Are you like me and want all of your continuous improvement projects to be delivered at once? The fact is that there isn't enough time in the day (let alone if you have a day job to contend with too!) or enough resource to call up to engage with all of your improvement projects at once. I am a big fan of effective prioritisation of improvement opportunities and so I thought I'd share with you part of a conversation I recently had with one of my client's member of staff. In front of us was a number of projects. Each one looked like it would give the business a real boost in terms of tangible results. But, when you listed them out there was a clear priority based on the dependencies. In this list was one of my hot topics for this business, kitting of orders. I spotted this and naturally became excited; its benefits will be huge for the business. Then I looked at the other options; cell design, stock control, 5S etc... The reality is that I could either have my

Out of ten, how hard do you currently push your business processes ? Are they well developed and delivering the results you need, or are they just a feature of your business? Develop your business processes with this step-by-step guide. Available from Amazon and iTunes . I thought I’d ask you this question to challenge you, to see if you are getting the most out of your processes. Properly developed processes can make the difference between poor performance and amazing performance. My clients have seen 500% increases in productivity, 80% reductions in lead times and tripling of sales with no extra employees through maximising the management of their business processes. It really is worth investing some of your time and effort to look into this topic. So, let me help you out with the scoring for this by sharing with you some of the things I look for. This is part of the ‘what does good look like?’ question that can really help you and your management team to focus on driving th

I have just re-published my guide: 7 Ideas to Gain Control and Improve Profit for Your Business You can download your copy by visiting:  https://mailchi.mp/smartspeed/7-ideas-to-gain-control-and-improve-profit-for-your-business If you are looking for simple but effective methods to drive up your business' productivity, performance and profits then this is a great resource to push you in the right direction. To get your free copy you just need to sign up for my email updates. Hopefully you will find them to be useful to you and your business and you can unsubscribe at any time. Enjoy, Giles About the author Giles Johnston is a Chartered Engineer who specialises in helping businesses to grow and improve through better business processes. Giles is also the author of Business Process Re-Engineering and creator of the ' Making It Happen ' continuous improvement toolkit.

I see two different types of businesses that engage with Continuous Improvement . Those that focus on problems only. Those that have an ability to move towards excellence. The challenge that I see, for those organisations that want to move from category 1 to category 2, is depicted in the diagram below: Being able to know what to do once you get past your immediate problems makes a huge difference to the overall effectiveness of your continuous improvement efforts and your eventual business performance. This kind of shift requires you to develop a continuous improvement strategy for your business that is based on more than just fixing today's problems. Here are some quick ideas for you: You could take generic challenges and decide to undertake root cause problem solving on them and not stop with your improvement projects until the challenge has gone. Use your existing business metrics as a springboard for continuous improvement projects and use them as

Let’s be realistic, days very rarely run smoothly. Most teams have bumps in their day to day working, which need to be resolved . This is normal, but the effectiveness of a team’s ability to deal with this massively impacts the overall performance of the function they are responsible for. Making the issues (and corresponding actions) visible and ‘in your face’ is a big part of this effectiveness. An example of a simple approach to managing an action log When the actions are visible they don’t get lost. They are constantly in your line of sight and the actions required to close out the issues have a higher chance of being completed if they are in the front of your mind. Out of sight, out of mind is certainly true in this case (and strategy doesn’t often get results). If the actions are visible there is a great chance that they will get worked on during the course of the day and not five minutes before the next meeting (in a state of panic). Many people are bad at taking notes a

Earlier today I was in a conversation with a Procurement Manager for a very busy national business. We were discussing the triggers that were missing within their business for identifying and communicating the long lead-time items on projects. You'll know the sort of things that I mean, the items that you can't pick up next day and typically cannot be replaced with a similar item. The manager was half complaining, half justifying the actions of the business. Whilst it is true that the world hasn't stopped to date because of this linkage being missed out in the business it is also true that they only achieve their mediocre on time delivery results through blood, sweat and tears. This is also the case for many businesses, and it can be different by changing just a couple of minor things within a business. Let me give you a few examples. Fixing the parameters of a capacity planning tool and enforcing the output of the capacity plan allowed one business to improve their

I was in a meeting today where the topic of options came up for a restructure of a business unit. These sorts of topics don ’ t normally come my way, but the nature of the conversation was the bit that piqued my interest. It was clear that there was already an option on the table, and because of this option every other alternative was being ignored. In many cases, the other options usually contain good, or better, results than the one being discussed. Getting stuck with the first option that comes your way is not often a great strategy. Being stuck with just one option can limit the results that can be obtained. What if the ideas of the rest of the team members could be mixed up to produce new ideas? It is often the partial ideas of others that can allow a new and improved solution to be stitched together. I recall working with a group of apprentices and their ‘ half-baked ’ solutions (as their former manager called them) were able to be linked and this resulted in a quadrupling

Nine new modules have been added to the Making It Happen programme, my online course sharing straightforward and effective continual improvement strategies and approaches. The really good news is that have all been added to the free month section of the programme! (You can find out more about the Making It Happen programme at  http://www.making-it-happen.website/ ) This means that the free month of the programme now includes: On day one you get access to the  Productivity Boost  modules: The End of a Process A quick review of your main business processes’ effectiveness by focusing on the last step in the process. Hour of Pain An effective strategy to buy some time to help you with your improvements. Measuring Your Productivity If you don’t know where you are now, how will you know when your projects have made a proper contribution to your business? Personal Losses If you don’t know where your time gets sucked away to you will be less effective

Would you like a tour through my You ’ re Late!!! guide, to help you put the ideas into action? If you sign up for my email updates using the link below you can download my guide right away and then receive fifteen emails over the next fifteen days to help you get the most from the ideas and strategies that are in the guide. You ’ ll get help and advice on:          Driving up your OTIF performance.           Prioritising your improvement plans.           Building a team around you.           Making sure your improvement plans realise their results.          Getting stuck projects moving. I hope that you ’ ll find the email course to be really useful. All the best, Giles About the author Giles Johnston is a Chartered Engineer who specialises in helping businesses to grow and improve through better business processes. Giles is also the author of Business Process Re-Engineering and creator of the ' Making It Happen ' continuous impr

I was in a fast food restaurant the other day. KFC was shut due to the chicken shortage and I used one of their competitors. Don't judge me, I had just gotten over the flu and now I was hungry! My experience was fascinating; this other fast food business was in absolute chaos. Their staff were all looking confused, food was building up in a pile on a table near the serving area and it took me nearly twenty minutes to get my order... No, this isn't a sob story this is a reminder to all of us that we need to stick to our operating rules (when our rules are right, of course). The business in question is usually a fantastic example of a well oiled team with a slick operation , but with a slight increase in custom they tried to adjust their system 'on the fly' and got it wrong. In this business everyone knows what they have to do, when they have to do it and how well they need to do it. On this particular visit I could see supervisors trying to 'help'

Yesterday I got notification that my book ‘Losing the Cape’ is now available on iBooks. Losing the Cape is written for those of you that are fed up with the constant fire fighting that takes place within your business and want a way out of this situation.

Change can take a really long time for some businesses to engage with. I don't mean the kind of rapid change that our businesses need when things are going wrong, I am talking about the longer term improvements that we all need to engage with. Do you ever watch your staff / colleagues agree to a new way of working, only to watch this approach ebb away after a few days or weeks? There may be a million reasons why the change doesn't stick. I'm sure that you can think of a whole host of reasons just off the top of your head, I know I can!

My next book to go through paperback conversion is Takt Time . Now available on Amazon, this book explains the Takt Time principle to help you better understand the degree of change you need to make in your business.