E308 That Great Business Show - He Lost 9 Hours a Year Looking for Scissors. So He Went to Toyota. | Frank Olden

Frank Olden is a pharmacist. So naturally, he went to Toyota. Why? Because he was fed up wasting time.

Frank once calculated that simply looking for a pair of scissors in pharmacies was costing him about nine working hours a year. Nine hours. Looking. For. Scissors.

So he started applying Toyota’s Lean principles to community pharmacy. Five small changes later? 46 hours of labour saved. And this is not really an episode about pharmacies. It is about something almost every SME does: waste time without noticing.

Frank explains why some apparently busy workplaces actually achieve very little; why Toyota gives workers time every day to remove tiny pieces of friction; why standard processes matter; and why fixing a recurring problem beats repeatedly fixing the consequences.

There are some particularly Irish moments too. Seven years training to become a pharmacist — and then spending your day printing labels and sticking them on boxes. And until recently, certain HSE reimbursement claims could still involve putting paperwork into an envelope, adding a stamp and posting it. We also talk about:

why chaotic businesses can feel busier than productive ones the Toyota Andon cord and the importance of fixing problems once knocking two seconds off repetitive tasks reducing prescription waiting times the bank that responded to Frank's request for business finance by trying to sell him pension and income-protection products and why the best process improvement may be ridiculously small.

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