Can that be true? Can developing a business routine really help to drive the performance of a business? For many businesses, the answer is 'yes'!

Also available for iPad. Improvement plans can be overwhelming for many businesses. On top of the day to day activities that you need to complete, the 'continuous improvement' plan can easily be left to one side. After months of being busy the improvements don't happen and eventually something else will take priority and the opportunity to improve risks being lost.

One topic of discussion that I find most beneficial for my clients is getting them to move their thinking from transactions to processes. Businesses are full of transactions; products being bought and sold, items being manufactured and distributed. And of course there are other essential tasks like paying the workforce! When we get lost within the hurly-burly of transactional work, we can lose sight of the overarching business process. This process is what we need to focus on, in order to improve how the organisation performs.

When your business takes on a new production order one of the immediate challenges is to ensure that all of the information you need to start the job is present. I call this 'making the unknowns known'.

Time moves fast. The phone rings, the emails land and there's your boss with your next assignment. Oh yeah, and your customers are still wanting their orders shipped on time. Another week passes and your business performance is still at the same level...

As part of my move of the downloadable products (see links on the left) I have added a coupon to save $20.00 (USD) off the price of the Waste Reduction Workshop Kit. The discount code is WALK2015  and expires tomorrow tonight (11th April 2015). The link to the product is:  https://smartspeed.dpdcart.com/product/106802?__dpd_cart=175d11b1-84bb-4355-a14f-5e8af77099b8 Giles Johnston Author of Business Process Re-Engineering

How much time do you save by not having a proper look at your business processes and instead assuming that they are working as designed? This is a bit of trick question, of course. It depends on how much time you have spent on developing your processes in the first place and the level of control / management you already have in place.

The following is an excerpt from the e-book ' On Time Delivery '. Adhering to the Schedule The Team Leaders were sticking to the production schedule like a charm, the previous fights over the value of work were now a dim memory (but not yet distant). The work to lists were being used and we were getting pro-active updates about problems with upcoming jobs on the schedule. The next milestone for the Production team was to get rid of the end of month bulge, we had removed the bulk of the ‘hockey stick curve’ but there was still a slight imbalance in the order books toward the back end.

Just a simple question for you today: 'How much time does your business spend on CI each week?' OK, and another one: 'Does that amount of time reflect your business' aspirations?' If you want some strategies to change this around read this article . Giles Johnston Author of Business Process Re-Engineering Now available in PDF format

I had a great catch up with a colleague yesterday and we were reminiscing about past projects when we, as Engineers at the time, would struggle to get people to realise that designing a problem out of a process is usually better than just managing it. I spend most of my time nowadays with clients who want to improve their on time delivery performance . Guess what? When I first start working with them they are trying to manage their problems rather than design them out. In 2015, so far, one of the common problems that I been asked to help with is 're-scheduling'.

Some business processes can be rather detailed, can't they? They may be written, or flow charted, and extend for pages. The question I often ask myself, when working on my client's projects, is 'do people actually understand them?'

I was recalling a past conversation to one of my clients today; it was based on the idea that 'all decisions are financial'. The conversation that I was recalling was between me and a talented Engineer who was frustrated by his boss' lack of enthusiasm to an improvement he had identified.

You know how it goes... The 'team' get all fired up and create their improvement plan. Finally, you think, your business is going to move up a gear. And then it happens.