Jun 14, 2010 | Management, OE, Operations
I had lunch a few months ago with a client, just at the local club, nothing fancy, as we discussed the very challenging problems of operational flow through his plant. It was a buffet, simple, serve yourself, and as luck would have it, a couple of tour busses landed at about the same time we did, and the lines were awful.
Stay with me here!.
Somebody very smart realised the problem, and did two things.
First, they moved the tables a couple of feet from the wall, encroaching on the unused dance floor, so people could use both sides, doubled the speed,
Second, they broke the tables up, so the clearly entre type stuff was separated from the mains by a couple of feet, encouraging people to go once for entre, and back later for mains. Lines disappeared as if by magic!
The point: watching this happen, the penny dropped, and now my clients factory now looks markedly different to what it was, and cycle time has dropped, as has inventory, waste, and outside storage. What has increased is throughput, and the number of smiles on the staffs faces as they work in an environment much less cluttered, less driven by the urgent order being expedited, and much more productive.
Apr 20, 2010 | Management, OE, Operations
Working my way through a book on the implementation of “Lean” called “Manage to learn” an interesting book that further evolves the textbook as a story genre started by Eliyahu Goldratt’s best selling book “The Goal” originally published back in the early eighties, I saw the list of questions reproduced below.
The book itself is about the learning how to use A3 method of problem solving and teaching that has come out of Toyota and is very useful, but it struck me that the list is a generic list of sensible questions that should be asked in a wide range of circumstances where solving a problem is the task at hand.
1. What is the problem or issue?
2. Who owns the problem?
3. What are the root causes of the problem?
4. What are some possible countermeasures?
5. How will you decide which countermeasures to propose?
6. How will you get agreement from everyone concerned?
7. What is your implementation plan—who, what, when, where, how?
8. How will you know if your countermeasures work?
9. What follow-up issues can you anticipate? What problems may occur
during implementation?
10. How will you capture and share the learning?
Answer all these, and the path will be very clear.
Apr 19, 2010 | Management, OE, Operations, Personal Rant
All you hear about currently is the Australian “health debate” a debate the pollies have decided to have as a political exercise, are discussions about who gets to spend the money i.e. exercise the power, it has little to do with the health outcomes of Australians, that is just the excuse.
Cynical perhaps, but if it were otherwise, you would be hearing real discussions about the manner in which the billions were spent, not how just much, and by whom. We do need more to be spent, but more importantly in a society where health costs are increasing rapidly, and will continue to do so, we need debate, and importantly action, on the effectiveness of the spending, and the means by which that effectiveness, measured by patient outcomes, can be improved.
Applying proven process improvement, Lean, and Six Sigma commercial disciplines to public spending should be a priority, but perhaps that would impinge on vested interests a bit much, so we leave it alone.
The parody via the “Lean” hyperlink above has a scary resonance, and we leave discussion about the effectiveness of spending alone, to the great cost of to our community over the medium & long term.
Mar 31, 2010 | Alliance management, Change, Demand chains, OE
It seems that everywhere there is a drive to collaborate, without any real regard to the challenges of collaboration, the behavioral and cultural changes necessary for success. Collaboration has become an end in itself, rather than a strategy that has the potential to deliver value to both parties under the appropriate circumstances.
For a collaboration to be successful, there are two pre-conditions:
- There is a genuinely important shared goal, and the goal is powerful enough to drive resource allocation decisions in both collaborators
- The reward systems of both parties recognise the importance of achieving the goal.
Without these two preconditions, there is little chance of the collaboration doing anything more than take some time, probably cover someone’s arse, and perhaps give the appearance of something useful happening.
Feb 9, 2010 | Change, Management, OE, Operations, Sales
For a long time as a consultant, who has done a fair but of sales training in a B2B environment, I have fallen back on a foundation proposition made up of three parts.
When planning a sales strategy to sell a product that is not a cheap disposable commodity (like paper clips)to a customer, you can only really do three things:
- Assist the customer increase his sales
- Assist the customer reduce his costs
- Assist the customer increase the productivity of his assets.
If the product you are selling does not address at least one of these three parameters, why would someone buy from you?
Recently, undertaking an improvement exercise for a manufacturing client, it became clear the same three questions can be applied to any improvement process, not just sales.
If any activity, policy, assumption, or behavioral norm does not contribute to at least one of these three outcomes for your organization why are you still doing it? “How does that contribute to…..?” becomes a very powerful question.
Jan 28, 2010 | Change, Management, OE, Operations
Scientific method calls for experimentation where you vary one variable at a time, observe the effect, making further changes only after consideration of the cause and effect relationships in the first experiment are understood.
Unfortunately, this is the opposite approach unwittingly adopted by many improvement initiatives, where there is a brainstorming session to identify “improvement opportunities” which are listed, prioritised, and implemented.
In the event of any improvement happening, we cannot tell which of the changed variables drove it, indeed, you may have good ideas in the mix whose positive impact is masked by the poor ideas and their outcomes.
One at a time takes more time, but not only offers the certainty of a positive outcome, it also educates you on the reasons why improvement has occurred, which can only benefit the ongoing process.
