Paul designs a pathway

Paul was looking out of his office window watching the hire vehicles enter and leave the car park. He watched as the drivers parked in the section cordoned off for returning vehicles, went to the canteen and then re-emerged to return to their cars, vans and lorries to refuel them at the in-house pumps and then clean them in the jet-spray area. Later they might climb into a different vehicle to set off on another job. Other times they might not clean the cars, and sometimes they refuelled before going off for a coffee.

This asymmetry irked him. “We need to streamline this to make it more efficient,” he thought to himself. “A pathway for managing all this activity after returning to the depot – that’s what is needed.”

He took a walk around outside and noticed that behind the canteen there was a covered area where the vehicles queued to get to the fuel pumps. It was tolerably large. Some vehicles however seemed to jump the queue, refuel and drive off immediately. These did not wait in the covered area.

He met with his managers to discuss this problem. They covered many sheets of paper with flowcharts, estimated timescales and projected numbers. Finally they came up with a plan.

“Shall we tell the drivers?” asked one.

“I suppose we should.”

*

“We need to restructure the process for servicing the vehicles when you return from jobs,” Paul began to the assembled company.

The drivers looked puzzled. “Why?” they asked. “What’s wrong with what we do now?”

“It doesn’t follow a defined pathway,” replied Paul. We need people to fuel and clean the vehicles and dedicated scheduled rest breaks.”

“But we fuel our vehicles now and clean them when necessary. When there’s time we’ll have a break. Sometimes there’s an urgent job to do so we just refuel straightaway and get on with the work. It works really well. No one gets upset if someone jumps the fuel queue if they have an urgent appointment”

Paul ignored this.

“We propose to build a dedicated ‘Fuel and Wash’ facility behind the canteen where specialist refuellers can work the pumps more efficiently and trained cleaners can be on jet-spray duty,” he countered.

“But Paul,” the drivers said. “Not all vehicles need cleaning every time. Their last job might only have been a trip for a few miles down the road. And most vehicles don’t need immediate refuelling as their next job might not be until the next day.”

Paul ignored this.

“You’re just going to spend money building a facility that simply reproduces what we do now.”

Paul ignored this. He was thinking of his pathway.

“Is there any evidence that refuelling our cars sooner and washing them more frequently improves our productivity?” they queried.

Paul ignored this, principally because he did not know of any.

The drivers despaired as Paul wandered off to meet with the architect to start building his new Fuel and Wash area anyway.