DILO (Day In the Life Of) templates

This page gives a few DILO Excel templates and PowerPoint templates. Each template is made to be used according to the DILO methodology and tools page and the DILO How -To practical guide page.

As stated in these documents, we assume the people performing the DILOs are consultants, external or internal to the organisation and they present the results to a client (internal client for internal consultants).

There are two types of templates, the operational templates and the supervisor templates. Their definition are in the DILO How - To practical guide page.

How does a good DILO template look like?

We believe a good DILO template has four main features

Pages for Observed People
Detailed activity breakdown
Activity breakdown customized to the type of job observed
Different types of results and charts

Pages for Observed People

Some of the information is purely back-end work, with intermediate calculations and some other is to be displayed in the reports (mainly the charts). They may contain elements or wordings, in particular ‘‘Non-Value-Added’, that are not always suitable to be shown to people observed or would take a lot of efforts to explain the wording.

However, it is a good practice to show some outputs, for feedback or validation purposes. Hence in our templates, the ‘Timesheet’ and the ‘Chart – public’ worksheets have non conflictual wording and information to fulfil these objectives.

Detailed activity breakdown

The activity breakdown level of detail may depend on the objective of the DILO. In the the DILO How - To practical guide page we have defined four levels, related to the quantification importance, as recalled below:

Level 1: Get an understanding of ‘real life’ activities, with examples and interesting stories; no quantification
Level 2: Roughly evaluate the proportion of Value-Added (VA) vs. Non-Value-Added activities (NVA)
Level 3: Identify as precisely as possible the NVA activities and whenever possible their root causes
Level 4: Though the DILO exercise isn’t fit for full representativity, you may want to get as much representativity as possible.

For the Level 1 objective, we could consider having only a very simple template with two columns: activities and comments.

For the Level 2, the two minimal additional information could just be the activities times and if they are Value-Added or Non-Value-Added.

For the Level 3 and 4, a detailed breakdown of the Non-Value-Added activities is necessary.

However, we recommend to always use a detailed breakdown, both of the Non-Value-Added and the Value-Added categories, for the following reasons:

Even for Level 1 objective, having a detailed breakdown enables to have a more profound understanding of the context, to tell a much more powerful story, and to answer questions about the proportion of the issues observed.
You may be challenged on what is considered a VA or NVA activity; if you haven’t built the breakdown at the time of the observation, it may be very time consuming to revisit all the DILO(s) to change / add an activity type. If this challenge happens during the Steering Committee (for example), it is too late if you don’t have the breakdown ready, at least in the presentation back-up
It is easier for the observing person to evaluate if an activity is NVA or VA; that is not always simple.
It is a good practice to discuss and validate with the client the definition of Non-Value-Added; that is an opportunity to demonstrate the consultant expertise and to coach the client…this is a Value-Added activity!
Yes, it takes time to build a good template with the appropriate breakdown; but compared to the observation time, which is long, that is worth the effort.

If the DILO is performed within a “Lean” project, it might be useful to identify the Muda type of each Non-Value-Added activities, the type 1 that is necessary for the customer, and the type 2 that is fully unnecessary.

By default, all Non-Value-Added activities in the DILO templates are Muda type 2.

Activity breakdown customized to the type of job observed

There are standard activities that can be applied in any type of job e.g. waiting, travel, but many are specific to the job and interesting to evaluate because they may be related to a particular process e.g.” Tools / Spare parts search in store”.

Value-Added activities are in general more specific to a job than Non-Value-Added ones.

Different types of results and charts

Depending on the context and the client preferences, some results (e.g. VA/NVA, VA details, NVA details) or charts (e.g. pie charts and stacked bar-charts) are a better fit than others; having a number of choices available avoids to lose time to create right one.

Templates

These templates may be used to be used under free license by anyone. If you like these templates, there are several ways you could thank us: share this page on your social media networks, write a "Powered by Wevalgo" in your reports, make good publicity of Wevalgo, or link your website (if you have one) to Wevalgo home page (www.wevalgo.com).

Operational DILO: Operator DILO template

Applicable to most production environments and industries except for:

- roles mixing supervisory and operational activities

- roles with a lot of "passive supervision" such as a control room operator; use the template below for this case.

Excel template for operator DILO

Operational DILO: Control Room Operator DILO

This template is specifically designed for a production control room operator.

Its key differences with standard operator DILO template are specific categories of activities:

interaction with the process (acting on the process/equipment settings and alarms)
interaction with the people (production operators, technicians...)
passive monitoring (not acting on the process)
specific data collection
'Standard' Non Value activities

Excel template for control room operator DILO

Operational DILO: maintenance technician DILO

This template is specifically designed for a maintenance technician in a production environment

It can be used in most production environment and industries.

It is not designed for the following roles:

technicians with a dual production-maintenance role
new equipment design, installation or project management

Excel template for maintenance technician DILO

Supervisory DILO: Production supervisor / Front Line leader

This template is specifically designed for a production supervisor / Front line leader in a production environment

Excel template for supervisor DILO

Powerpoint template

Powerpoint template example

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