Sep 15, 2010 | OE, Operations, Small business
Focusing attention holistically on a whole process, end to end, and the productivity of the process will improve, improving the outcome.
When you focus just on the outcome, all you get is the opportunity to improve the efficiency of the existing process, but it will have no sustainable impact on the productivity of the process itself, and inevitably when you just focus on efficiency of one part, over time the whole process will at the very best, remain at the stable level, because as you make efficiency improvements in one spot, in another, something has gone wrong to reduce the efficiency of that point in the process.
If you want to improve, focus on the whole process, not pieces of it.
Sep 14, 2010 | Change, Management, Operations
In any environment, those on the front lines see ways to complete a task easier, faster, cheaper, better, simply because they are doing it all the time, it is just that we usually do not listen enough when the front line employees they try to tell us, and once bitten twice shy.
Labor costs are typically seen as an expense, something to be trimmed and managed, rather than as an investment that can be optimised and leveraged.
All the fancy computer programs, training, and supervision in the world will not even begin to replace the value of an engaged employee who has some control over his environment, and recognition for making it more effective.
What is it like in your factory?
Sep 13, 2010 | Collaboration, Communication, Leadership
It occurred to me that during the recent election campaign, and subsequent “Phony Government” that both sides over-used the term “Social Capital“, as well as mis-using it. Whilst it was not one of the hollow slogans of the campaign, it got a pretty fair run as each side tried to give their “policies” substance.
Social capital is created when a person contributes without any expectation of reward, it is just the right thing to do for the group, and for that sense of well being that individuals feel but do not often articulate. This giving creates a sense of mutual obligation, which is the glue that holds social groups together.
The same dynamic is at work in collaborative systems, if you put in, the sense of obligation is created, and others join the effort. Commercial collaboration has at its heart making a bob, but the social aspects of the collaboration process are ignored or under-estimated at the peril of the collaborative project.
For a number of years I have looked after the grass courts at my local tennis club. It takes some time, it is entirely voluntary, and I do it simply because I enjoy playing the game on grass, the costs of professional maintenance are way beyond the capacity of a small club to fund, and once the grass is replaced or let go to become a cow paddock, it will never come back, and few would want that to happen. In this case, perhaps the mutual bit comes in when other club members are still prepared to play with me in my tennis dotage, which is sometimes a bit closer than I would like.
Sep 12, 2010 | Change, Innovation, Marketing, Social Media
Product optimisation is not product discovery, the techniques to get the best results differ, usually markedly, as the challenge to collect data to mitigate risk for entirely new products is substantially more difficult than collecting the same data for what is effectively a range extension .
However, in a web environment, experimentation is becoming easier and easier with the Google analytic tools now freely available, so product optimisation is easier and quicker than ever, to the extent that there is no excuse not to use them. The same tools also make collecting data on new products, almost as easy, so long as an “experiment” can be set up.
However, outside the web environment, where the results are not so immediate or transparent, a bit of creative thought will open up ways to use the tools of the web to track test markets, early adopter customer feedback and reactions, service difficulties, unexpected uses that evolve, and the myriad of other factors at play in a genuinely new product, it just takes a bit more effort to dream up and implement the experiment.
Sep 9, 2010 | Management, OE, Operations, Small business
It seems almost all improvement programs I see have as a central objective the reduction of inventories. That is pretty easy to achieve, order less, less often, and in smaller quantities, objective achieved.
However, when you count customer service, and cycle times into the equation, something the financial inventory measures do not do, reduction of inventory can have a catastrophic impact on financial results, as if nothing else changes, you just fail your customers.
Reduction of inventory is usually an outcome of the reduction of waste, but should not be the objective, waste reduction, waste in all its forms, should be the objective.
