drives me crazy, the work is so hard. And we need to change something and you go into this organization and a half the participant uncomfortable what I’m doing, I really don’t care, but that there is a change. I’m not I’m not going to change. And and then you always have that issue. Right. So the latter one will not give you that significant improvement. But the first one, it will give you a significant improvement. That’s why understanding the stakeholder doing the stakeholder analysis, trying to work with them ahead of time, look changes coming in, what do you think about this? What do you think about that, tell me more about your job. So you begin to educate them, right? Have a dialogue with them, one on one with them. So they feel comfortable when the change is coming. And you will have a higher process improvement than if you don’t do it. Right. So again, the key with the successful doing Value Stream Mapping is number one is identify your problem, write a very good problem statement. And identify the scope in scope out of scope so that you do not do a scope creep when you start working on your value stream map. And within those two, now you begin to identify what will be the first step in your value stream? And what will be the last step in your value stream, right? Because now, you know, if the first step does not impact the problem statement, then you got to change that first step. Right. I’m going to give an example. For example, how long does it take to deliver pizza to my house when I ordered the pizza? If the first step is to create the door, and then prepare making the pizza, and the last step is to cook in the box, you will not be able to see the entire value stream. So the first step supposed to be as you pick up the phone to call the pizza place until you receive the pizza at your doorstep. That will be the first and the last and then you capture everything, then you begin to see okay, now we’re not going to improve the cycle time or the effectiveness of the process of delivering pizza. So I use the word pizza because I think everybody experienced that right? Yeah. So that’s, that’s, that’s what that’s what it is. So I have asked him,
Ian Gotts 27:47
I did an interview with Jim boots. Just recently he was he’s been spent 40 years in the world of business analysis, he led a lot of the business analysis change or the BPM stuff at Chevron? I asked him exactly the same question. And interesting the same answer, which was huge benefits. But often companies don’t measure where they currently are. So it’s very difficult to put a number on how much it’s improved. But empirically, everybody knows it’s improved, because actually, it’s working better. That’s first one second point you made about scope. I think this is probably the most important thing that that when if you’re new to this is getting that scope set correctly, which is what are the inputs, one, the outputs. And often in live workshops, you spend as much time arguing about what those are, which is okay, the definition of it was delivered is delivered, if they put the pizza under the door or left it on the mat was delivered, you actually got it and then you’ve written a review. So you is even a debate about what delivered means. So we need to get those the inputs and the outputs Correct. Before we’ve actually got the scope. We often spend more time on those than we actually do and getting that right first sight. I think that’s really important. One of the questions that’s come in, which is one of the signs that you would see in an organization where it’s time to start doing Value Stream Mapping?
John Tjahjadi 29:07
Well, you will. Usually the organization has to wait too late when they have filed in the organization’s right. Well, why are you waiting until this? Well, now suddenly, from our financial statement, we’re not making profit anymore. Oh, there you go. Right. So I, I’ve been working with this long enough that maybe this is not the right word to share, but I’m going to share it anyway. So in the word of Lean when I worked with the Toyota global engineers that you know, we promote Lean Six Sigma is to eliminate waste or reduce variations right? At the end of the day. That’s not a those are just symptoms. You run a business, what is your primary focus is to increase profit, reduce operating expense Now, you need to focus on reducing the operating expense so that you can create more profit by which you apply the Lean Six Sigma methodology. Yes, you got to eliminate waste, because not always actually will transfer into dollars. So I’m fairly rigid about that. So I’m going to look at it. Okay, let’s, let’s look at your financial statement itemized list of financial statements, which have the biggest expenses that you have, and see if we can look into that process to reduce those expenses. Right. So maybe deal with limitations to streamlining process, I do not know what the answer is going to be unless you understand what your current condition looks like. So there is there is no guarantee on anything. But when you work with somebody that has a lot of experience, like working with Ian or myself, you know, we guide you through that. So you begin to see different things in the perspective of how you’re going to improve your future state. So
Ian Gotts 30:58
I essentially the question was, how do I know when my organization is ready for this? I think you’ll find every organization at some in some area of your organization needs to be continuously improving. I mean, anyone that’s customer facing where the demands are changing, then there’s always improvement there. So I don’t think it’s a question of saying, Should I am I ready for this? I think it’s what area of the business needs to be focused on this first. So there obviously priorities are the other thing I remember from my time that Toyota was one of the comments was, everyone’s job is to change their job by 1%, every day continuously. So it’s not this big effort, we’ve now changed it, we can forget about it for the next three years, it’s about 1% change continuously. So there’s like you talked about it several times, it’s continuous improvement. So it’s being able to apply these either at the macro level, which is, hey, we need to implement AI, or we’re going to make a big change to our Salesforce instance, or at the micro level, which is at, you know, the customer service bits not quite working, because of the way that people have changed our relationship with us, we need to go and change those. So I think it’s also levels in terms of value stream mapping could be at a higher level, we’ve got a big area of the business that needs to change on a micro level, which is there’s a part of our business, which isn’t working as well as it could. And let’s apply these principles at that level. So this doesn’t have to be top down all the time, it could be bottom up as well. So I think it’s the question is not I’ll be ready for it. I think it’s what areas should we be applying this? So can I just change our change tack a little bit about? Okay, who are the people in the organization who should be doing the value stream mapping? And if anybody wants to a career in this? Where Where would they start in terms of certification? So I’ll I’ll answer the last question what John asked you. The first question on the certification path is business analysis, that that’s where this hits, a prerequisite of the business analysis. Certification is Salesforce admin certification. So if you haven’t got that, you need to get that first. The reason for that is that it then sets a good foundation for your Salesforce business analysis certification. So clearly, what we’ve been talking about is business analysis. That’s the certification. So John, over to you. In the organizations you’re seeing what are the sorts of talk to you about the the typical titles or the roles that would be involved in value stream mapping?
John Tjahjadi 33:26
Well, you mentioned about the business panels, right, the business analysts can function as two different roles, either as a continuous improvement leader or is a value stream manager, you have to have a palace, the managers that fallacy manager that is supported by many, many continuous improvement leader or Kaizen leader. Right? So because once you do the value stream mapping, you will have many, many kinds of sense that you need to roll out. Right? Think about it. So the current state going to the future state, you have gaps, those gaps are a list of opportunities that give you the roadmap of implementation to achieve the future state. So those those are the things that I’m always looking at is or the current project manager within the organization, if you have a pm role within the organization, that can also become a value stream manager or a Kaizen leader. You know, it’s very interesting that you mentioned in Toyota is like, you know, every everybody has to get one thing change every day. Yeah, I call it Kaizen every day. You know, you do Kaizen every day. It doesn’t have to be big, but it’s got to be continuously improved. Now, with the caveat, you have to have a standard process how you can do that, otherwise, you’re going to create a chaos. Now people say like, well, it’s easy to say no, it is not. Actually, it’s more difficult than you think. Now if your culture is not conducive to do that, kind of stuff, you will end up creating more chaos than a good continuous improvement as a whole. You know, for the organization, just just just be very careful with that, you know, what Toyota has been doing in the last 90 years now in about 90 years. Their foundation is very strong. Right, very, very strong. And they continuously pass on that into the next leadership. So the leadership, the new leadership is not going to change anything that’s been learned in the last 90 years. No, they improve that in the last 90 years, unlike the typical Western companies, right, when you have a new CEO, they wipe everything out and start from a clean slate. And that’s, that’s a struggle that we have why we cannot sustain the improvement that you have?
Ian Gotts 35:48
Well, yeah, I think people say, when you think about established companies like Toyota, they think of quarters, there’s 25 years, not three months, currently, they take away longer term perspective, I think that idea, it’s very difficult to continuously improve unless you have a baseline, which is, again, the importance of process documentation. I think in the life sciences industry, everybody understands that because of the regulators require things to be well documented. But that’s often in the area of say, drug safety testing, or manufacturing, we need to apply those same disciplines into the sales world, make sure that that is well documented, we can’t have sales go, you know, it’s magic. You don’t you can’t document what I do it, there’s, there’s a certain magic to that’s not true, there are elements of what you do can be documented. And we can’t, we can’t change and build better Salesforce implementations unless we understand what you really do and how you want to make that change. So I think the principles that from manufacturing can be applied in every part of the organization.
John Tjahjadi 36:51
Yeah, well, again, you know, my mentor used to tell me, you know, John, if there is no standard, there is no improvement, actually is very true. Right. So how do you know if the improvement actually is an improvement? You don’t know what your standard is. When when somebody ran a problem statement? Well, our sales has been declining, that’s not a problem, what declining means to whom, right, so you got to be able to quantify that, because when you are able to quantify that, because think about the value stream map structured, right, the one that I shared with you the big difference between the value stream map and the process map, the process map, only to show you the process flow, but there is no data attached to each one of those blocks. Right, the value stream map has a data that is going to give you a value to analyze, whether you’re going to achieve what you need to achieve that therefore the problem statement has to be very quiet, it has to be quantifiable and specific to that value stream. Right? So because when you’re done, you can feel good. So like Wallah, now we improve 30% from the problem statement, very good. And you continue it with your with your work. Another thing is that you probably all have the experience, finding the true root cause is so difficult. Therefore, most people use the symptom as a true root cause to find the solutions, which usually the solution is not going to be sustainable. Depending who is the manager or the leader of that value stream, when that person left, that thing is going back into the old days, because the root cause sometime point much higher in the organization. And people do not want to do that. But that’s what the true lean environment is being transparent. And everybody got involved from the top of the organization all the way to the janitor of the organizations. And that’s why I keep on telling them that, you know, are you sure there’s a root cause? Because I still keep on asking why. And you still keep on giving me the answer. So there could not be the root cause yet. Right? So there’s still the symptom. So just keep on asking the why question, just like the three years old toddler, right? Sometimes you get so upset, why, why, why, why? And then you just tell it just keep quiet. I mean, let’s move on. Because eventually is going to come back to the parents. Okay, that’s my fault.
Ian Gotts 39:17
So I think that’s that the five why’s is something we hear a lot in other areas of business analysis. So again, just proving that these things, these things are completely coherent. It’s about asking, but getting good at asking those business analysis questions about well, why does it really happen? And I’m not taking the first answer. This has been fascinating. John, we’re, we’re getting close to the top of the top of the webinar. If there are any places that you should go to for any resources that we can go to clearly the deck is going to be shared. Is there anywhere else that we should be sending people who are interested? You ask me? Yes, John.
John Tjahjadi 39:55
Well, let me start There is a group of Lynne they call it the LE ai ai.org. I think that’s probably the most common use by people that wants to learn about Lean. And I can always suggest to it the book, which is the easy read is my favorite book is the goal. Yes, because the goal is based on a theory of constraints. Now, if you if you had a PhD in physics or things like that, go and have fun reading the theory of constraint, because they have a long string of formula that drive me crazy, like I didn’t even get that high. But what they did is they translate that into enough, we just really nice to write and then you begin to understand how to improve your throughput and reducing defects in your organization’s read that I mean, they also have an audio book, but I will not do the audio book because reading book is kind of nice, because they get the graphic that you could not see the audiobook. But it’s an easy read, you know, you read once, and then it will relate to your life, especially when you are a middle manager or upper manager, right? It will relate to your mind, because you have a family that you need to take care of. But yet they get concerned about the work is rarely good book. I mean, there’s so many books out there, but I always recommend the only book is written with the practical.
Ian Gotts 41:32
Okay, so the book is called The Goal. As John said, it’s a novel, but it actually is a novel. But it also has, it talks about principles. Having written multiple boring nonfiction books, it’s really hard to write a book like the goal, but it’s beautifully written. So the goal is if you’re interested in this, and clearly the other area to look obviously is looking at the business analysis, certification inside Salesforce is the other place where these two things come together. So thank you, John, so much. It’s been fascinating talking to you. I can talk to you for the rest of the day. But unfortunately, none of us had all that time. But thanks for spending time with us.
John Tjahjadi 42:01
Yeah, thank you for all the participants, you know, if you have any more question, I mean, I’m sure Shannon or even scan my informations. And, you know, I’ll be glad to answer
Shannon Gregg 42:06
Beautiful. Thank you fellows so much. And thanks for everybody who attended. I will tell you about a decade ago, I worked with JT on a process that was very heavy in waste on the contracting process. And by following all of these prescriptive principles, we were able to find a few amazing ways to develop some automations in Salesforce. And so it was a good way for us to take a step back and look at our process and say, Where do we have waste? Where can we develop automation. And it is so worth your time to look at this before you decide to make changes in your technology. Looking at your process first is critical.
John Tjahjadi 42:51
I have not heard before you finished yet. Oh, so my current clients right? Over the last two decades, they’ve been adding automation by way of patching. So to the point that their sales would not grow anymore, without hiring a bunch of people because their process is was no longer scalable. So after we did the first value, stream, map, desktop, all of the IT projects, waiting until this value stream was done. And then revisit all of the projects within the IT organization. They wiped out almost 70% of those IT projects 70% Kartell and then would focus on only what we identify in the value stream mapping workshop. And that’s why we were able to reduce from 210 days to 70 days, I you can calculate was 66 70% improvement. I don’t know. But that’s that’s what it is. Okay, so automation is enabler. If your process is broken, you put automations Yes, your process can go faster with all of the broken processes going through it as well. So just be mindful on that.
Ian Gotts 44:08
Let me add one thing to that. The only place automates becomes comes before simplify is in the dictionary.
Shannon Gregg 44:14
Fantastic fellows, thank you so much. This has been wonderful and delightful. I love it. Thank you to JT thank you to Ian thank you to ES Doc’s cap storm elements cloud steady state and phyto SEO for sponsoring today’s webinar. We look forward to seeing you next month in the final webinar installment in the life sciences dreaming webinar series. Thanks, everybody and have a fantastic day.
Ian Gotts 44:43
Thank you. Thanks bye bye
