Q. 118  "Bells and Whistles" in a product or service are likely to be considered Non Value adding in the "Lean" language. However, they seem to be desirable in certain occasions.  

Explain with examples, if such features in products and services should be a part of solution in a Lean Six Sigma project. 

 

  

Note for website visitors - Two questions are asked every week on this platform. One on Tuesday and the other on Friday.

• All questions so far can be seen here - https://www.benchmarksixsigma.com/forum/lean-six-sigma-business-excellence-questions/
• Please visit the forum home page at https://www.benchmarksixsigma.com/forum/ to respond to the latest question open till the next Tuesday/ Friday evening as per Indian Standard Time.  
• The best answer is always shown at the top among responses and the author finds honorable mention in our Business Excellence dictionary at https://www.benchmarksixsigma.com/forum/business-excellence-dictionary-glossary/ along with the related term.

 

 

Important Note - To be able to answer, you need to sign up or sign in  

If lean is applied in absolute terms with no additional features or Bells and whistles the this will lead to a stagnation situation, with little or no scope for improvements in products or value addition.

 

These small additional features tease the boundaries of lean and play an important role in newer developments

 

The brilliant examples of bells and whistles in the past 15 years had been a camera in a mobile phone, pedometer in a wristwatch. 

 

These features create their own space and market and can become a niche.

 

I strongly advocate that such bells and whistles must be encouraged and given due respect for innovation and science.

Bells and Whistles are non value adding activites. In PMP parlour, it may be probably akin to Gold Plating - Just a rough analogy though, i would say .

 

W.r.t whether this to be as part of solution of a Lean Six Sigma project, i feel it could be a key topic. 

 

For instance, in an IT six sigma project, a team is working on improved responsiveness of its web based system(it has been a problem for customer for quite some time - IT team initiated a Six Sigma project).

 

While doing that, the team did few things which are non-value added ones but they are desirable in the given context.

 

1. The Main search page has to respond <= 3 seconds on an average. Depending on some search criteria , however it can take a max of 10-15 seconds, though this is a rare scenario. The team introduced a "Please wait" message circling on that page whenever it was beyond 5 seconds[Note:Before Improvement, the original timing was 10-15 seconds for normal condition and 30-45 secs for special conditions].  The team also sent an alert mail whenever a search had exceeded beyond 5 seconds and once that search was completed. This was a non-value added activity as the customer knows the improvement target and also he/she would see the browser after the stipulated time(in sec). So this was actually not adding value to the problem on hand. But what it made was providing information on how much instances(occasions) this delay happened in a given month. This gave a trend of on which kind of criteria search, this delay happened. The team had this info and addressed 80% of the issues and minimised the delay period in subsequent months. This non-value added activity thus helped the team indirectly in addressing the shortfall of the current system , to an extent.

 

2. Because this project was all about system improvement, style of coding was thoroughly looked and while coding pitfalls(memory leaks, unreachable codes) were shortlisted and attacked, the team also revisited its coding standards and worked on that(beautifying that) which were not a value add for its current problem. Nevertheless the team and its management took that as a launch pad and ensured that standards were set as benchmark for other teams.

 

Conclusion:

The idiom of 'Bells and Whistles' might mean additional features which may not add value to , but can be attractive. But as we seen above with examples, there are quite a few such 'Bells and Whistles' category activities, which can give us the desirable and favourable outcome , if we use those activities at the right context.

"Bells and Whistles"

Firstly if anything the customer cares or pay for shouldn't be considered as Bell and whistles, this kind of solutions might help the company to delight the customer and stand out of the crowd.

Suppose you are providing a service of finance. You are providing all the required documents accurately and on time and customer is happy. Now suppose company starts providing the summary report explaining the outcomes of the report will be an added advantage to the customer. However company might not charge for this thing. So it's obvious that customers will get delighted with this NVA activity.Going forward it could be a necessary thing for customer to have it and thus then would not be NVA but a VA service. So NVA service in present which delights customer will be a VA service for future.

 

Bells and Whistles can be compared to the excitement attributes in Kano analysis. Such features may become a distinguishing feature and hence create a niche in the market.

 

Manjeet's answer is the chosen best answer with relevant examples. Rajesh and Avinash's answers also mention additional examples.