You’ll notice a theme beginning to appear in these blogs – we like to keep things simple.

Our view is that there are only three type of role in an organisation (though someone’s job may actually be made up of one or more of these).

The primary role, and interestingly in a conventional hierarchy these roles are often at the ‘bottom’, is the performing of value adding processes.  In a previous posting we’ve defined value adding as something the customer will pay for, something that converts inputs to outputs and something that is done right first time, every time.  Typically, in a manufacturing business these will include material conversion operations.

(more…)

Change is a fundamental part of everyday life – after all, we’re all getting older every day.  However, most people crave some stability and consistency in their lives.  It’s sometimes seems like watching TV with one finger on the Play button and one on the Pause.

In working environments I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t want to be part of a successful company and most actively want to do the best they can.

So why do so many change programs run in to trouble and what can be done to improve the odds of success?

(more…)

Great leadership is the single most important determinant of business success.  Without it few businesses can prosper and while it’s not a guarantee that you’ll overcome all the external factors pushing against your business, it is the surest way to give you the best chance.  The best thing about it is that it is one of the easiest things to affect, because it’s down to you.

The ten things that mark out a great leader are:

(more…)

Focussing the lean enterprise on value adding is at the heart of any excellence program – so what is value adding and how can you tell if what you are doing adds value?

Well many people have many different definitions but we like to keep things simple.

1) Value adding steps do things that customers care about.  The acid test is ‘will they pay for this’?

2) It’s a conversion activity or process.  It takes ‘inputs’ and changes them in some way to produce an ‘output’.  This output is either already in the form that the customer wants it or it becomes the input to a downstream process that converts it some more

3) This conversion process must be optimised to produce the output right first time, every time

(more…)