The Smartspeed Performance Improvement Blog

Many businesses use Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to help them judge and monitor the performance of the business. They often use what I would call ‘output metrics’. These metrics tell the story of what happened, which is useful to know. They need to be included in a suite of measures, to give you the proper context, but don’t allow you to change the outcome. Process KPIs are therefore metrics that tell you how key elements of your business processes are working. By understanding the performance in these areas you can adjust what you are doing today, with the idea of impacting tomorrow’s outcome. Managing the process helps you to define what the output metrics will be. If you review your process map, and the questions you have designed for your sunrise meeting, you will probably start to see the type of process KPIs you have. Whilst many KPIs are numerical in nature, usually expressed as a percentage, they can be used digitally. The ‘yes’ and ‘no’ questions of the sunrise ...

By defining a handful of essential routines for your business you have taken a step forward. The real challenge is in executing these routines day in and day out. A great way to keep an eye on things and get your team involved with developing these new habits is a ‘sunrise meeting’. Simply, a sunrise meeting is a start of the working day meeting where the key elements of your routine are reviewed. Ideally the routines can be boiled down to a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer to prevent people from dodging the question. For example, if your team were responsible for the shop floor information packs (drawings, works orders etc…) then an effective question could be ’did all of the packs get issued yesterday?’ Sunrise meetings should be short and punchy. If they start to break down into discussions about specific issues in the factory then the focus is lost. The idea is that your team are keeping an eye on the overall process happening day in and day out. Specific issues could point to a part...

Businesses need to create and use effective routines . When you boil down your factories’ activities you can find a simple series of activities that need to be completed on a daily, or weekly, basis. Businesses that are out of control find themselves not doing the things that they know they should be doing. The first day is OK as nothing bad has happened. Extend this forward a week or two and the lack of proper activity starts to have a knock on effect. The key is to make the right activities part of the normal course of action. One factory that I worked with had a purchasing team that didn't execute their daily activities each day. Problems would ‘come out of the blue’ every few weeks. Suppliers had to be chased to prevent line stoppages and a frenzy of activity would be seen by all. Their problem was that they hadn't decided how to handle their key activities each and every day, so they didn't. Rather than correct this situation they worked ineffectively for a week o...

Many of my clients are engaged in contract manufacturing and have lots of different products moving through their factory. The combination of having many customers, products and batch sizes can create a complex environment. When a business like this is struggling to manage their schedules they can slip into a fire fighting situation. Have you seen different schedules being written down on pieces of paper and handed to your Team Leaders every few hours? The new note is different to the one they received earlier that day and can leave production teams confused. Late orders are chased rather than managed. I realise that demands do change in a business, but not tackling this issue can really diminish productivity. I am a big fan of having formality in the right places of a business. The right kind of discipline and considered action can have a big impact when used correctly. The kinds of problems I have mentioned above often stem back to one problem. Businesses that don’t consistently ...

This week my book ' Effective Continuous Improvement ' was re-released. This revised version includes expanded sections on how to generate and manage improvement ideas. The downloads that come with the book are also expanded. To download a sample visit your local Amazon web store. Currently it is only available on the Kindle platform, but will be available on all formats shortly. Giles Johnston Author of 'Business Process Re-Engineering', a practical plan to improve business performance.

I visited a client the other day and they were looking sheepish when I asked them how their new process was working. They'd changed the process . They thought I would have been disappointed. The new process was even better; why would I have been disappointed? If a process stays still then it probably isn't being given any attention. Processes should evolve over time if they can be improved upon (and most can). So, as I told my client, if you aren't changing your processes over time then it means that you probably aren't looking at them (objectively) on a regular basis. I should finish this post off by stating that changing and innovating your processes needs to be done in a controlled manner. Changing parts of a process without a thought out approach can lead to disaster, but not looking at them at all - that's nearly as bad! Giles Johnston Author of 'Business Process Re-Engineering', a practical plan to improve business perfor...

Time moves fast. The phone rings, the emails land and there's your boss with your next assignment. Oh yeah, and your customers are still wanting their orders shipped on time. Another week passes and your business performance is still at the same level... How do you get out of this situation? The most effective way I have found to get out of this cycle is to punctuate your working week. A small segment of the week where you decide to exit normal working and decide to look objectively at your business. Armed with nothing more than a few good questions you can identify and improve how your business operates. With a little application you can quickly find that your business can transform allowing you to spend less time in a frantic state. It might be painful the first couple of times, to carve out a piece of the week, but if done properly this time will be paid back many times. Worth a look I'd say. Giles Johnston Author of 'Business Process Re...

A good friend, and colleague, of mine confessed the other week that he had only just started to use ‘to do’ lists. He was almost evangelical about the use of such a tool. I thought that pretty much everyone uses a tool like this. I then thought about this for a bit longer, and I have met lots of different businesses that don’t capture all of the items in their working lives. They may have a main system, such as MRP / ERP , but it’s the little things that trip them up. The promise they made to a customer, a report to print off for a senior manager, specific preparations for a meeting.... or whatever. Being able to capture these items, process and prioritise them, and action them is a skill. I have a feeling that a lot of people see just how much stuff is on their lists if they do compile one that they feel overwhelmed. Is discarding the list the same as ‘burying your head in the sand’? I think so. If you have read my book ‘ Office Productivity ’ then you will know m...

Having a written plan can be a very useful tool. Just being able to capture your ideas, put them into a sequence and then work on them can make a huge difference to your ability to implement changes . When I talk to businesses I often find that only their big projects make it into a project plan. What about the smaller items, the mini-projects that only have a few tasks associated? From my experience I see a lot of people in business decide that they can remember the tasks, or that it isn't worth writing the tasks down. I suggest that if this is you that you reconsider. I don't think that every plan should be a bit ornate project plan with a Gantt chart; I think that committing your notes to paper is the point. A sheet of A4 with a heading and a list of tasks is all you need to get started. Our days can be busy and tasks can be forgotten. Even the most informal of project plans will likely give you a benefit in your quest to improve your business . G...

A factor that can derail progress on an improvement project is a lack of clarity around who is meant to be doing what. When creating a formal project plan this is usually not an issue. You assign owner's to each element of the plan and it becomes crystal clear who is doing what. The problem, as I see it, is when the project moves out of scope into less formal project areas. You know that something needs to be fixed / improved upon that is related to your project, but no one knows who is responsible for that area. This can obviously lead to confusion and delay if it is not agreed. Having clarity around the business of who owns what process is vital. Communicating this formally is incredibly useful. Most times this kind of ownership is linked back to 'roles and responsibilities' type documents. For many people these are not visible documents and so a way around this is to create a family tree (organogram) to map out people's responsibilities. If there ar...

If you have read some of Dr. Deming's ideas about total cost you will be familiar with the idea that the idea of the cheapest supplier often hides other costs (re-work, transport etc...). In a process the same can be said of time. If you want to find the quickest way to complete a process then you need to educate your team to look for the total time. Sometimes the fastest way of completing a specific step can cause problems elsewhere in the process. Likewise a slower looking idea can save a lot of time elsewhere. By reviewing the process from end to end you can find better solutions than when you look at elements in isolation. Next time you are reviewing specific parts of your process try to keep them in the context of your overall process and look to make the biggest overall process improvement . Giles Johnston Author of 'Business Process Re-Engineering', a practical plan to improve business performance.

Making MRP Work: Available on Amazon My latest book ' Making MRP Work ' is currently available for free on Amazon, via the Kindle reading app. I spend a lot of my time helping businesses to improve how their MRP system is set up. The book is aimed at the manager who is tasked with making MRP work, or who is being measured on their on time delivery performance and has a system that is in a mess.  The book starts off looking at how to configure key elements of the system and then focuses on the managerial approach of running a system effectively. The main links to the book are: UK - http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00E9SHAN4 US - http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E9SHAN4 ...or find it directly through the Kindle Store. The book will be free until midnight Sunday (11th August) PST. Giles Johnston Author of 'Business Process Re-Engineering', a practical plan to improve business performance.

We all like smart people, right? The purpose of this article is to share a word of caution when undertaking new continuous improvement projects; sometimes the situation to be improved can be made artificially complex. Many smart people like complicated things. However, complicated problems and complicated solutions can make life unnecessarily difficult. When a situation is difficult to manage and needs to be improved you can often find yourself looking for solutions that will take every last detail into account and provide a robust solution. What if you don’t need to undertake all of these details? What if they are symptoms of something else? If you find yourself in this position then it might be a good time to undertake some root cause analysis, to find out what is real and what is a knock on effect from some other activity. Root cause analysis can be very simple to undertake and one of the most popular options is ‘5 Why’. This approach is widely used to dig past the symp...