New slideshow uploaded to Slideshare. Hopefully it will give you some ideas if you are developing your own plan to get your MRP system working properly. Giles Johnston ...optimising MRP systems and re-engineering business processes

I was tied up in a conversation the other day about how I was too focussed on the 'little' things when we should be focused on the 'big' things. The conversation was going back and forward until I wrote this on their whiteboard in their office:

I see a lot of frustration in businesses when it comes to implementing continuous improvement projects. I see it so much that it reminds me of a phrase I heard from a performance psychologist called  Dr John Eliot . He was talking about the frustrations of performances not turning out exactly as planned and talked about the ability to 'win ugly'.

I was giving a potted history of my working life to an undergraduate Engineer yesterday. After a few minutes I noticed the haunting theme that was running through my stories, about the need for good data to make informed decisions .

Something that I have observed (consciously at least) over the past few months is the correlation between clear project actions (such as on meeting minutes) and the rate of actions being closed out. How many times have you read the notes from a meeting and wondered what on Earth the tasks really are? I'd bet that a lot of people feel the same way.

I delivered a really interesting training session last week. I was working with a team of managers from a local engineering business, which has been growing rapidly over the past couple of years. What worked a couple of years ago was creaking at the seams last year, and this year.... well some things have broken. As part of the training session we talked about continuous improvement ideas that we could apply to the business and one of the guys started to explore some of the problems that were zapping his time. This then lead to an idea to vastly improve the situation, which was almost dismissed because of the work involved...

This weekend I succumbed to buying a barbecue. I bought one from a local shop and thought it would be fun to build and use for the first time. I was quite impressed with the packaging and the instructions were pretty good... until I got to about three quarters of the way through the assembly.