For many businesses this time of year provides a good time to reflect upon the past year's performance and decide upon their plans for the upcoming year. How about you? Do you know where and how you want to improve your business during 2014? If you haven't pulled your plan together then the following pointers could help you to pull your ideas together to get you started:

All business processes have a drum beat. Certain tasks need to happen like clockwork and the ability for a business to develop these habits can distinguish them from the competition. My latest book, Sunrise Meetings , shares a step by step process to help capture these routines and make them an integral part of your day-to-day business. It is free this weekend on the Amazon Kindle (until the end of 16th December 2013 PST). You can get it here. Giles Johnston Author of 'Business Process Re-Engineering', a practical plan to improve business performance.

There is a phrase (I’m not sure how common) about good businesses being boring businesses. I don’t know how you feel about this, but I want to work in an interesting business. But here’s the thing. If your business is out of control then you need to define what interesting means to you. If it means that chasing your tail and always being under severe pressure from customers then I could understand you not wanting a boring business.

My new book 'Sunrise Meetings' is now available on the Amazon Kindle platform and is free to download between the 12th of December 2013 and the 16th of December 2013 (PST). Download 'Sunrise Meetings' for Kindle here. The book is focused on tying up your process management issues into an organised and routine way of working. The Sunrise Meeting is one great way of doing this, and the book takes you through a series of steps to create and define your own effective Sunrise Meeting. There's more in the book too, helping establish more disciplined and effective habits of working. I hope you enjoy it. Giles Johnston Author of 'Business Process Re-Engineering', a practical plan to improve business performance.

There are many continuous improvement projects that get broken down into stages, whether we realise this or not. The key to appreciating this is to think through the work you are doing now and understanding what you will have to do next. Very rarely is the first stage (or activity) the only stage. For example, if you are implementing a lean improvement approach and are deploying a toolkit, what happens next? Do you have to restructure people's time to be able to use the tools? Do you have to adjust the supervisory roles so that they can support the approach? Thinking through the improvement project and asking yourself 'what happens next?' can help you to imagine what the subsequent stages are. Just like the new piece of machinery that is installed there is usually planned maintenance to define, SOPs to write, training to deliver, commissioning to complete etc... If you are planning improvement projects then please think through the subsequent stages to

One of the biggest reasons that a business delivers late is due to an uneven order book. Huge peaks in some weeks and next to nothing in other weeks. Getting a grip over this situation can make a massive difference in your quest for consistent on time delivery (without the headache). There are usually two steps to resolving this situation; balancing out what you already have and stopping it from happening again. The first step, re-balancing your order book, can be straightforward or a large task, depending on the type of work you produce and the complexity of the process it has to go through in order to complete the work. Whatever situation you are in it is essential that you complete this exercise to its logical completion. Many businesses re-balance the first few weeks (which contains overdue orders that have built up over time) and leave it at that. A few more weeks down the line and these businesses are back to where they have started (they just moved the biggest peak bac

When you are trying to get your Lean / Continuous Improvement activities moving it is vital that you get the buy in and support from all areas of the business. If your area of specialism is in facilitation and / or business improvement methods then the toolkit that you are currently using may be far too advanced for newcomers to this way of working. Developing a simplified toolkit for your team is often a great way to let people dip their toes into the water, but still yield excellent results. To simplify this process further I recommend considering your simplified toolkit as being divided into three sections: 1. Seeing It Choose a group of tools to help your team to see the problems and opportunities that they are facing. 2. Solving It Choose a root cause problem solving method that is straightforward to use. 3. Doing It Choose a simple way to track and monitor progress. Existing well known tools such as 8D or A3 can be a great help in this regard. It may also

When you are faced with a list of continuous improvement opportunities there is a good deal of sense in prioritising them. One of the simplest ways is to rank them in terms of: Ease Cost Impact If you get really into this you can score and prioritise them based on their total score (similar to the FMEA approach). There is of course another factor that might be worth considering. Motivation. Sometimes the ideas are good, but the people who need to buy in to the ideas just aren't interested. This brings in the 'open door' factor. Sometimes pushing on an open door is the right thing to do. Find those projects that the individuals who you need to get involved want to do. Hopefully they will be near to the top of your list too, and the aim is to get them interested in the 'right' improvements next. Sometimes it makes sense to go with the flow... Giles Johnston Author of 'Business Process Re-Engineering', a practical plan to improve

A lot of time can be invested in creating an improvement plan. If you subscribe to the PDCA (Plan Do Check Act) approach to continuous improvement then I am sure that you will too. There is a drawback to the planning stage however. There will be certain things that you can only find out, and learn, by undertaking the doing part (the D in PDCA). The more experienced you get at planning the better your plans will be. There are also other things you can do to improve the quality of your planning (by using the FMEA approach for example), but fundamentally the reason that the continuous improvement cycle is a cycle is that you will gain additional information each time you attempt the improvement. If you feel that you are getting stuck at the planning stage then it may just be time to get into the doing phase and see what happens. Giles Johnston Author of 'Business Process Re-Engineering', a practical plan to improve business performance.

When you get into a process improvement  conversation there is always the chance of recovering old ground. The great idea that you have just had may well be something that has already been tried, but stopped working. Most of these 'failed' ideas are only a tweak away from being brilliant solutions. If you recall the PDCA (Plan Do Check Act) improvement cycle then you will know what I mean. The PDCA Continuous Improvement Cycle When a new way of working falls over the PDCA cycle gets you to consider why it fell over. It gets you to consider how to make it work better, and then urges you to make the necessary corrections. I have seen countless improvements that have ceased to be because they didn't work the first time. A little encouragement, and use of the feedback as to why it fell over, is all it can take to implement a really good improvement. How is it going for your business? Do you need to share the PDCA approach with more people? Giles Johnston

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