Hello fellow process improvers! After a bit of a personal break, Thomas and I are gearing up for our normally scheduled programming. We will be back in the new year with more thoughts, more stories and more opportunities to connect with this great community of thinkers and changers.
But in the meantime, we wanted to express our appreciation to you all. A holiday themed posting seemed like the best and lightest way to say our thanks for our wonderful first year of blogging.
So enough of the corporate ideation and let’s dive into a truly important topic. How can we optimize one of the most demanding and critical processes in the world? We are talking about Santa’s legendary Christmas Eve journey of course.
The Legend
First some context setting for the few people who are not aware of Santa’s awesomeness. Santa is tasked with delivering Christmas gifts to deserving children all over the world. He uses a reindeer powered, flying sled to travel to each country, town and house over the course of only a single night! Kudos for the environmentally friendly mode of travel. Children then wake up the next morning with gifts magically under their Christmas tree, only to wonder how Santa found his way into their living room, along with every other one across the planet.
Some other amazing details? Santa not only delivers gifts but an amazing customer experience as well. For each house, he makes sure to land on the roof, go down the chimney and then place gifts under each tree. This is heard by each child throughout the night, which only adds to the excitement. And the morning view of magical gifts under a Christmas tree is second to none. Think about that the next time Amazon just throws a box on your stoop … in the rain.
But Santa goes further than that. He also manages the entire production line of these gifts in the North Pole, through a dedicated team of specialized elves. Santa’s team starts mass producing gifts literally the day after Christmas and always finishes on time before that fabled night of globe-trotting. Talk about a high-stress service agreement that is never missed!
It is truly amazing that such a set of processes is continually managed at a superb level of quality. Santa has basically zero turn-over in his team, and even single-handedly manages the vetting of each customer through an infamous naughty list. And yet he still has enough time to drink all of that Coca-Cola during the holiday season.
Time to Improve
Obviously, I am a fan of Santa’s processes and his ability to make them work. But I felt the need to blog about some glaring issues that may blemish his stellar record at some point in the future. These red flags are more familiar in a corporate setting but even Santa can’t escape the all-encompassing world of process improvement! So at risk of being seen as anti-Santa, here are some thoughts on why even he should consider some improvements.
I mean just because Santa has always done it this way, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t challenge it right? Doesn’t “it has always been done this way” sound familiar?
Firstly, I’ve never seen any process definition on the inner mechanics of how Santa manages his service. How are materials for gifts sourced? What routing logic is used (has he solved the traveling salesman problem)? How does he manage data on literally the entire world? I understand this is akin to asking a magician to explain his illusions, but even just a few details would help fill in my massive mental gaps!
Therefore, my only logical conclusion is that these details are managed in the brains of himself and his stellar team. Sure that’s working now, but what if the elves decide to try something new one year? Buddy the Elf anyone? Santa would lose all of that intellectual capital in an instant.
So, he has a critical dependency on his current staff. But he also has his entire operations in a single location. And by the way, that location is literally on thin ice (pun intended)! Warming winters may soon start to affect everything from his physical manufacturing plant to the viability of using cold weather reindeer for transport.
But there’s more. Here are some other potential pain points I’ve thought about while procrastinating surely more important work.
- The chimney? Is this really the best way to enter a house? To be clear, I am not bringing anyone’s weight into question
- How does gift manufacturing start BEFORE children send in their lists? Feels like a lot of waiting time and / or unnecessary inventory (ie WASTE)
- I can only imagine how many trips back to the north pole is required to fill up a tiny sled with a yet another batch of gifts…
- There is literally zero adoption of new technology (c’mon Santa)
Santa’s Optimization
So I’ve got your attention! Fear not as I have also come up with some optimizing ideas to keep Santa rolling for thousands of years more. Yes, my level of procrastination knows no limit.
Small Batches, Many Christmases
- Let’s first tackle this one-night thing. Has anyone asked the customer (ie children) if they need everything to happen on one night? Does France care if Australia got their gifts a day earlier or later? Santa’s team should get some serious VOC requirements and see if Christmas can be spread out for many days and ease the velocity of this process. Take a page out of the Hanukkah playbook!
The Naughty List
- I completely get why children need to be vetted but this feels like a bit of a binary task that can be outsourced to a compliance service. Santa should be able to just receive the respective populations while another firm does the tedious work of tracking activities around the world
- Oh and why are we giving white glove service (another pun!) to the naughty children? Sure, they are getting a lump of coal but Santa is still hand-delivering it. A strongly worded email with a picture of coal could produce the same result
Just in Time Production
- Tackling the apparent waste in Santa’s manufacturing operations, we should target a less inventory intensive strategy for making gifts. Perhaps requiring children to send lists earlier in the year and with key required data to make manufacturing quicker and more on-demand.
- Also, decentralize operations! Get out of the melting north and place teams all over the world. This would help with sled fill-ups during delivery nights as well.
The House
- Given the volume of deliveries, please eliminate this whole chimney business. I can only imagine how time consuming that is to enter a house. Create a policy where easier access points are left available by parents, for quicker entries and exits
- Also, try a bit of poka-yoke and ask roofs to be clearly marked to indicate expectant children. Some nice big color coding would help Santa identify the next house more quickly (or is this why we have Christmas lights?).
Technology
- Drones with a snazzy VR setup for Santa so he doesn’t have to leave his sled!
- Zoom calls for decentralized teams of elves!
- SpaceX rockets instead of sleds! (And hyper-tubes for ground travel?)
Final Thoughts
This is clearly meant to be a super serious list so please do respond back with ideas of your own! Surely we can have more hope of Santa adopting these ideas than our mid-manager for our day job requests.
Also, even though these could be great ideas and improve the process, would we actually be improving the value for our client? If Christmas is diminished by a teched out Santa sending out emails on random days of the year, would the magic of Christmas be lost? A lesson to all of us in balancing efficiency and cost with the ultimate goal of our businesses – to serve our customers with a level of value inspired only by the legend himself.
Happy holidays and looking forward to engaging in the new year.
Thank you!!1