Operational Excellence

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 ...

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 ...