The “Brittleness” of Global Lean The 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami remains a watershed moment for this debate. In a classic Harvard Business Review analysis, Steven Forth highlighted how Japan’s renowned lean production systems were remarkably brittle. Efficiency had come at the cost of redundancy, leaving giants like Toyota and Sony vulnerable to single-point-of-failure suppliers. This wasn’t just […]
Pace of Change..Is It Fast Enough #Write52 It was 30 years ago today…. I saw a change. 1992, do we need to make it go faster, today? Yep, 30 years ago as a student project engineer, working over holidays and still at Uni, I came across something very, very rare. Something back then you might […]
Easy, Onions. Why Did I Get Into Improvement? People + Crispy Fried Onions Crispy Fried Onions to be precise. My first full time job after University was a baptism in a growing business. Overseeing the processing of vegetables in a business supplying 5 sister factories. We bought daily, made daily, stock turns were measured in […]
“Why Did You Go Into Manufacturing?” I was asked. I’ve never mentioned this so here goes. Easy, a single conversation with Mr Stacey, my Physics #teacher in Liverpool. He spent time explaining a few engineering courses; Mechanical, Electrical, etc then turned and said “but you’d probably enjoy Manufacturing”. He mentioned that “The factory of the future will […]
Over the weekend a question was posed to me via Twitter (@theleanmanager if you’d like to follow). How Much (Lean) Waste is there in the Service Industry? It was posed as someone tried to discover the amount of waste (wasted time ⌚) in the back office of Banks/Service/Insurance Operations. Now I took this to mean […]
In Summer 2020, with Covid, Zoom and remote working being front of mind in organisation across the globe. We were given the opportunity, by the Moeller Institute at Cambridge University, in the UK to share our insights on the digital leadership skills needed to make digitalisation projects a success. The Moeller Institute provide executive education […]
J.Stephen Poor, chairman of Seyfarth Shaw, in his article for The New York Times, financial news service DealB%k, offers that lawyers today should be asking non-traditional questions. Questions to meet the changing demands of the buyers of legal services; How can I apply resources more effectively? How can I shorten cycle time? How can I […]
In case you missed it Starbucks claimed Lean Management Thinking was behind a tripling of profits and a dramatic surge in customer satisfaction in recent weeks. What exactly did they do? According to this Lean Japanese Techniques story in The Wall Street Journal, they Saved between 20 and 33% of the processing time in making coffee, which […]
Business Process Mapping Tips #4 Go and Check Observe the Work being Done, the Orders being made; the actual work you are paying for, the movement of people and parts, the checking, the paperwork or software being filled in, the looking for parts, information; the Work In Progress being stored. Listen to the Staff […]
Business Process Mapping Tips #3 Everyday, you work on orders that go through all the main steps every time. These are the Runners. Twice a week, or 20% of orders use all the main steps but have a few extra steps that depends on exactly what the customer wants. These are the Repeaters. […]
