For those of you looking to run your own in-house process mapping and streamlining projects you may be interested to know that my latest downloadable kit is now available to purchase. The kit is particularly useful if you are (relatively) new to streamlining processes and are looking for a step by step method to follow. The kit includes: a modified process analysis methodology. supporting (editable) templates to complete the review. instructions on how to get the most out of the analysis and subsequent improvement activities. examples to review in preparation of your own analysis. a PowerPoint presentation to help you share the methodology with your team. To read more, and to purchase, please visit: http://www.improvingbusinesses.com/product/Streamlining-Production-Processes Giles Johnston Author of Business Process Re-Engineering

I was running a workshop yesterday about Sunrise Meetings . My client has a number of teams, all of which need to become more process driven, and short, standard, daily meetings are part of that equation. After discussing the types of questions that form good standard agendas, we got on to the topic of ' what do you do to get everyone involved? '

I was visiting a business yesterday and a few simple questions revealed that their newer members of staff didn't understand the business' processes. There were some simple things this business could do, that many businesses could do, to improve this situation.

MRP systems come in all shapes and sizes. Some are OK, some are great and some are astounding. Some have big price tags and some are modestly priced. They all need a human input however...

One thing that happens when you get involved with continuous improvement is that you find other, related, actions start to appear. They might be things that you can't do immediately (for time constraints let's say) but that you do want to do. How do you capture all of these actions that spring up? On a wider note, how do you capture all of the actions that come forth from you business that you have been asked to do, or need to do?

I was in a conversation the other day that I was hoping was going to be straightforward. We were looking to extend part of an ERP system into another area of the business. The area admittedly was difficult to model within ERP and had therefore been kept out of the system. But I had an idea that I thought would work. The conversation was not straightforward...

I was doing some work today with a team who were trying to work out how to improve their business' processes. There was a lot of debate about where they should start this conversation.

I was in a really good meeting today. The specification was clear as to what the client wanted to achieve and it made developing a methodology relatively straightforward. The first meeting wasn't like this however.

New presentation uploaded to SlideShare: Giles Johnston Author of Business Process Re-Engineering

If you have ever struggled to get a change to take hold in your business then you might want to look at the feedback loops in your business. A good feedback loop, or mechanism, can make the ongoing management of your processes a whole load easier? Do you have them defined in your business?

I was delivering some training on Lean Production methods yesterday. The team I was working with are based in a call centre and we found a number of interesting continuous improvement opportunities to work on. Through our conversation I became particularly interested in how they could move their resources more dynamically (rules based) when call queues were extending. I shared with them an account of when I was working as a Production Engineer in an automotive firm where we used several different Kan-Ban pull production systems to address this same issue. Despite having already explained how these systems worked in principle, they were not convinced that it was a strategy that could work for them. It was the story, the parallel example, that convinced them. I see this situation time and time again. The principles of an improvement may be sound and people may understand the improvement concept logically, but they haven't bought into the applicability to their busin

Now that the working year seems to be back into full swing I have already had two conversations with client member's of staff about feeling overwhelmed with their continuous improvement projects .

Available for the Amazon Kindle I have spent quite a bit of time this year working on Sunrise Meetings . These are of particular interest to businesses that have expanded, or changed, rapidly during the past three years. Growing pains are inevitable. How do you ensure that your staff work on the right things, at the right time?