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 perfor

When a project is being developed there is usually a purpose to it. The purpose can lead you to define an outcome for the project, its objective. What if the objective isn’t a suitable end point for you to reach? For example, and something I was told a long time ago, consider a trapeze artist. If their focus is on the reaching the opposite swing, then they usually fall off. If their focus on the other hand is to successfully travel on the other swing (i.e. they catch it and then use it) then they usually have a far better chance of achieving their objective. In your business improvement projects it can be the same kind of situation. You choose an objective but then realise that this is not the end of the story. You implement the new process, but forget the SOPs, training, auditing etc… You install the new software solution, but forget the housekeeping activities, backups etc… You test a different morning meeting approach, but don’t write down the agenda, share th

Drive Down Costs, Improve Performance and Engage Your Teams Price - $37.00 USD Available for immediate download. If you are looking for a way to get your staff more involved with the Lean manufacturing projects you have planned for your business then this waste walking reduction workshop kit is ideal. Combining a practical approach with a suite of quick to use templates, the waste reduction workshop is easy to use and available for immediate download. Are your Lean projects going the way you had hoped? Waste reduction and engaging your teams is at the heart of the Lean approach to business improvement. This kit is a collection of tools, a presentation, instructions and a workbook that you can download via this site immediately after payment. The kit is based on a successful workshop series delivered by Giles Johnston, the creator of this product, to manufacturing companies of different shapes and sizes. Giles is a Chartered Engineer who has a background in Production Ma

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

Improvement ideas are often dismissed. They are not dismissed because they are not a good idea and don’t offer a good improvement, they are dismissed because no one understands the idea. When you are working with others, people that need to approve an idea before it can go ahead, find out how they work. What do they need to see, feel and hear in order to appreciate your idea? For some it might be a flow chart, for others a presentation. Some may need to see the proposed savings on a piece of paper. Find out how they work and then present it in the right way. Taking a few minutes out to establish the right way to put forward your ideas can make a big difference to the level of uptake you experience. Giles Johnston Author, Consultant and Chartered Engineer

The other week I was quizzed about ‘what are your top three tips to streamline an office process ?’ It’s a good question. First, I said, was to create a top level map of the process. Knowing the major steps in the process and the interfaces between the steps is vital to improve the flow of the process. Secondly, establish meaningful performance measures throughout the process. Are key steps starting on time? What is the lead time of the bottleneck operation? Some measures can be yes and no measures, some may be more quantifiable. Know how you process is performing so that the results don’t come as a shock. Thirdly, design a routine that supports points one and two. Discipline and routine can make the designed benefits of a process come to life. Each and every day certain activities need to take place. Make sure they do! I’m sure that you can think of additional activities that you could undertake, but these are my top three. I could think of more complete answers w

If you are struggling to use existing methods, why not create your own? One of my clients has been beating themselves up for not improving. Whilst I don't mind people being hard on themselves if it motivates them I have a problem when the issue is 'academic'. The issue in this case is about not being able to follow a specific text book methodology. It's the results we're bothered about right? For whatever reason some people just don't grasp a pre-defined methodology. They do however grasp the key principles of what is trying to be achieved. Starting there can help them to create a half-way house when it comes to an improvement approach, one they can build upon. Your business will have nuances, variations on how it works to other businesses. Whilst the principles of improvement hold for all types of business (flexibility is the key) you can vary the application method. If you are struggling to implement an improvement process to your busin