Are Your Customers Urging You to Improve Your On Time Delivery Performance? Price - $49.00 USD Available for immediate download. Your customers expect you to deliver on time. Sometimes this is hard to do and sometimes it can seem impossible. If you have a complex range of products, or a large volume of changing products, then this can become a tricky proposition. Do you get lots of phone calls from your customers asking you where their orders are? Have your customers threatened to take their order elsewhere unless you start meeting the delivery schedules? Do your team waste lots of time trying to push orders around the business against an ever changing schedule? Do you want to stop being ‘out of control’? If you answered yes to any of the above and want a simpler and easier way to deliver on time then this kit is for you. Do you want a practical solution? My ‘On Time Delivery Kit’ has been created using the expertise I have acquired from years o

Many of my clients when I have first started working with them seem concerned with messy looking improvement projects . That's a natural reaction on two counts. Firstly, we don't want messy projects on the whole. We want to have neat delineated projects with clear steps, milestones and outcomes. This doesn't often happen. Secondly, projects don't often unveil their full range of tasks until we start taking action. We may be able to plan / predict the steps required for a project but unless we have done the same project before we end up having to guess the steps. Please plan your projects properly, don't miss this step out. But be prepared for the common reality that your later steps will be replaced as you go, once new knowledge is available to you. When you look from the outside in (whether a business, project or something else) it usually looks organised, tidy and planned. When you look from the inside out it can look chaotic, confused and difficult.

I was in a meeting with a prospective client a few months ago. The meeting didn't go well from a sales perspective. The company that had called me in had decided that they wanted to deliver a different project, one that wouldn't require outside assistance. That's fine, these things happen. I had to bite my tongue however, the result they were now heading for is not the one they wanted. They now had two projects on the table in front of them. Project one (involving me) was aiming to reduce the amount of time a process took to complete, to standardise the delivery of the process and improve quality and speed together. Project two was focussed on understanding the current process cycle times and changing the information held in their capacity planning system. The client wants what the clients wants, but you have to ask yourself a question. "What result did they want in the first place?" Do you ever get lost with your improvement projects? Do

You've come to the end of your project. You've found out what is going on in your business, you've developed some new processes and now you need to finish the project. What do you do next? Many projects, especially change projects, need to conclude by inserting their key outputs into the routines and habits of the business. The processes that are developed need to be triggered and executed as they were designed. Attaching these project steps to your daily meetings, your timetables, or whatever else you use to regulate your daily activities is essential. Letting a project's brilliance lapse due to a lack of discipline is not a route I recommend. A project needs to move past maintenance instructions and Standard Operating Procedures if you want it to become a habit that the business adopts. If your improvement projects aren't creating new ways of working then make sure your projects turn into routines. Giles Johnston Author of 'Business

Time management is an ongoing and popular topic on the Internet. There are many approaches and some really deliver benefits to the people who use them. I am a big fan of routines. Every process has trigger points and key activities that need to happen like clockwork. Ensuring that you identify these key activities and then schedule them is a priority for anyone managing themselves or a team. Putting the routine in writing makes it easier to communicate, it also makes it easier to manage. I recommend that my clients who decide to create one of these loose timetables also uses a copy as a checklist. Ticking off completed actions can help to form the right habits. An alternative approach is to use a Kamishibai board of course. I'm sure that you can think of more alternative methods to drive the same kind of repetition. As a rule of thumb I advise my clients to only put 50% of their time (or less) against a time table like this. This allows you to maintain flexibilit

A client of mine was failing to map out their processes fully and go through the 'concern-cause-countermeasure' sequence. We were running out of time and so I decided that we should cut to the chase. There were clearly issues that needed to be addressed, but so far no progress made to correct the situation. Jumping past the mapping stage we went straight to 'concern'. All of the issues and concerns that this person had with a process was captured. After this was done we undertook some digging. It wasn't true root cause analysis, but the rule in place was that my client couldn't accept the first answer as the final answer. After some probing of the issues some simple and straightforward improvements were identified. The ideas were put into an improvement log, to manage their implementation, and we reviewed what we had done together. Through bypassing the formality of the business improvement method my client gained confidence. They are now ready to

For those of you who don't have a copy of our ' Kamishibai Boards ' book, you can download it for free over the next two weeks via Smashwords. Use the link below to visit Smashwords, where it is available on multiple formats. Kamishibai Boards eBook Giles Johnston Author, Consultant and Chartered Engineer