Two cautionary examples

Once upon a time in a small bakery there was a skilled baker named Zara. Her bakery provided bread and occasional treats for the town and everyone loved visiting her bakery.

The bakery sells a lot of products and her employees are very busy, but Zara realised that they are somehow still wasting time, money, and resources. Many days there would be specific types of bread and cakes left over that she would need to throw away, resulting in a waste of ingredients and time.

She also noted that her employees have to constantly move around the bakery, bumping into each other, not finding the right ingredients when they needed it. This movement wasted time and energy and resulted in lack of focus, which often resulted in mistakes in the baking process.

Zara decided to put some time aside to rethink the bakery’s layout and better ways to run the order-and-production process. She started by listing the typical products that were often left over. She decided that she would implement a bake-to-order process for the identified products which are more expensive to make and thus leads to bigger losses.

When she investigated the layout of the bakery, she realised that the baking stations were not ordered according to what the employees bake, and that the ingredients were not packed in a logical order. She decided to implement a better layout that groups baking stations per category of bakery product and ensures that each station has the tools and ingredients needed for preparation.

As a result of Zara’s small yet significant changes, her bakery became more efficient. Her bread and cakes were fresher, she had a lot less waste and a lot more happy customers. The story of Zara’s bakery serves as a story to help us understand how being observant and making continuous improvements to our organisational processes, usually leads to making things better for the organisation, for our employees and for those we serve.