The phone is ringing and you know it is going to be another unhappy customer, the only question is what are they going to complain about? Their product is late, there are defects in what they got, they got the wrong thing, there were too many or not enough. Every time the phone it is a complaint, another fire to be put out, another thing that you n...

Last month I was having a chat with a friend about a problem they were having at their organisation. They had been trying to get their people involved in doing some continuous improvement, or any improvement work. They had sat everyone down and told them that they needed to find ways to get products out quicker. The issue was that their order book ...

The other day I watched the movie The Founder with Michael Keeton who plays Ray Kroc the "founder" of the McDonalds restaurant chain. It is a great movie and it is pretty factual as biopics go, and as it turns out technically, he is not the founder of McDonalds, the McDonald brothers were (hence the name) and certainly worth a watch. It brought bac...

Earlier this week I had to take my daughter to the fracture clinic to get her leg checked out. She had broken it 4 weeks ago and it was check up time. It was interesting when she 1st went to get it check out when it happened. On the original visit hey had asked all sorts of questions, decided on an outcome then thought, actually we should Xray it j...

The ability to deliver client orders quickly can be the difference between winning or losing an order but how can you ensure that you do that and how quickly do you really need to do it? Part of the challenge is of course the desire everyone seems to have of wanting stuff now, to have the safety net of knowing it's there just in case you or the cli...

Like most parents I have a morning routine that gets followed if I want to get my daughter to school on time, there is very little variation to the routine otherwise things go wrong and we miss the school bell. Of course, we could just get up earlier I suppose and have extra time to sit around but that just seems a little wasteful. When I get up th...

Every organisation has problems, it doesn't matter how big or how small the organisation, there are always problems. They come in all shapes and sizes from little niggles like there's no A3 paper for the printer again to we have to do a full recall of the product all the way to the more serious we may have to shut the company down. There is a myria...

As a parent I find myself saying things to my 11 year old daughter that I certainly heard my parents say to me, things that made my eyes roll and managed to draw deep huffing breaths from me as these were stated for the umpteenth time, and I'm certain I'm not alone with this. Things like, tidy up your room, where is your other shoe (there is always...

When I talk to organisations about how to improve things something they all jump on is their quality, we must improve our quality. Great I'd say, so tell me what you mean by that, they would then typically run off a list of things that are found to be wrong with their products or service that either get to the customer or cause things to pile up at...

With everything that is going on in the world at the moment with the Covid-19 pandemic the move to working remotely has exploded. People have, to be fair, worked remotely for a long time and been successful with it, but it's not normally been the whole team, it's normally been a few people and even then they would pop in for face to face meetings o...

Imagine you are in the Scottish Highlands in the late 1500's between you and your extended family or Clan as we call them, you have a bit of land and around 600 cattle and sheep. Now imagine that another clan have decided that for what ever reason to have a bit of a battle. Typically, these battles were comprised of hundreds of people all on foot w...

Joe walked into a doctor's surgery convinced he was not long for this world. He sat patiently waiting for the doctor, who was running 30 minutes late, but finally it was his turn. The Doctor, an elderly and portly man with a beard that would make Santa proud, asked what the problem was. Joe explained that everywhere hurt, he said that when he touch...

I spend a lot of time talking to people about lean and ISO (International Standards Organisation) systems, especially ISO9001. People sometimes think that it's a strange mix of things but when you peel back the surface of ISO9001 what you have is a standard build around 2 things, understanding risk and the Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA) or if you are ...

I get asked pretty much every week what Lean is, what's its purpose, how can it possibly help my organisation, we don't make cars, or volume or even, we don't make anything – we are a service organisation! From time to time I also get told "we don't want lean here – we don't want to see people losing their jobs". I've even had the whole 6 sigma vs ...

"If you want to cut someone's hair, they need to be in the room". I heard that phrase a while ago and it's continued to bounce round my brain nonstop since then because frankly it's brilliant. If you want to understand leadership, engagement and one of the most fundamental tenants of lean, respect for people, then that's the phrase, that I think, w...

When Taiichi Ohno started the journey that was to revolutionise not just Toyota but the manufacturing world, which has now spread across all organisations including services and even healthcare and construction. Ohno started with good old-fashioned Industrial Engineering, that was his job. Today universally it's referred to as lean, but at its core...

Suppose you are sitting in your home, reading your favourite book when there's a bit of a bang and the light above you goes out. Now you are sitting there trying to read in the dark, what do you do? Obviously, there are options, you can just get up and move to somewhere that has a working light, you could go to the cupboard you keep the spare bulbs...

When I talk with clients undertaking their lean journey about heading towards one-piece flow in their processes, they tend to be slightly nervous. There are lots of discussions about how that will make things more expensive (it doesn't) and that it will slow things down (it won't) but mostly the thing I get is, well that may work in some places but...