There is a great time management phrase, it says: "Do Less Better" I don't know if you subscribe to this approach, but I certainly try my best to do so. It certainly holds very true when you are trying to improve your business. With so many day to day pressures already being upon us, our continuous improvement projects can just seem like unnecessary, unwanted, additional pressure. This situation is then made more arduous and complicated by not having just one continuous improvement project / focus at a time but several. Have you been in the situation where you have numerous competing projects, for the the time that you just do not have? I know I have in the past, and I won't be the last. I can see the frustration in my client's eyes when they just aren't making progress with any of their improvements. Not just one project is failing, they are all failing. I've tried to juggle several change projects plus my Operations Manager job in a

When I am trying to figure out why a client's MRP / ERP system isn't helping them to deliver their products on time, their workcentres often creep into the equation. The configuration of workcentres can make a big difference to effectively managing a shop floor environment, but even before that is understood the volume of workcentres is a serious consideration to be thought through. Splitting up your manufacturing facility into workcentres is never a right or wrong decision. The quality of your thinking about this however will affect the ease of managing the flow of production and the following pointers are listed here for those of you who may be in a bit of muddle with work to lists, routings and capacity planning. Things to consider: Like the resolution of a digital camera, having too few workcentres won't allow you to manage bottlenecks. Try to avoid having one workcentre called 'factory' or too few that won't allow you to see what is happen

I was yesterday confronted with a conversation about how something that I was doing with a client was wrong. A little confused about how something that was going wrong was producing such good results we started to double check a couple of items. After a few minutes of scratching our heads it turns out that 'wrong' was a perspective. There were many appropriate solutions, but the other person only saw one as being the right solution. After a little bit more digging it turned out that my client had wasted a couple of weeks of their improvement efforts on trying to work out what was wrong with what they had already done! Continuous Improvement is rarely a straight-line affair. It involves experimentation and one team will create a different solution to a different team. It is the direction of travel that is the important factor to agree upon. Giles Johnston Author of 'Business Process Re-Engineering', a practical plan to improve business performan

My new website, improvingbusinesses.com , now has links back to Amazon and Smashwords. So, if you have a Kindle, an iPad, a Nook, a Kobo, or something else, then you can now download my books for these devices. Each book has the links to the site (Amazon or Smashwords) at the bottom of its page, an example is below: Click here to view the e-books page. Giles Johnston Author of 'Business Process Re-Engineering', a practical plan to improve business performance.

If something goes wrong in a manufacturing business there occasionally comes a time when you have stop what you are doing and re-schedule the order books . Hopefully before you do this you will have worked out what had caused the problem and addressed that first. Some MRP systems will take care of this for you and some won't. If yours won't then I wanted to share this thought with you, in case your re-scheduling efforts seem to be in vain. I see many businesses who, when they are faced with a re-schedule, don't do a complete job. They do enough to level out the next few weeks of production and then hope that they can get away without doing any more. The next couple of weeks may go OK, but then the problems that were there beforehand start to amass, and a few weeks later your overdues are sky high again! If you need to re-schedule your order books manually then please make sure that you do the entire job in one go. Don't pick at it. Don't just do th

To mark the launch of the improving businesses website I am offering a 50% discount on products until the end of November 2013. The products include PDF versions of my business improvement books, as well as a handful of downloadable kits. The kits include work books, instructions, work sheets and presentation slides in most cases. To get your 50% discount, please enter the code  launch when prompted during checkout (just after you enter your name and email address). Click here to visit the website. Giles Johnston Author of 'Business Process Re-Engineering', a practical plan to improve business performance.

Developing a mission statement for a business is an interesting process. Firstly, it usually means that you have chosen some kind of vision for your business (the why / what question). Secondly, it usually means that you have some idea of how you want to realise the vision (the how). 'Mission Drift' is a term I heard a number of years ago and I think it is a good term to apply to our continuous improvement activities. If your business started to behave in a way that wasn't congruent with your values then you wouldn't achieve your vision. If your business started to work toward objectives that don't fall in line with your mission statement then you probably wouldn't end up where you wanted to be. Mission drift is when we fall away from what we were meant to be doing and do something else. In your business your continuous improvement activities will hopefully align with your vision and mission statements. If they don't then it might b