What Do You Design Your Improvements For?

Design For Manufacturing is a well used term in industry, the practice of designing products for ease of manufacturing.

This approach uses manufacturing-ability as the focus for improvement of the design. There can however be different perspectives that we could use, and this can be applied to areas other than product design.

What if we designed our:

customer services for immediate response?
order intake for on time delivery?
SOPs for simplicity?
meetings for decision making?

I'm sure that you can think of all kinds of different approaches to different processes. Some processes benefit from having more than one focus to balance out the objectives for that process.

Aligning your 'design for....' approach with your business objectives is a good way to direct your continuous improvement activities.

Enjoy your re-designing activities!

Giles Johnston
Author of 'Business Process Re-Engineering', a practical plan to improve business performance.

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