Musings: customer relations garrison nova scotia power propeller rob batherson
by Ben
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It’s all about relationships
Today I noticed a tweet by a public relations worker at a local creative firm, Rob Batherson, who was pleased with the way an employee at the Hilton Fashion District Hotel in New York had dealt with an issue he was having. Obviously we all prefer when a company solves our problems, but I do want to elaborate a bit on this thought.
My beer habits have changed dramatically in the past year. I’ve always been a lover of quirky, bold beers, and have never been a big fan of the mass-market swill that one can find at most bars. My conversion to nearly 100% craft beer consumption, from perhaps 50% previously, was quick, and largely thanks to a tweet that I spotted by Bobby O’Keefe last August which introduced me to the Brewnosers Club. In the same period, my brand loyalty switched dramatically.
In my first year at Dal, I lived at Howe Hall, and when I wanted to fill my growler (perhaps 10% of my beer consumption at the time, maybe less), I’d trek out to Propeller. I really love Propeller’s beer, I find they have great quality, flavour, and consistency. The following year, I was living close to the North End (depends on who you ask) and was even closer to their brewery. However, every time I went to Propeller, I didn’t feel accepted as a customer. By that I mean the employees made no attempt to reach out, and rarely said more than a forceful “Hello.” Growler fills and purchasing bottles directly from the brewery had probably hit 50% of my consumption (excluding bars). This year, I once again moved downtown, and when the farmer’s market moved across the street from Garrison I started to check Garrison’s brews out when in the area.
Garrison provided a wildly different customer experience. Their staff seemed friendlier from day one, and when I go to purchase or sample their products they are always friendly and helpful. A few have started to recognize me, which is nice considering my visits are infrequent. One employee, however, has stood out. Garrison’s marketing and social media is handled by a young woman named Meg. Meg is great because she answers any query rapidly and thoroughly. If a product is not as expected, she moves quickly to rectify the situation. Meg goes above and beyond to ensure Garrison’s customers are satisfied, and it’s something I’ve noticed on multiple occasions. Whether an individual says something about Garrison in a public forum, whether positive or negative, Meg is quick to respond, thank the person if it’s positive, or see what can be done to correct the problem if it’s not.
The customer service displayed by the entire team at Garrison is something that motivates me to consume more of their beer, even though I don’t like it to the same extent as Propeller. Sadly, Propeller suffered a big loss in my eyes when brewmaster Don Harms returned to Ontario this spring. I sat next to him on a flight to Ottawa last December, and he was very friendly and encouraged me to come to the brewery so he could run some quality tests on my homebrew. Sadly, I was not able to take him up on the offer before he left a few months later.
Breweries aren’t the only companies that work to establish solid relationships with their customers. Public utilities seem to be much-maligned organizations. Relatively isolated from the threat of competition, they have little incentive to work harder on their product and their relationships. Aaron, who handles social media for Nova Scotia Power is another great example. He keeps their Twitter account up to date, lighthearted, and proactive. He works hard to answer questions thoroughly (I’ve asked questions about corona discharge sounding louder than normal, emissions at generating stations, charts for power usage by time of day. I’ve also pointed out issues with the website’s usability). Every time, Aaron is quick and thorough to respond. His proficiency is especially unexpected given my preconceptions of public utilities.
As Rob pointed out in his tweet, it’s all about creating positive relationships with customers and solving their problems. That’ll beat any advertising campaign.
Halifax’s new ferries: do we really need them?
Halifax’s Metro Transit is about to drop a few bills on new, faster ferries. They say that the new ships will decrease the time taken to do the current run, aiming for a top speed of 20 knots, more than double the current speed of 8 knots. On such short routes it’s hard to believe they’d hit 20 knots for very long, though the ride will definitely be faster. The simple question, however, is whether we actually need to spend the money on new boats.
With some (relatively) simple changes to the boarding ramps, the time taken to load and unload the boat at each end could be slashed by more than half. I estimate that this would allow for an additional crossing per boat per hour on the Halifax to Dartmouth run. How, you ask?
Currently, the same ramp is used to board and unload. Passengers wait far from the boat and the alighting passengers walk all the way past them to exit. Once the last passenger is confirmed to have left the passage, the doors are unlocked and the new passengers walk down to the ferry for boarding. This takes approximately five minutes, or 1/3 of the time taken to make the crossing. If a second ramp was installed on the outside of the dock, alighting passengers could leave via a dedicated route. Boarding passengers would already be down the ramp waiting for the ferry to arrive. Now, the second the final passenger has left, the alighting doors can be locked and the boarding doors unlocked, cutting the transfer time to approximately 2 minutes.
The current ferry terminal design.
With this change, trips would take 12 minutes instead of 15, allowing a fifth hourly crossing to be added. By shaping the jetty to look like a funnel, the ferries will not have a hard time docking, even in high winds (I dock an underpowered sailboat in a narrow dock in decently rough seas while in reverse on a regular basis). Surely this will cost less than purchasing new ferries, and will require fewer ferries to do the run.
If the ferries are in bad shape, then yes, we should look at replacing them. The new ferries should allow for two-sided alighting in order to make the proposed design change, allowing even more passengers to be carried well into the future. Since staff are paid on an hourly/salaried basis, the only added cost of additional crossings when the ferry is already operating is an increase in fuel consumption and a modest increase in maintenance costs.
These times have been gleaned from 4 separate observations of the ferry’s operations. More testing would be needed to confirm the improvement in speed. Times are taken from the moment the first passenger alights to the moment the doors close for the ferry to depart.
The proposed new design
Industrial Engineering Musings: Charlottetown Halifax Lean Metro Transit Toronto Toronto Transit Commission Transit Trius Transit Value Stream
by Ben
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Redefining the value stream in Canadian public transit
Canadian public transit providers seem to be at a crossroads. The Toronto Transit Commission is seeing a downright revolt from its riders, Halifax can’t seem to get busses to arrive on time or with frequency becoming of a modern city, Charlottetown’s budding system is undergoing a complete overhaul after a drop in ridership, and others are all over the map. There is, however, an underlying connection between all Canadian public transit systems, one that doesn’t directly involve their funding (or, arguably lack thereof): the value stream.
Public organizations, as well as most corporations seem to view the value stream as minimizing the cost of their operation, no matter what. What sets successful organizations apart is the way they view their value stream. Integrated discussions with both suppliers and customers, ensuring that costs savings are achieved in the correct spots in the stream, and viewing the relationship with their customers (riders) in a different way.
Haligonians and Torontonians who ride the bus or streetcar with any frequency have surely seen drivers stop mid-route for a coffee break. This is an example of a practice that is entirely contrary to the concept of a value stream. First, the driver is taking a break while paying customers wait. This reduces the value of riding a bus in contrast to driving. Second, routes are not optimized from the perspective of serving the customer, since they use what Tim Bousquet of Halifax’s alt-weekly “The Coast” calls “California-style scheduling.” He means the busses all arrive at the hub at once, then leave a long gap before the next bus comes. It works well in California, where missing your bus means sitting in the sun, but not in Halifax, where it means freezing to death. Since Halifax’s busses often follow similar routes between the hubs, this practice is arguably silly, and could probably be refined.
When I lived in Europe, bus drivers never took a coffee break mid-route, even on the most rural of routes. I’m not arguing that drives should not be entitled to breaks – they should. In Europe, the drivers were swapped out at the central terminal, as well as other hubs when necessary, allowing them to take a break in the break room, with (presumably) comfy chairs and no paying customers to upset. With some re-alignment, this would not be impossible to achieve in Halifax or Toronto. Some drivers may get their break a minute or two early, some a minute or two late, but a competent management should be able to sell such a plan to the union, particularly if drivers are offered some form of compensation when breaks are curtailed.
With regard to route scheduling, two solutions immediately jump to mind. One is to realign the routes to cover the main arteries as frequently as every five minutes. Then, feeder routes would aim to arrive at the transfer point with about 3 minutes to spare, allowing customers to be whisked away quickly. The busses running down the artery should, but don’t have to, follow the exact same path. minor deviations can be accounted for in scheduling. This type of system was well implemented in Aachen, Germany, as well as a few other cities that I’ve visited. The second solution is to change the procedure for busses to leave transfer points. If a bus is marginally late (perhaps one minute or less) arriving at the transfer point, the departing bus should wait to allow passengers to connect. This would accelerate the travel of riders through the system, though has the potential to backfire if the same bus is held back several times (though more data would be required to confirm this assumption).
Changing drivers mid-route, or at the end, and having them take another route after the break has two key benefits. The first is reducing bus downtime, which on many routes in Halifax appears to be 15 minutes at each end of the route (through observation). This window could be cut to five minutes or less if the drivers were swapped, potentially reducing the number of busses required to maintain the current level of service. The second advantage, which would occur with less frequently serviced routes, is having drivers take a new route after their break. This reduces the monotony that comes from running the same route for an entire shift, and keeps drivers trained on various stop locations in case the regular driver isn’t there. This is one of the key principles in Lean thinking — cross-training employees to keep them interested and keep their skill level up.
When we consider effectiveness from the customer’s point of view rather than simply viewing the dollars we stand to gain in terms of ridership, customer satisfaction, reductions in vehicle downtime, and driver satisfaction. Re-aligning all of Halifax’s routes, which cover some 3,000 stops across an area of over 3,000 km2 is no small feat, though the benefits listed above, coupled with the potential for ongoing cost savings through increased efficiencies leads me to believe the long-term cost of the changes will be lower than the current costs. Of course, it would require access to all of Metro Transit’s route data, the collective agreement, and more, plus very complex simulations in order to estimate these costs precisely. On the surface though, the customer wins, and when the customer wins, they keep coming back — with their friends.
Industrial Engineering Musings: Arena Breast Cancer Capital Health CDHA Health PEI Healthcare Home care Lean Ontario Paramedicine Rockwell Automation Six Sigma Sunnybrook
by Ben
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Cutting costs in healthcare
When provincial governments announce they will find ways to cut health care costs, they are usually, and rightly, met with an outcry that they will cut services. Fortunately, with the help of Industrial Engineering professionals and new medical and nursing grads who approach their fields with more open minds than their long-entrenched colleagues, cost savings are a definite possibility. There has long been skepticism from the bureaucracy about fundamentally changing the way programs are delivered, and no politician wants to preside over job cuts. The reality of the situation, however, is that change is necessary.
Last year, Health PEI announced a plan to have paramedics provide some aspects of the homecare program in rural areas. Their logic was sound. The paramedics were under-utilized, and there is a deficit of nursing resources. The paramedics could provide many basic services, such as re-dressing a wound and ensuring patients took their medications, releasing the nurses to do other, more specialized work. Through this change, it would be cheaper to keep an ambulance in West Prince 24/7, something that was promised when emergency room hours were cut. The nurses union took this as an affront, but the government persevered, albeit with a smaller program, which launched this spring. Initial reports make it seem rather successful, and hopefully the nurses union will embrace its expansion.
Other changes have occurred behind the scenes. Two years ago, two graduating Dalhousie students applied queuing theory and simulation to the call centre for women looking for breast cancer screening in Nova Scotia. The problem at the call centre was tri-fold: staffing costs needed to be decreased, the average wait time for a caller needed to be less than one minute (due to fears they’d hang up and not be screened), and the call volume was highly seasonal, with a surge during and shortly after Breast Cancer Awareness Month each year. After applying sound engineering principles to this problem, new staffing levels were devised to meet these three goals, saving the system money, and possibly saving lives.
While large health authorities have been employing industrial engineers for a number of years, the system is still largely inefficient. At a conference I attended in 2010, I learned that some 15,000 Canadians die each and every year through inefficiencies in our health care system. A project featuring a co-op student at Canada’s largest hospital, the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, was presented. The student was tasked with reducing spoilage, errors, and re-sampling for blood tests. With the old system, the nurse would take the sample, the porter would come by and collect that unit’s samples, and when finished the round, would deposit them at the lab. The lab would then analyze the samples, provide reports, and the porter would bring them back to the correct unit. Unfortunately, this process was time consuming, though rush jobs were moved more quickly. In the time between the sampling and the analysis, two things happened with shocking frequency: some samples would spill and others were mixed up, becoming useless. In both of these situations, the already-frail patient would require a second blood sample, taking up time for the nurse and the lab, and delaying the patient’s treatment. The student’s approach was (looking back) quite simple: better labeling and storage of the samples, and a switch to new containers that were less likely to spill. The result was a dramatic reduction in re-sampling of blood, and quicker care for the patients, ultimately getting more patients out of the hospital more quickly, and saving lives.
Another example, which was presented at a conference this past year, involved re-designing a Montreal-area hospital. The hospital’s elevator was running above capacity, with patients being transferred from the ward to the OR with an average transfer time of approximately 25 minutes. The hospital’s target was five minutes. With a mean of 25 minutes porters could move approximately two patients per hour. By reducing it to five minutes, the porters could be re-assigned to more valuable tasks than watching over a stretcher in a hallway. The hospital hired a local company, Trellisys, who used queuing theory and Arena, a simulation software from Rockwell Automation, to examine the layout of the hospital, as well as the arrival, departure, and movement of everyone inside. To an outsider, it would seem that five new elevators would be required to hit the hospital’s target. Five elevators would take up huge amounts of space inside the hospital’s narrow tower. Thankfully, that was not the case, and Trellisys recommended installing just one additional elevator. Their simulation found that the dialysis unit was wasting elevator resources, and recommended moving that to the first floor, and moving the cafeteria upstairs to where the dialysis unit used to be. Not only did this recommendation meet the hospital’s target, but they estimated it would take but two minutes to transfer a patient, on average, saving valuable porter resources, improving the timeliness of patient transfers, reducing patient stress, and saving huge capital and maintenance costs associated with adding four elevators.
A shocking example of industrial engineering came from Health PEI, who recently hired their first industrial engineer. After a few months on the job, she has already paid her way for years to come. A scheduling task which took a team of employees two days to complete has reportedly been modified to take a mere two hours. That’s an 800% improvement! This wasn’t a once-per-year task either. The team was continuously generating this schedule. The human resources are quickly being re-assigned to other tasks, and layoffs were reportedly avoided through attrition. (No public link to this report is available)
In 2010, Ontario ruffled some surgical feathers by insisting surgeons use checklists during procedures, no matter how many years on the job. While no statistically significant change in the complication rate was observed at the western hospitals in a major international study of surgical checklists, the Toronto hospital in the study quickly chose to push for the use of checklists across the board in Ontario. The government complied with their request and mandated it, partly in response to problems occurring at one Windsor-area hospital. Industrial Engineers are frequently called on to thoroughly document processes and create checklists to reduce variability and error.
Further savings in our health care system will be achieved through integrated practice models, where the doctors, nurses, pharmacists, dietitians, physiotherapists, and alternative practitioners such sports coaches, yogi, and others will work together to help patients live healthier lifestyles and concentrate human resources to their particular areas of expertise.
Industrial Engineers work behind the scenes to clean up processes and keep our hospitals humming along nicely. We enhance patient outcomes by applying queuing theory, simulation, statistics, and principles such as Lean and Six Sigma to every environment, reducing the strain on human resources, stresses to the patient, and costs to the public purse. When politicians are ready to get serious about cost savings in health care, they should continue to turn to us, and listen to the sound advice engineers provide across a variety of industries.
