There are as many ways to run a to do list as there are days in the month, probably more! The other day I was having a coaching session with a new leader in a business and they were sharing their to do list set by their boss with me. I found it quite an eye opener, there were a great many things, 10 in total with an A against them inferring these w...

I've sat in a few, ok a lot of exec & operations meetings at companies as they discuss the various metrics that are being used to monitor the performance of the company and make some fairly major decisions. Each time I do I see largely the same thing, and it's not good. The range of metrics used in businesses always surprises me in the commonal...

If you want to change the culture in your organisation focus on the behaviours, no big shock really but what if I said there is a good chance that your own measures or business metrics are fighting against your efforts to grow your culture and improve behaviours?   Lets Look At An Example  We worked with a company who said that "Quality i...

You will have heard the saying - if a tree falls in the forest does it make a noise, well Productivity is kind of the same, Are you really productive if no one knows or rather how do you know you are productive if you are not actually measuring it? A question we always ask clients is how you view your business? Is it effective, ...

On Wednesday morning my alarm went to remind me to get up to watch SpaceX's Falcon Heavy take off on it's test flight. Truth be told I didn't need the alarm, I was up already and excited, this was history in the making. Then, disappointment it was delayed by over an hour because the wind conditions weren't quite right. Finally the wind was good, th...

Every business has problems, it doesn't matter the size or complexity of the business issues come up, daily some large and some small. What defines great business and great business cultures is how they solve those problems both in terms of the solutions they come up with and the methods they use to do it. The size of the problem often dictate...

It's been a busy time of late between some increased travel while working with some great clients in Auckland, plus touching base with some in Christchurch, working with some really interesting individuals as part of the LinkedIn Mentoring program, preparing for our workshop next week on Understanding & Improving The Customer Experience and of ...

Before we start I want to point I'm not going to be talking about in-depth project management or project office systems, I'm not talking about slippage, work breakdown structures or Gant charts or  Scrum sessions or anything like that. What I am talking about is actually controlling what projects happen in your organisation and why that's...

You hear the advice from a huge number of people, hit the big things 1st, focus on the biggest bang for the buck, don't sweat the small stuff. Yet the thing that people forget, it's all small stuff, until it's not! Big stuff starts out as small stuff, then it grows, it feeds waste or lack of accountability or poor company culture and it grows then ...

Volume is the solution, volume will make you more productive, volume will reduce costs. That's the goal, reduce costs and send more money to the profit line. The more you can spread your set up costs over a larger run (like spreading jam on toast) the cheaper things will be and the more profit you will make. Problem solved.. just make more! Except,...

Productivity conversations are always interesting conversations, generally they start about being more efficient in the organisation, when what is really meant is I want more out the factory, which is fine. We invariably talk about what has been done so far and how they lead the floor and the example they set themselves. One of my favourite little ...

It's not news that when you have a bottleneck in your process you have a problem, backlogs build up, sales don't go out on time, customers get frustrated and cash flow starts to suffer. Identifying your bottlenecks and understanding the value of them then is important, so why don't more people pay attention to them? Moreover why isn't more tim...

I don't know how many times I have the conversation or overhear the conversation about wanting to improve throughput in a operation by doing things quicker. Typically it's something like "Lets find that 1 or 2% additional speed and it'll be fine", I cringe every time and here's why, speeding up your operations will not give you the big bang ch...

How often have you heard or said something like "We are running behind again!" or "We are not meeting our output Targets", "The System says it should only take", "We have timed it and know how long it takes!". I've heard them quite a few times over the years and after a few questions and a little digging I come to largely the same conclusion each t...

When it comes to describing the LEAN Wastes I like the DOWNTIME acronym, it gives the added hint that these aren't good things. Most people know and attack the popular ones in the group, the loud ones if you like, Defects - it's out there big, bold, brash and hard to ignore. Inventory, it's in your face, always demanding more valuable (and costly)&...

 When is Continuous Improvement not Continuous Improvement? It's not a dad joke, it's one of my favourite annoying questions I pose to clients when we are working through any form of LEAN or 6 Sigma programs. I'll wait a little while as people ponder the question... go on you as well… OK, so When is Continuous Improvement Not Continuous Improv...

Daily work life can be busy, meetings, phone calls, paperwork, emails, more meetings. It just never stops. By lunchtime, your head hurts and your thinking I just need 5 minutes to get things in an orderly list, then I'll be on top of it. The reality is that the rest of your organisation is probably having the same issues and as a result ultimately ...

LEAN is one of those things that every organisation, large, small, manufacturing or service should do, for me it's just obvious. A great many people see LEAN as a waste reduction process, there to cut costs and nothing else, and unfortunately this is the thing that tends to stick, and in some cases be promoted as the value of LEAN but it's not what...

When I talk with organisations about forecasting most tell me it's not possible in their industry, their customers don't know what they need so how are they ever going to know? That usually just code for our sales guys like to take orders rather than build relationships and understand the customer needs. Or they tell me they do this proce...

Over the last 10 or 12 years the term "True North", sometimes referred to as "North Star" has gradually become more of a talking point in lean circles. Now it's is increasingly cropping up in conversations around NZ lean and continuous improvement circles as well. So what is "True North", how can you find it, communicate it and use it and should yo...

Often you will hear an organisation talk about being 'lean' they have lean processes, they have driven down the waste in their systems, they have 5s and Kanban's and management by walking around, everyone is clear on the goal and so many more great things happening, in their manufacturing area. Yet take 10 steps into their offices, their servi...

Value stream mapping is a phrase that gets banded around in lean quite a lot, "Oh you should map that process" "have you VSM'd that?" and a hold host of other phrases (I quite like to ask if "you have mapped the value of a process" or variations on that). You will hear it in pretty much any lean organisation or an organisation with aspirations to b...

When we get the call from new or even existing clients eager to start their lean journey they are always desperate to get started. They have heard from friends, colleagues, industry bodies and magazine articles what it is all about and so they know what they have to do and so just want to get started. Invariably however, when we ask what their...

Start talking about lean and almost everyone starts thinking about waste elimination, which is good, mostly. You see what they are usually talking about is removing non-value-added tasks and activities which is certainly important and if that's all you did you would most certainly move forward. From a lean perspective we need to think about it...

How do you set the price of your products? It seems like a simple question yet like everything there are multiple answers to this question depending on which organisation you ask or indeed if you ask the accountant, the engineer, the marketing guy or the sales lady. As an engineer, I know that the sales team always want the lowest price f...

I have a question when I work with teams about how long it would take them to save at least $20,000 in their organisation, normally this results in answers of killing meetings or big bang events. When people think of lean improvements it tends conjure thoughts about big bang events that transform the organisation over a short period of time which i...

It sounds counter intuitive doesn't it, if you want to improve your quality and your productivity it's best if you just stand still for a while. Surely you need to be running around doing things, having meetings, inspecting things, checking things, gathering lots and lots of data, maybe even a white board session with your best Ishikawa Diagram (fi...

You have just noticed that people all around you are making changes to things, they keep tweaking and tweaking them to get "improvement" but they are moving away from what's written down on the paperwork, yes if you standardised the bolts to one size it would be quicker but that's not the point you have rules! We understand, the last thing you want...

Change in any form can be challenging, some people find big changes are scary, for some people it's really stressful. Part of the reason apparently is how our brains have developed over the many thousands of years we have been around, in fact your brain is designed to respond to change by triggering your fear response, the fight or flight response ...

We were recently invited to take part in a webinar with the Craig from Mango to talk about continuous Improvement and how a little can go a long way. When it comes to Continuous Improvement there seems to be a belief that you have go large if you want to have any major impact on your organisation. You don't! In fact, more than that, you s...

I get asked frequently to explain what lean is about or find myself explaining to a management team that it's certainly not about reducing headcount. It's about continuous improvement in every area of the organisation, it's not a manufacturing thing, it's a business thing, it's a strategy. In each case I come back to the same 4 words which are at t...

Just before Christmas, I got my 1st pair of reading glasses, this was after much persuasion from my wife and daughter that something wasn't as good as it could be with my vision. The key hint apparently was me running out of arms length when reading books, reading labels on food for ingredients went a while before that.  I was actually pretty ...

One of the fundamental elements of lean is to create pull in the system, so what does that mean? Well lets first agree what we mean when we talk about push systems and the challenges that they create and about what the heck grab is!   A Push System  Most of the time when you hear people talking about push systems, they are describing make...

When people talk about lean there are so many areas that are discussed, there are of course all the tools – 5s, Kanban, load balancing (Heijunka), mistake proofing (poka-yoke) Root Cause analysis with things like fishbone diagrams, A3 problem solving, Andon systems, Gemba walks, Kaizen and so the list goes on, there is the history of it and what it...

Lighthouses have got to be one of the most magical of buildings ever created, I love them. They stand against the mighty elements, the wind, the rain, the hail, the sun and everything else the environment has to throw at them. They stand firm, throwing out the vast illumination to light the way, showing where is safe and what isn't. The lighthouses...

When we start talking to organisations about the use of checklists in their operations to ensure nothing gets missed and what needs to get check or inspected gets, well, checked and inspected we get a lot of push back. It's accepted that checklists are prevalent in HR for things like inductions, health and safety programs have no end of checklists ...

Unfortunately, Most continuous improvement programs fail, either completely or they fail to live up tot eh hype and expectations that are set up front for them The reason for this is that they are focusing only on delivering the "big bang", they make a big song and dance about this new latest thing and hope that it'll work, like the noise of t...

I get asked all the time what is the point of lean? Why would you 'do lean'? It's actually a pretty common question and there are many many answers that people give when they are asked about it. The problem is, I think, that people forget the real reason for introducing lean to an organisation, the reason it exists in the first place, why Toyota cr...

One of the 5 fundamental principles of lean is to obtain flow, find a way that your product or service flows seamlessly from the start of your process to your client and do this as fast as is practicable to maintain a high-quality product or service. There are always many ways to do this and it will vary from organisation to organisation since ever...

It's a bit of a sitcom stable, the main character comes out with a comment or a put down and then gasps, the hand goes to their mouth and then they utter that terrible phrase... Oh no! I sound like my Mum! (or Dad as the case may be), the audience laughs, and our lead character looks both stunned and a little worried, are they in fact turning into ...

The other week I had a really interesting discussion over a coffee with potential client. They had been working internally to find a way to really drive and push a continuous improvement culture into their organisation and were looking for someone to help out. We talked about what their current challenges were and what they want to achieve, they sa...

As questions about lean go, how to measure the success of a lean program or 'how lean' is an organisation seems to be getting an increasing amount of air time in meetings, in part, it's about how do we know where we are in the journey, but it's also around return on investment. The board, for example, wants to know what they are actually getting fo...

Episode 6  I was really delighted to participate in episode 6 of The Quest to QHSE Podcast with Craig where we got together and talked about how to use lean improvements to save money, something that's dear to my heart, not just because I'm a Scotsman but because it makes great sense for your organsiaiton. So how does that fit with QHSE? well ...

Yesterday I was sitting with my daughter in a coffee shop as we shuffled between school and one of her many extracurricular activities, she is 10 so there are a lot of activities as she tests out the various options for things to do, refines it, and then, hopefully finally settles on a few as she gets a little older to focus on. I explain it to fri...

Episode 8 - Top Tips for Implementing 5s  Last month we got another chance to guest on the fantastic new podcast The Quest to QHSE where we joined host Craig Thornton to talk about 5s and gave our top tips for implementing it and some tips on what not to do as well! You may be wondering what 5s has to do with your QHSE (Quality Health & Sa...

Most people will by now have heard of the MVP, the Minimum Viable Product. It's the smallest functioning version of what you want to build or ultimately deliver to your customer but perhaps with limited features, sometimes it's a part of it, sometimes it's a dummy version with someone behind the curtain pulling the strings. Ultimately though it's p...

We launched a 30 second survey a few weeks back to ask the main question, What is your biggest challenge in gaining engagement in your Continuous Improvement Programs? and the results are in. We had a great response with just over 180 people adding their input to the question and a big thank you to those who did. In the survey we asked a couple of ...

When I talk with clients undertaking their lean journey about heading towards one-piece flow in their processes, they tend to be slightly nervous. There are lots of discussions about how that will make things more expensive (it doesn't) and that it will slow things down (it won't) but mostly the thing I get is, well that may work in some places but...

Suppose you are sitting in your home, reading your favourite book when there's a bit of a bang and the light above you goes out. Now you are sitting there trying to read in the dark, what do you do? Obviously, there are options, you can just get up and move to somewhere that has a working light, you could go to the cupboard you keep the spare bulbs...

When Taiichi Ohno started the journey that was to revolutionise not just Toyota but the manufacturing world, which has now spread across all organisations including services and even healthcare and construction. Ohno started with good old-fashioned Industrial Engineering, that was his job. Today universally it's referred to as lean, but at its core...