Would you like a tour through my You ’ re Late!!! guide, to help you put the ideas into action? If you sign up for my email updates using the link below you can download my guide right away and then receive fifteen emails over the next fifteen days to help you get the most from the ideas and strategies that are in the guide. You ’ ll get help and advice on:          Driving up your OTIF performance.           Prioritising your improvement plans.           Building a team around you.           Making sure your improvement plans realise their results.          Getting stuck projects moving. I hope that you ’ ll find the email course to be really useful. All the best, Giles About the author Giles Johnston is a Chartered Engineer who specialises in helping businesses to grow and improve through better business processes. Giles is also the author of Business Process Re-Engineering and creator of the ' Making It Happen ' continuous impr

I was in a fast food restaurant the other day. KFC was shut due to the chicken shortage and I used one of their competitors. Don't judge me, I had just gotten over the flu and now I was hungry! My experience was fascinating; this other fast food business was in absolute chaos. Their staff were all looking confused, food was building up in a pile on a table near the serving area and it took me nearly twenty minutes to get my order... No, this isn't a sob story this is a reminder to all of us that we need to stick to our operating rules (when our rules are right, of course). The business in question is usually a fantastic example of a well oiled team with a slick operation , but with a slight increase in custom they tried to adjust their system 'on the fly' and got it wrong. In this business everyone knows what they have to do, when they have to do it and how well they need to do it. On this particular visit I could see supervisors trying to 'help'

Yesterday I got notification that my book ‘Losing the Cape’ is now available on iBooks. Losing the Cape is written for those of you that are fed up with the constant fire fighting that takes place within your business and want a way out of this situation.

Change can take a really long time for some businesses to engage with. I don't mean the kind of rapid change that our businesses need when things are going wrong, I am talking about the longer term improvements that we all need to engage with. Do you ever watch your staff / colleagues agree to a new way of working, only to watch this approach ebb away after a few days or weeks? There may be a million reasons why the change doesn't stick. I'm sure that you can think of a whole host of reasons just off the top of your head, I know I can!

My next book to go through paperback conversion is Takt Time . Now available on Amazon, this book explains the Takt Time principle to help you better understand the degree of change you need to make in your business.

Do you find your day being broken up by interruptions, stopping you from getting on with your work? Continuous improvement projects often fall foul of this. The day can become so inefficient through the constant stopping and starting that we only just seem to have enough time to get the 'day job' completed. I was in a meeting last week where this same issue cropped up. It also cropped up today. It's nothing new, but it is still a pain in the rear! So, let me share with you an approach that has worked for my clients - the 'Hour of Pain!'.

Is your business geared up to win? More importantly, are you team geared up to win? Setting people up to win isn't a common expression, but one that I wish I would hear more often when I work with businesses. The opposite, setting people up to fail, is a more common expression and might give us (as a culture) a clue as to one of the pitfalls of organising our business activities. There are a few different ways that we can set our business up to win . These include clear business standards, KPIs and corresponding targets and effective routines.