Record the lessons learned
Write down every week what was learned, what worked and what did not, so the team and the others do not repeat the same mistakes.
The task in figures
- Gives you back
- 1.1 h a monthper team; today it takes 3.6 to 8.3 h a month
- Elmira today
- Helps
- Frequency
- Weekly
- Who does it today
- Engineer
- Version
- Elmira Junior
What hurts today.
What was learned stays at the end of the A3, and nobody reads it again.
Whoever is new repeats what was already tried.
What worked gets written down, and what did not is forgotten.
What a team learns while solving problems is worth as much as the solution: which cause turned out true, which countermeasure did not work, what it would do differently. It is gathered at the end of the week or when a project ends, written in a spreadsheet or at the end of the A3, and almost never read again. Whoever is new, or the team next door, repeats what was already tried.
Done today with
- Expert
- In-person meeting
- Paper and whiteboard
- Spreadsheet
- Email and chat
- Slides
Each step, today and with Elmira.
In the app’s debriefing, each person writes what they learned and whether it worked, and it stays in the minutes, where the next briefing starts from. On WhatsApp, Elmira tells whoever was not there what was learned.
| Step | Today | With Elmira |
|---|---|---|
| Gather them at the end of the week | In-person meeting10 min – 20 min | Obeyaka (web) |
| Write what worked and what did not | Paper and whiteboard, Spreadsheet10 min – 20 min | Obeyaka (web) |
| Keep them where they can be found | Spreadsheet, Email and chat5 min – 15 min | Automatic |
| Tell them to whoever was not there | Email and chat, Slides10 min – 30 min | |
| Let other teams find them | Email and chat, Expert15 min – 30 min | Still by hand |
The conversation
- Carolina, Operational Excellence lead
Elmira, what did Packaging learn about the waste in its last debriefings?
In its last three debriefings, Packaging wrote down three learnings. What worked: setting the sealing temperature at 180 °C, which cut the waste, and cleaning the sealers at every shift change, which prevents jams. What did not: speeding up line 2, which raised the waste.
Does this happen to your team?
Book a demo and we will show you Elmira doing this task.
More cases of problem solving
- Gather the problems people on the floor reportWhat is said in the hallway reaches nobody.
- Spot the problems in the indicators’ deviationsPeople react to every number that drops, and none gets solved.
- Keep the list of open problems and their statusThe list lives apart from the plan, and goes stale.