How much time do you spend fighting fires each day?

Today was a jam-packed day at the IW Best Plants Conference. (See yesterday's post for more). I heard a number of interesting presentations about how manufacturing companies can implement continuous improvement in their facilities. A lot of the challenges and solutions discussed today were of course specific to manufacturing, but there are some things that digital marketers can learn from too -- no matter what industry you're in.

During a session called "How to Create a Continuous Improvement Culture," David Rowland from Milliken & Company (one of the world's largest textile companies) talked about "firefighting" and how it's often a significant portion of an employee's day. How many "fires" are you putting out each day and how many crises are you solving, versus doing your normal job?

David said that the typical person in a typical company spends about 40% of their time on daily operations (the "normal" part of their job), and 60% trying to solve unexpected problems and put out various "fires." Milliken & Co. actually did a study a while back where it examined how its managers were using their time, and the numbers were amazingly close to this 40%/60% ratio.

However, he pointed out that the best companies -- like Toyota -- only spend 20% of their time on daily operations and 20% firefighting. So where do they spend the other 60%? Continuous improvement. They make their processes better. They find ways to reduce waste. They standardize routine decisions.

So how does this apply to online marketing? Well, just like the people in manufacturing operations, we can put processes into place that eliminate variability and waste. Whether it's a report your team puts together for management, a process for distributing leads to sales, etc., implement a plan to standardize these types of activities. As David said during his presentation, "People love their jobs when they need to make fewer decisions. They don't need to make many decisions when you have good processes in place."

But here's the tough part: no process is ever finished. Once you have the process in place, always look for ways to make it better, like Toyota does with its famed Toyota Production System in the manufacturing world.

As digital marketers, there are plenty of things we do that can't be standardized. But I think we underestimate the number of standard tasks we complete each day -- and you can apply continuous improvement principles to most of these. Standard practices will reduce the amount of time you spend "firefighting" and give you more time for the big, difficult, custom tasks you perform.