Aug 27, 2013 | Communication, Lean, Marketing, Social Media
Lean thinking is well established in manufacturing and office operations, but social media?
Hardly?
Lean thinking is all about the removal of anything that does not add value to the customer. So, if we extend this a bit to potential customers as well, given that Social media is now being extensively used in marketing programs, and ask ourselves weather that post, tweet, or message of some sort is adding value, or just clogging up the recipients feed.
For most of us, time is our most valuable resource. Therefore, it should be incumbent on us as responsible marketers, setting out to gain the interest, and trust of customers, not to waste their time with trivia, irrelevance, and what amounts to directed SPAM.
Most people reading this blog are still working out their menu of Social media usage. Each platform has differing characteristics of usage and ecosystem of users, and like most software, most users leverage a small percentage of the capability. Once you spend a bit of time and recognise which platform suits the way you want to interact, be ruthless about removing the “waste” by saying goodbye to those that are not worth the investment of your time.
However, the advent of automated marketing is adding another dimension. Once a marketer has your email address and christian name, it can be hard to recognise a robot from a real person, and often the “Unsubscribe” button is hard to find.
Not a good way to engage a potential customer.
We should be asking ourselves a few questions before we send out anything:
- How does this communication add to the sum of knowledge “recipient” has?
- What value is that knowledge to “recipient” , or are we just filling a quota?
- Where is the humanity of the message communicated?
Tough questions, which will both increase the response rate, because to answer them takes time, research, and sensitivity, and annoy less recipients, simply because the message will add value by addressing their needs.
Jun 12, 2013 | Change, Customers, Lean, Operations, Sales
The sorts of customers you have play a significant role in defining who you are.
A former client had a customer base that valued the hands on, custom design, and short supply chain they offered on their packaging component items. That group of clients were not buying the high volume, commoditized products, but far smaller volumes for more specialised and bespoke products.
However, promises of large volumes can be seductive, so in the face of squeezed margins and a flat industry, they broadened their product base to include the low margin high volume items required by the large commodity product suppliers.
The equation was changed, no longer did they enjoy an intimate relationship with their largest customers, being engaged in their businesses at a detailed, technical and developmental level, they were just suppliers who could be replaced with product from China or the US.
The result is a flat revenue line over the last 5 years, with fragile margins despite great success in increasing the productivity of their asset base and employees, and a significant lowering of overheads.
It takes guts and vision to turn a customer away, but it often pays.
Mar 13, 2013 | Change, Lean, Management, Small business
Manufacturing SME’s in this country (Australia) are under severe pressure, particularly in heavily trade exposed industries like food manufacturing.
Yesterday, Windsor Farms was put into administration, a month ago, Rosella went the same way and is currently being liquidated in a fire sale, Heinz ceased to manufacture here a year ago, Goodman Fielder is a shadow of its former self, the list goes on.
To some extent, most of the failed, and failing businesses have adopted some of the elements of “Lean” often just seeing it as a way to cut costs, rather than recognising the wider implications for enterprise culture.
However, almost always, the accounting function is the last to make any substantive changes. Partly this is due to the conservative nature of the profession and its training, and partly the fault is accounting convention and regulation.
To survive, SME’s need to remove waste in all its forms. The stuff on the factory floor is easy to see, what is harder to see is the waste in time, effort, and morale that occurs in offices. The core service function in any enterprise is accounting, so change here can have substantial impact elsewhere. It is my view that setting about changing the focus of the accounting function from compliance and the traditional view of the published accounts to one focused on waste in all its forms, can pay huge dividends.
There are some great resources around, even though the thinking is still emerging. The take-up is remarkably slow given the dire circumstances of much of the manufacturing sector, so there is the scent of competitive advantage as well as just survival in the air.
This interview with Lean guru Bill Waddell is a terrific explanation, Brian Maskell has a range of material available free on his great site that offers some real thought starters. A recent blog post by Brian also led to this front page piece in “Strategic Finance” magazine, finally the profession starting to recognise the implications of lean accounting.
PS. March 13, 2013. Another established SME, Spring Gully, a 70year old family company goes to the wall. There is simply nothing left in the fabric of food manufacturing in this country, and in the long run, we will pay a very high price for that generational mismanagement of a pretty fundamental manufacturing sector.
Mar 12, 2013 | Lean, Management, Marketing, Operations
It is often said that for successful innovation to occur, you must be prepared to” fail often, fail cheap”.
Early testing and prototyping speeds up innovation cycle times, the longer a project proceeds with issues unnoticed or unfixed, the harder they become to fix, and the remediation is more costly and complicated.
Early failure enables hypothesis testing and idea generation, which can only increase the productivity of assets, human and otherwise that are applied to a development project.
The similarity to Lean Manufacturing methodology is extreme, where small batches matched to demand lead to smaller inventory of raw materials, finished goods and WIP.
Jan 21, 2013 | Change, Governance, Lean, Operations
The maths are simple, do more with less, and you have more left over at the end.
Productivity is not just something you aim for in the factory, the opportunities to do more with less are everywhere, in every activity undertaken.
The catch in all this is, when you identify the opportunities, free up the capacity by doing more with less, and figure out how to make the necessary changes “stick”, you have a choice to make:
- You remove the now redundant resources, and pocket the difference, or,
- You sell the added capacity that is already “paid for”, so you get the added revenue at an enhanced margin.
Sounds seductively easy, but in fact it is a tough road, littered with challenges, and nasty potholes for the unprepared.
Dec 13, 2012 | Lean, Operations, Small business
How often do we get sidetracked by several possible causes of an adverse or unexpected outcome?
In the course of doing a fair bit of process improvement work over the years, one of the really successful strategies I have used is to get people to distinguish between the real cause of an unwanted outcome, and something that has no impact. Put like that it seems pretty simple, but it is almost always more complicated, and serves as a core of the “5 Why” lean tool, always requiring hands on knowledge of the way things work, and usually some data. Ask yourself “Why” successively, up to 5 times, as in this lovely story of the Lincoln memorial and pigeons.
Is the intermittent crushing of boxes by the box erector in the factory caused by a marginal variation in the dimensions of the carton flat (prior to erection) or by the wearing of the bearings in the box erector itself, leading to sloppy operation in one of the clamps? Pretty easy to mistake which of these is the real cause of the stoppages, and waste time trying to fix something that perhaps does not need fixing, while the boxes continue to be crushed.
This is of course different from the confusion about which is cause, and which is effect. I was in the Sydney CBD last week, and saw several blind people with Labrador dogs. Does having a Labrador cause blindness?
