We were really honoured to be invited onto MANGO's webinar series where we got to talk about one of our LEAN passions, 5s. If you want to get started in LEAN then 5s is the way to go and listening to our webinar should give you some great hints on where to start, what to do and what not to do. We hope you find it helpful.  D...

When is Continuous Improvement not Continuous Improvement? It's not a dad joke, it's one of my favourite annoying questions I pose to clients when we are working through any form of LEAN or 6 Sigma programs.I'll wait a little while as people ponder the question... go on you as well… OK, so When is Continuous Improvement Not Continuous Improvement? ...

There are many myths in the world, ranging from Bigfoot to bumblebee's defying the laws of physics (they don't) and of course the Loch Ness Monster (who is just shy and wants to be left alone). It seems that myths are still very real in the world of work as well. Work-life balance is impossible, remote working is inefficient, workplace conflict can...

You will have heard the saying - if a tree falls in the forest does it make a noise, well Productivity is kind of the same, Are you really productive if no one knows or rather how do you know you are productive if you are not actually measuring it? A question we always ask clients is how you view your business? Is it effective, ...

Volume is the solution, volume will make you more productive, volume will reduce costs. That's the goal, reduce costs and send more money to the profit line. The more you can spread your set up costs over a larger run (like spreading jam on toast) the cheaper things will be and the more profit you will make. Problem solved.. just make more! Except,...

When it comes to describing the LEAN Wastes I like the DOWNTIME acronym, it gives the added hint that these aren't good things. Most people know and attack the popular ones in the group, the loud ones if you like, Defects - it's out there big, bold, brash and hard to ignore. Inventory, it's in your face, always demanding more valuable (and costly)&...

When I talk with organisations about forecasting most tell me it's not possible in their industry, their customers don't know what they need so how are they ever going to know? That usually just code for our sales guys like to take orders rather than build relationships and understand the customer needs. Or they tell me they do this proce...

Over the last 10 or 12 years the term "True North", sometimes referred to as "North Star" has gradually become more of a talking point in lean circles. Now it's is increasingly cropping up in conversations around NZ lean and continuous improvement circles as well. So what is "True North", how can you find it, communicate it and use it and should yo...

Often you will hear an organisation talk about being 'lean' they have lean processes, they have driven down the waste in their systems, they have 5s and Kanban's and management by walking around, everyone is clear on the goal and so many more great things happening, in their manufacturing area. Yet take 10 steps into their offices, their servi...

Value stream mapping is a phrase that gets banded around in lean quite a lot, "Oh you should map that process" "have you VSM'd that?" and a hold host of other phrases (I quite like to ask if "you have mapped the value of a process" or variations on that). You will hear it in pretty much any lean organisation or an organisation with aspirations to b...

When we get the call from new or even existing clients eager to start their lean journey they are always desperate to get started. They have heard from friends, colleagues, industry bodies and magazine articles what it is all about and so they know what they have to do and so just want to get started. Invariably however, when we ask what their...

My daughter is 9, I joke that she's 9 going on 19! There are many reasons I'm proud of my daughter, too many to list here but her inquisativeness is fantastic and when I started the I actually got her busienss cards made saying "Trainee Big Boss" as a bit of a joke but she's taken a keen interest in things as we went along. So I want to share ...

Start talking about lean and almost everyone starts thinking about waste elimination, which is good, mostly. You see what they are usually talking about is removing non-value-added tasks and activities which is certainly important and if that's all you did you would most certainly move forward. From a lean perspective we need to think about it...

How do you set the price of your products? It seems like a simple question yet like everything there are multiple answers to this question depending on which organisation you ask or indeed if you ask the accountant, the engineer, the marketing guy or the sales lady. As an engineer, I know that the sales team always want the lowest price f...

It sounds counter intuitive doesn't it, if you want to improve your quality and your productivity it's best if you just stand still for a while. Surely you need to be running around doing things, having meetings, inspecting things, checking things, gathering lots and lots of data, maybe even a white board session with your best Ishikawa Diagram (fi...

I get asked frequently to explain what lean is about or find myself explaining to a management team that it's certainly not about reducing headcount. It's about continuous improvement in every area of the organisation, it's not a manufacturing thing, it's a business thing, it's a strategy. In each case I come back to the same 4 words which are at t...

One of the fundamental elements of lean is to create pull in the system, so what does that mean? Well lets first agree what we mean when we talk about push systems and the challenges that they create and about what the heck grab is!   A Push System  Most of the time when you hear people talking about push systems, they are describing make...

When people talk about lean there are so many areas that are discussed, there are of course all the tools – 5s, Kanban, load balancing (Heijunka), mistake proofing (poka-yoke) Root Cause analysis with things like fishbone diagrams, A3 problem solving, Andon systems, Gemba walks, Kaizen and so the list goes on, there is the history of it and what it...

Lighthouses have got to be one of the most magical of buildings ever created, I love them. They stand against the mighty elements, the wind, the rain, the hail, the sun and everything else the environment has to throw at them. They stand firm, throwing out the vast illumination to light the way, showing where is safe and what isn't. The lighthouses...

When we start talking to organisations about the use of checklists in their operations to ensure nothing gets missed and what needs to get check or inspected gets, well, checked and inspected we get a lot of push back. It's accepted that checklists are prevalent in HR for things like inductions, health and safety programs have no end of checklists ...

I get asked all the time what is the point of lean? Why would you 'do lean'? It's actually a pretty common question and there are many many answers that people give when they are asked about it. The problem is, I think, that people forget the real reason for introducing lean to an organisation, the reason it exists in the first place, why Toyota cr...

One of the 5 fundamental principles of lean is to obtain flow, find a way that your product or service flows seamlessly from the start of your process to your client and do this as fast as is practicable to maintain a high-quality product or service. There are always many ways to do this and it will vary from organisation to organisation since ever...

It's a bit of a sitcom stable, the main character comes out with a comment or a put down and then gasps, the hand goes to their mouth and then they utter that terrible phrase... Oh no! I sound like my Mum! (or Dad as the case may be), the audience laughs, and our lead character looks both stunned and a little worried, are they in fact turning into ...

As questions about lean go, how to measure the success of a lean program or 'how lean' is an organisation seems to be getting an increasing amount of air time in meetings, in part, it's about how do we know where we are in the journey, but it's also around return on investment. The board, for example, wants to know what they are actually getting fo...

Episode 6  I was really delighted to participate in episode 6 of The Quest to QHSE Podcast with Craig where we got together and talked about how to use lean improvements to save money, something that's dear to my heart, not just because I'm a Scotsman but because it makes great sense for your organsiaiton. So how does that fit with QHSE? well ...

Yesterday I was sitting with my daughter in a coffee shop as we shuffled between school and one of her many extracurricular activities, she is 10 so there are a lot of activities as she tests out the various options for things to do, refines it, and then, hopefully finally settles on a few as she gets a little older to focus on. I explain it to fri...

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...

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 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...

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 ...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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 ...

There are a few things you need to know about Business Metrics or KPI's (Key Performance Indicators), firstly its that they are important, anyone who says any different clearly does not really understand how businesses work. KPI's help you understand how your organisation is performing, if you are winning or losing, getting better or getting worse....

Going through university I studied manufacturing systems which is a fancy title for industrial engineering. We were the guys who learned lots about figuring out how to be productive. After university I landed a great job in an electronics company working as, you guessed it, a production engineer. Our focus, we were told was to create processes and ...

I remember sitting in Biology back in high school (admittedly a long time ago) and the teacher explaining that our bodies were just a big battery for our brain. Sure, we have arms for reaching out and grabbing things, typically food, legs make us mobile so we can run away from the sabre tooth tiger and of course eyes to see the same sabre tooth tig...

The great thing about lean is that there is always more to learn, there is always improvement in the thinking, the methodologies, the approaches, and the tools that get used. However, the underlying idea never changes, people somehow manage to complicate it when trying to explain what lean is and that perhaps is one of the things that make people t...

What would you do if one day your accountant walked in and said Ok boss, we have no money and the bank is going to have to step in. They are going to keep us afloat and let us trade out of the problem, but we need to improve what we do. They want us to increase our productivity, reduce our money tied up in WIP & stock, oh, and they will not let...

Creating flow in your operation is the ideal state if you want to have a lean process. Anything that stops you flowing product (or services) from start to finish in your organisation is something you want to eliminate, if you can't eliminate it completely then you need to minimise it. It is fair to say that in general terms anything that stops your...

In 1926 Henry Ford wrote the book Today and Tomorrow. It's a fascinating book and it's littered with insights that wouldn't be out of play in any modern lean discussion, little wonder since Taiichi Ohno took a lot of inspiration from what Ford did originally as part of a trip to the US, where he was also taken with the way US supermarkets operated ...

I always remember the 1st time I helped implement 5s into a factory. 5s (Sort, Set, Shine, Standardise and Sustain) is one of the many 'tools' used by organisations when moving to taking lean thinking. The driving force was actually from the maintenance department at the time rather than operations, which still surprises some people. People still t...

One of the challenges with quality management is building systems and processes that are simple enough for people to use, and want to use, but be robust enough to give you what you need to achieve. As I've talked about before, we spend a lot of time with clients helping them simplify their systems, people will use a simple system every day of the w...

Productivity is a fickle thing, it can drive you to make some interesting and costly decisions in the name of getting more out of your process. Organisations the world over get sucked into the belief that to improve productivity, you have to open the wallet and spend the profits (or the overdraft) to become more productive. How much are you being b...

I overheard a conversation the other week at a between a couple of people who talking about lean. Naturally, my ears pricked up and I just hard to eavesdrop a little bit. They were making a list of their 'lean projects' they had completed already, which was quite a list. They were then going to set their sights on their next 'lean project' and how ...