Systems engineering focuses on the many interdependencies of various elements in complex systems. Below is an interesting illustration. Lean practitioners will recognize the importance of “hidden processes.”
On an old episode of “This American Life,” a program produced by Chicago Public Radio and hosted by Ira Glass, Jim Bodman, chairman and CEO of Vienna Sausage Manufacturing Company in Chicago, related this story about the company’s move to a new production facility.
“In 1970 the company built a state-of-the- art plant on Chicago’s north side. This plant replaced the old site on the south side of the city. The old site was a maze of buildings on one block, acquired over seventy years as the company grew.
As Bodman tells the story the new production site was state-of-the-art, stainless steel, with perfect refrigeration capability and a shiny clean building where the company produced their popular natural, old-world hickory-smoked sausage. But something unexpected happened when the company started producing their sausages in the new facility. They simply weren’t as good. They tasted okay, but they didn’t have the same snap when you bit into them and the color was wrong: slightly pink instead of the trademark bright red.
What was wrong? The employees and managers worked to find the flaw. The ingredients were the same—the same spices, same production process. They thought maybe the temperature in the smokehouse was wrong. Maybe the water on the north side of Chicago was different than the water on the south side. For a year and a half they wracked their brains, but nothing checked out as the culprit.
One night, in a local bar, a bunch of the production guys were talking about an employee who had been with the company for years: Irving. Irving was the kind of guy who knew everyone in the facility and even had nicknames for everybody. Irving’s job was to deliver the sausages on racks from a cold storage room to the smokehouse. In the old facility Irving would weave his way through a maze of hanging bins, past the boiler room, past the tanks where they cooked the corned beef, finally up an elevator to the smokehouse where the sausages were cooked.
Suddenly a light bulb went off. There was no Irving. Irving hadn’t made the trip to the new facility—he didn’t want to commute across town. As a result, the sausages didn’t make the half-hour trip through the network of hallways where (as it turned out) they would get slightly warm before they were cooked. In the new facility the sausages were kept in a cold room until they were cooked in the smokehouse right next door. Irving’s trip was the “secret ingredient” that made the sausages red and snappy.
The company’s final solution was to build a new room next to the smokehouse where they could emulate the old conditions—graduallywarming the sausages before they were smoked. They had to create a physical space that simulated Irving.Here was an example of a sometimes “hidden” process in action. The company had done everything right, built their dream factory where they thought everything was perfect. But something totally unanticipated, unplanned for—and unexamined—had conspired to change the product. Sometimes, even when you’re successful, you don’t know why.
