When I am working with clients I often hear them talking about potential improvement ideas. But, when I ask them where they keep their improvement ideas they can't show me!

I get it. No, I really do. People are busy. Are you busy? I certainly know the feeling. However, when someone tells me that progress is not being made on their improvement projects because they haven't got time it makes me question what they do have time for.

When you embark on making changes to your business Planning is required. If you recall the PDCA (Plan, Do, Check and Act) cycle, you will know just how important this is to effective change management . There are a lot of businesses, however, who get too bogged down with their Planning and become ineffective with their Doing.

Some businesses haven't grasped the idea of continuous improvement including a progression of small incremental changes. These businesses don't do continuous improvement, they do one off improvements. Their improvements are small in number but large in terms of change. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don't.

Have you ever had that feeling that the change you are trying to make in your business is the wrong one? There sometimes comes a point, when your improvement just isn't making progress, that this thought crosses your mind.

One of the challenges I hear from businesses is with regards to sustaining 5S. If you haven't come across the 5S approach for improving workplace organisation it really is worth reading up on.

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.