Available for the Amazon Kindle I had an interesting chat with a friend of mine, David Hicks , about working in office environments the other day. We were discussing how in trays can hide all manner of work and I was saying how they needed to be flushed on a regular basis. David however offered a nice and simple solution to the problem. When certain members of his team weren't progressing with their work as expected he would periodically go to their in tray and invert the stack of work in the pile. This was done with the person present, so that it wasn't an underhand trick. So, the work that was tucked away at the bottom of the in tray would now be at the top and have an increased chance of being worked upon. Unmanaged in trays were the inspiration for the front cover of the ' Office Productivity ' book (see image to the right) and if you have any ideas on this specific theme then please let me know! Giles Johnston Author, Consultant and Charter

Don't just jump into your next business improvement project, be selective. When we have a range of business improvement ideas available to us we need to be able to discriminate between them so that we can optimise our time and maximise our results. When I speak to many businesses about this a good number of them treat all improvements as being equal, but: They won't all produce the same level of benefits, They won't all require the same amount of resources. They won't all need the same degree of problem solving. In summary, some ideas will be impactful, cheap and easy. Other ideas will be marginal, expensive and hard. Discriminating between improvement opportunities in some sort of (semi) formal manner can really help a business to improve both the rate of change and the level of success endured. Giles Johnston Author, Consultant and Chartered Engineer

Available at Amazon I got a follow up question from last week's lean manufacturing event  about how this applies into the administrative area of a business and I thought that I would share this on my blog too. The principles of lean (value, value stream, flow, pull and perfection) all apply, it's about being a little creative in how you apply these ideas to your business that counts. By looking at what your business needs to achieve then you can find ways to apply the ideas, ultimately cutting out unnecessary work and streamlining the remaining work. Take the flow stage for example. In administrative functions the quality of the work being passed between one department and another can make a huge difference to the overall lead time if the work is incomplete or unclear. Whereas in a manufacturing environment you can see the physical work happening and there are sometimes more rigid constraints this does not always happen in an office. There can be many ways to pro

When we are attempting to bring about a change within our business, whether this is reducing lead times , improving product quality, or changing the culture towards continuous improvement it can sometimes be hard to know where people are on this journey. Knowing where your team is on their journey helps plan for the next step. For those of us planning the changes it can be simple, we can see and understand the whole journey. We know all the pieces of the puzzle and how we expect them to fit together. Other people don't. To become more effective at guiding people through the changes we need to take the time to find out where they are on the journey, in terms of understanding and enthusiasm. By doing this we can undertake the right kind of education and explain how the change will benefit them longer term (hopefully to provide a good enough reason to make the change). If we keep going at our own pace (and neglecting the team's need for understanding and suppor

Today I delivered a Lean Manufacturing development session with Alan Whittaker from the Manufacturing Advisory Service (on behalf of the South Tyneside Manufacturing Forum). It was a great session and a lot of ground was covered. One of the interesting points, and the reason for this post, was that it was agreed that simplicity needs to be at the heart of the lean approach to business improvement . Finding the right tools for the job is essential when we aim to improve our business' processes, we need to choose a small selection of appropriate approaches and really make them work. Lego parts from the simulation game - ready for the next improvement round! We could spend all of our time testing and trialling new approaches on our business but the basic tool kits can  help us get a long way along the improvement road before we have to consider more sophisticated options. In the session we reviewed approaches such as takt time, line balancing, waste reduction, cont

One of the more interesting phrases I have heard when discussing on time delivery performance is the 'hockey stick' curve. You know the sort of thing I mean (see below). Your business outputs very little in the first couple of weeks of the calendar month, and the last week or two look like everyone is running on rocket fuel! The rate of change in output is huge and once again the business achieves its turnover target. Interpretation of the 'hockey stick' curve. Skeptics may say that although work is invoiced it isn't produced until the next calendar month, which accounts for the low levels of output in those weeks. So what? The important question is what do you do about it if you recognise this pattern occurring in your business. Finding out if you have an uneven order book is essential to find out if you have a throughput issue or a loading issue. Loading issues can be rectified easily by balancing out the order book (and coming up with a be

The On Time Delivery Kit has now arrived. It's a full kit, available via immediate download, for you to use with your team to improve your business' on time delivery performance. The files are provided so that you can modify the documents and tailor this approach for your specific needs (instructions are included). The kit includes: Instructions Staff Overview Presentation Meetings Timeline Meeting Agendas Meeting Forms Examples of Forms Audit Forms Contract Review forms Scheduling Agenda Fine Tuning Worksheet 7 Mistakes to Avoid White Paper For full details, and to buy, please visit the On Time Delivery Kit page on our partner website. Smartspeed Consulting Limited Taking the frustration out of on time delivery.

When I have been asked to deliver waste walking workshops for my clients it has often been seen as a one off exercise, to give the business a one off jump in performance. Whilst these workshops do allow us to identify and plan improvements, waste walking is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to business improvement. At the heart of Lean (manufacturing) is the conflict between value adding activities and waste generation. The aim of Lean is to eliminate waste, ultimately allowing you to provide your customers with better products that are delivered in line with their demand whilst giving you a healthier profit margin. This method is a doorway to a larger world. One of the main reasons why waste walking is such a good way to get into Lean is that this process is really easy to learn. Best of all, waste walking actually addresses the eighth waste, untapped human potential, as it gets the people who do the job involved with improving it. It is widely recognised that the people wh

The Effective Office is a short guide written by an experienced business consultant to help you improve the productivity and effectiveness of your office. In eight chapters this book takes you through ways to get more done in less time, how to get your office team on track with the right tasks every day and how to conquer your recurring administrative problems once and for all. Aimed at the office manager who wants to make their team’s performance even better this step by step guide provides you with a list of action steps at the end of each section of the book, making your implementation of this information even easier. Click here to view on Amazon.com. Smartspeed Consulting Limited Taking the frustration out of on time delivery.

Continuous improvement is a phrase that is commonly used, but one in my experience that is not utilised in most businesses to any great effect. Going from bad to OK is a good thing to do when you start a process of change within your business, but eventually you will need to try and tackle the change of going from OK to amazing. This is where a lot of businesses find that their continuous improvement activities stall. I don't believe it is down to a lack of vision as to why the movement from OK to amazing doesn't take place. I think people are busy with their working lives and that most of their motivation comes from trying to avoid their bosses giving them a hard time for things not working properly. Now of course there are lots of people who are motivated to see how good they can make things, and I am not trying to take away anything from managing a well performing business process, but if people potentially have lots of ideas then why aren't they more forthcoming? I

Lean programmes of work can really help to improve the performance of a business, but does this have to be at expense of fixing the problems right in front of us? I have seen too many projects have time invested in them whilst right in front of the people in the business are immediate problems and opportunities. Small, lean centric, actions that can yield quick and long lasting results get ignored. How does that benefit everyone? So, please plan out the bigger change projects for your business but don't lose sight of the obvious improvement opportunities that are sitting under your nose. Giles Johnston Smartspeed Consulting Limited Taking the frustration out of on time delivery.

Sometimes our business improvement projects feel like we’re not making enough of a change, but what if there was a simple method to determine just how much of a change we needed to make in order to make our processes competitive?  By using some basic facts and figures we can determine exactly how much of a shift we need to make to our processes, and ultimately guide our thinking to create the right degree of change.  This booklet, written by an experienced business consultant, gives you a step by step guide on how to determine the key inputs to your business process improvement design. By using takt time as the basis for the direction you will identify the right amount of change required for your business. Click here to view on Amazon.com. Smartspeed Consulting Limited Taking the frustration out of on time delivery.

Earlier this week I gave a presentation around the subject of improving your process improvement projects. The embedded link below is the annotated version of this presentation. Smartspeed Consulting Limited Taking the frustration out of on time delivery.

Takt time (or cycle time) is a term that is very rarely understood outside of engineering circles, but can apply to different businesses who need to improve their business processes. The reason for writing this post is to help people who approach their business improvement with no real objectives other than to be better than they currently are. When continuous improvement approaches are used in isolation there is sometimes a lack of understanding about how good  an improvement needs to be in order to serve the business from the perspective of profit and customer service. Sometimes we pat ourselves on the back when we make improvements, but the improvement might not go far enough. Calculating takt time is a simple approach that divides the amount of demand into the available time. For example, if you need to handle three enquiries every hour, then that means that the task (nominally) should be designed to be no longer than 20 minutes. Obviously this example assumes that there is n

When you are trying to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of a business process you are often presented with in-trays. They may look quite innocuous as they sit there on the edge of the desk, but the way that they are used can greatly affect the ability to close out project tasks, or affect the lead time of the process that they are part of. As an example, one of my clients was having problems with the length of time it took to produce their manufacturing orders. As I was engaged to lead some lean transformation work in this area I scoped the sales order processing part of the business into the project. There was initially some scepticism as to why I would need to look there when it was a manufacturing problem I had been hired to resolve. However, after explaining the lead time was from order receipt right through to despatch of the products my client agreed that the administrative function may have some effect on the overall time taken. The analysis from the offices in that

5S is a much used Lean tool that is often seen as a good launching point for business transformation projects. In many cases however, its application into the office environment is rather lacking . This is a shame because it can offer some really good benefits for the business who does embrace the five steps (sort, set, shine, standards and sustain) fully. For example, when you implement 5S on your computer server files become easier to find and time that was wasted trying to get the information that you need is now used for more important tasks (plus it's less frustrating!). Physical files and information are better organised and clutter in the workplace reduces. Again, this makes retrieving information quicker, trip hazards reduce and morale can improve. Also, if you run some form of software to manage your business (such as a CRM system, or MRP/ERP system) then having this same mentality with the data in the system will allow you to improve the quality of the business

I heard a statement recently about how SMED was something you do to ‘polish’ a process, after you have done everything else you need to do to that production process. When I worked through the experience part of gaining my Engineering Chartership I had never heard of the term SMED, it was just something you did to streamline a process – to remove the ‘dead time’ when changing over. Since the lean movement has grown (where I first heard the term SMED) we understand better the need for flexibility within production environments and how quick changeovers can really help. As you can imagine, I disputed the statement that SMED was something you do at the end. I’m sure that you agree that it is just good working practice. If you aren’t familiar with SMED it is a really useful method for taking the work out of a changeover and minimising the time where the process is not running at full speed. A common approach is to: 1 - List all of the activities required to changeover.

If you need to increase your effectiveness in the workplace and need a visual tool to help with day to day task management then this short guide is for you. Giles Johnston, a business improvement consultant for small to medium sized businesses, takes you through the steps needed to implement a low / no cost solution to your day to day management problems - a 'Kamishibai' board.  A Kamishibai board can help to improve discipline within the workplace and ensure that the working days / weeks / months are more effective. Common within businesses that use 'lean' methods to improve efficiency and performance (and very effective to use when implementing 5S), a Kamishibai board can be used in its own right, in any kind of business, whether you are going through a lean transformation or not.  Click here to view on Amazon.com. Smartspeed Consulting Limited Taking the frustration out of on time delivery.

A daily meeting to organise, prioritise and focus team efforts are invaluable. They also need to be quick. Businesses that have put these ‘huddles’ into place run the risk of the meeting becoming stale, boring, routine and long. The first three of these problems are OK, but the fourth ( huddles becoming long) is the real stumbling block. If you become quick at running the meeting then the first three problems can disappear altogether. If your huddles are becoming stale and long winded then refresh the meeting through speed. A daily meeting to increase productivity and performance is just too good to miss. Smartspeed Consulting Limited Taking the frustration out of on time delivery.

When I first start working with clients, one of the complaints they often make  is that their projects are not progressing quickly enough. Upon further inspection their diary seems so stuffed full of things that they don’t have time to get anything done in the first place! Sometimes this problem is due to procrastination, and when that is the case then breaking the overall project down into small packets is a great way to move forward. Small chunks of time that are easy to schedule that have a clear start, middle and end. These small packets of time work even better when they are done at the start of the working day. You can also put a number of small packets together if you feel inclined. If you are feeling stuck with your projects then consider re-planning the work and putting it into palatable chunks of work and trying to schedule those instead. Smartspeed Consulting Limited Taking the frustration out of on time delivery.