I have a question for you to think about this week. How often have you had a conversation with a colleague, a staff member or perhaps even your partner where you left feeling sure they knew what to do, what you wanted, what was expected yet that's not how they felt? Let me ask it another way, how often do you feel frustrated because something wasn'...

Unless you are operating in some mystical nirvana the reality is at some point you are going to have rework in your organisation, you have rework because you have a non-conforming output and so ISO9001:2015 has some requirements for you to meet in order to ensure that you control these adequately. The other thing that tends to happen around non-con...

People never seem to pay attention or understand what's being said, why do I have to keep repeating myself? We have said that our culture is X or that our priority is Y it was perfectly clear! I hear this time and again from leaders at all levels in organisations so often I'm losing count. Frequently it's backed up with I've told people this, we me...

What is the signal within your organisation that your product or service is ready to be handed over to the customer? That is essentially the question that ISO9001:2015 is asking in Clause 8.6 – Release of Products and Services. Previously we have talked about verification and validation of your product or service to ensure that it meets the end use...

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...

Have you ever had one of those days when you are working through something you have done many times before only for someone to say, oh hey we changed how we do that, or we don't use those parts now we changed that? Frustrating isn't it? It's also pretty wasteful as it can create a bunch of rework or worse useless products or services no one wants o...

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...

ISO9001:2015 clause 8.5.5 – Post Delivery Activities is as the name suggests, all about how you support your customers after they get their hands on your products or services. Before going too much further just pause for a second and think about the time when you have bought say a car or a new cell phone and you wanted to follow up support for it, ...

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...

Preservation may sound like an unusual thing to talk about when it comes to ISO9001:2015 but that's exactly what clause 8.5.4 is all about and as is the tendency for this standard it's a small clause, only 20 words in fact, and a short note to give some hints, surely that can't be a big deal then?... well it is and here's why. Clause 8.5.4 is 100% ...

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 ...

When I worked in subcontract electronics, we build products for a great range of organisations and a great range of industries. One of the challenges there is making sure you test things properly before you ship them both electrically and mechanically where a specific fit is required. Sometimes we would build the test gear and sometimes the custome...

Clause 8.5.2 of ISO9001:2015 is a very brief section which outlines the need for the organisation to (it's got that Shall word in it again meaning you must) be able to identify and trace their products and services, it's brief but important, here's why.   Identification Let's start with identification since you would find it tricky to trace an...

"What If?" are magical words, they are the first words of endless possibilities and adventures. If people in history had never asked "What If?" we wouldn't have achieved so many things, no discovery of different continents, no flying in planes round the globe or setting foot on the moon. We would not have radio, computers, phones, electricity, mobi...

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...

Over last 6 months or so I've been playing with Google 's GSuite (disclaimer..I'm a MIcrosoft fan having lived through Windows 3.11 and so many revisiosn of office it's scray) to do a number of things for a client who is a user including building an ISO9001 system with it but in talking to some friends on a Lean group I'm in on WhatsApp&n...

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...

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 ...