Operational Excellence

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...

"If you want to cut someone's hair, they need to be in the room". I heard that phrase a while ago and it's continued to bounce round my brain nonstop since then because frankly it's brilliant. If you want to understand leadership, engagement and one of the most fundamental tenants of lean, respect for people, then that's the phrase, that I think, w...

I get asked pretty much every week what Lean is, what's its purpose, how can it possibly help my organisation, we don't make cars, or volume or even, we don't make anything – we are a service organisation! From time to time I also get told "we don't want lean here – we don't want to see people losing their jobs". I've even had the whole 6 sigma vs ...

I spend a lot of time talking to people about lean and ISO (International Standards Organisation) systems, especially ISO9001. People sometimes think that it's a strange mix of things but when you peel back the surface of ISO9001 what you have is a standard build around 2 things, understanding risk and the Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA) or if you are ...