The LMJ February 2016

Looking to the future Where does the future of lean lie and when will it arrive?

Organisations and interviews in this issue include: InFor, IMI Hydronic Engineering, Accelerated Improvement Ltd, Evoke People Development

In this issue: Man v Machine - Why firms often treat employees like robots and how to avoid the trap.

Common ground? Postponement and lean strategies in the future of manufacturing - The rise of consumer customisation and why postponement manufacturing is the way to go.

Lean Is neither a Journey, nor a Destination- Is it all about lean, or is there something more?

the-lmj.com February 2016

EDITOR’S LETTER

Dear Reader... right tools for the upcoming job is also massively important. This can pose a problem thanks to the huge array of lean tools that are available, choosing the right one can be extremely difficult and even if you do pick the right tool for you, it’s still possible that the implementation is wrong.

Commissioning Editor Fred Tongue

f.tongue@hennikgroup.com

Managing Editor Victoria Fitzgerald

v.fitzgerald@hennikgroup.com

Editorial Director Callum Bentley

c.bentley@hennikgroup.com

Designer

Jamie Rector

j.rector@hennikgroup.com

The New Year is in full swing now, resolutions have fallen by the wayside, diets have come unstuck and the gym membership is now a waste of money.

Much like New Year’s resolutions, many lean and process improvement initiatives fall by the wayside. Despite best intentions and the most well laid plans, change implementation is extremely difficult to get right.

Planning for the future is a must in any organisation and choosing the

That is why in this issue we are looking at the future of lean. Many of the tools that we associate with lean manufacturing and the Toyota Production System were originally developed in 1948.

Since then technology, customer expectations and the world we live in has changed immeasurably but the principles of lean have not changed much over that period.

So with that in mind, Hafez Shurrab, has written a piece about the future of lean, discusses lean 2.0 and what the potential uses could be.

Martyna Kuczynska Brooks writes about the often overlooked role of middle management and why it is crucial to get middle management to invest in process change.

Carrying on with the theme of management and leadership, Frank Devine, delves in to the current state of training available to leaders and how it is impacting on business.

This month we also have a case study from Smriti Neogi about a fitness club and how they attempt to retain customers, a critical point for any organisation an article that has a lot of take home points.

We also have all the regular bits such as news, events, the best of online and our monthly column from Bill Bellows where he discusses the differences between interdependence and intradependence in business models.

There is no doubt that lean is extremely valuable to organisations across a massive spectrum of industries and sectors, but implementation has always been a problem. Perhaps the word lean puts people off, they hear it and immediately imagine a bunch of tools and methodologies being shoehorned in to the organisation, even If they don’t fit.

Maybe lean needs a rebrand, perhaps it is the word that puts people off.

Perhaps it’s all the fangled awards and certificates that come along with it. Or perhaps maybe it is the tools themselves, they might need rethinking to combat the ever changing landscape we live in.

Maybe the future of lean is that businesses and organisations understand the true power of lean, that it doesn’t need to change at all and that the world needs to learn to better understand it.

I hope you enjoy this issue and it gives you some interesting points of view about the future of lean.

Happy Reading

Fred Tongue

Commissioning Editor

In order to receive your copy of the Lean Management Journal kindly email lmj@hennikgroup.com or telephone 0207 401 6033. Neither the Lean Management Journal nor Hennik Group can accept responsibilty for omissions or errors.

Terms and Conditions Please note that points of view expressed in articles by contributing writers and in advertisements included in this journal do not necessarily represent those of the publishers. Whilst every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of the information contained in the journal, no legal responsibility will be accepted by the publishers for loss arising from use of information published. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written consent of the publishers.

CONTENTS

February 2016 4 - - - - - - -

MEET THE EDITORS

5 - - - - - - -

NEWS PRINCEPLES AND PURPOSE

8 - - - - - - -

Postponement and lean strategies in the future of manufacturing Phil Lewis addresses how new consumer habits and technologies have led to lean 2.0 and what that means.

11- - - - - - -

Man v Machine Writing about how employees should be treated, Joe Bell lets us know how to get the most out of your employees.

13- - - - - - -

Demystifying Leadership: Setting Leaders up for Success Frank Devine takes a very in-depth look at the current state of leadership and assesses how to improve the training given to our business leaders.

21- - - - - - -

Lean is neither a journey, nor a destination Hafez Shurrab discusses what lean actually it is and lean in the future.

24- - - - - - -

Why is it so hard for middle managers to disrupt the status quo?

Speaking from experience Martyna Kuczynska Brooks discusses the problems that middle management can cause and the ways to remedy it.

28- - - - - - -

CASE STUDY Can Customer Retention be Predicted and Improved?

An academic piece by Smriti Neogi looking at how to retain customers using the renewal rates at a fitness club as an example.

34- - - - - - -

OUT OF THE BLUE Come Together and Mind the Choice Bill Bellows is back and looks at the differences in inter and intra dependence and how it can affect business models.

37- - - - - - -

LEAN ONLINE

38- - - - - - -

LEAN EVENTS

39- - - - - - -

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MEET THE EDITORS

Our experienced editorial board members contribute to the journal providing comment against articles and guiding the coverage of subject matter.

Jacob Austad

Novo Nordisk, Denmark

LeanTeam, Denamrk

Lean Enterprise Research Centre, Cardiff Business School

Bill Bellows

Brenton Harder

David Ben-Tovim

President, In2:InThinking Network

Commonwealth Bank of Australia

Flinders Medical Centre, Australia

Gwendolyn Galsworth

Jeff Liker

Sarah Lethbridge

Visual Thinking Inc., USA

University of Michigan, USA

Cardiff Business School. UK

Malcolm Jones

Joseph Paris

Dr Nick Rich

Industry Forum, UK

Operational Excellence Society

Swansea University, UK

Steve Yorkstone Edinburgh Napier University, UK

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John Bicheno

Rene Aagaard

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Torbjorn Netland

Nowegian University of Science and Technology, Norway

More information about our editorial board. their experience, and views on lean is available on the LMJ website:

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NEWS

LEAN savings of over £50k identified at He-Man Dual Controls Southampton-based He-Man Dual Controls Ltd. can look forward to some positive results on their balance sheet over the coming year as quantifiable savings of at least £50k have been identified and will be easily achievable following the implementation of lean training.

The need to increase productivity at the plant was recognised back in November 2014 when two employees registered for the Lean Academy training course with Gosport-based Fedden USP. This course is delivered in partnership with MIT Skills and aims to train up LEAN Champions with the skills, knowledge and confidence to make improvements to their own business through a five-day workshop, followed by eight days of mentoring to help participants deliver three improvement projects within their own business.

On the successful implementation of the three projects, participants are awarded a nationally recognised qualification - Lean Business Improvement Techniques (BITs) NVQ Level 2.

Three projects were quickly identified at He-Man and a kanban system was introduced to improve process efficiency by preventing parts from running out during the production process. Workplace organisation (5s) was introduced to the workshop so that employees had all the tools they needed to complete a job at their workstation and didn’t have to waste time looking for tools and parts etc.

Finally, the layout of the factory was completely re-organised to streamline the production process from start to finish so that all items produced flowed naturally from one section to another.

Workshop Manager Richard Draper, commented: “The training we received from Fedden USP was excellent. Going into the training

we had no concept of ‘lean’, but we were taught the benefits of a ‘lean’ environment and the 5s principles and through this we have been developing the way we work.

Continuous improvement is the new way of life for us now”.

Jack Rose, lean consultant with Fedden USP, added: “It has been a pleasure working with the employees from He-Man who were very keen to learn the principles of lean from the outset. I am also very pleased to see that the training has given them the confidence to pass on what they have learnt to their colleagues and two more employees have now enrolled on our next course. The company really is making significant progress through the implementation of lean”.

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NEWS

Kuwaiti company makes massive savings thanks to lean According to Petrochemicals Industries Company’s CEO, Asaad al-Saad, the company has made financial savings of $188m. The Kuwait based company attributes the savings to the successful implementation of lean six sigma projects, the company claims to have completed more than 533 projects. Some of the projects that the company completed included financial enterprises to decrease spending and realising socioenvironmental responsibilities, as well as cutting down on the time it takes to implement decisions. Many employees underwent six sigma training, with 128 gaining green belt status and 28 employee being recognised as black belts. The PIC has pledged to training 25% of staff in six sigma.

Manufacturing workshop held in Bangalore In an attempt to help SMEs in India reduce their manufacturing costs and improve quality, a national workshop was organised in Bangalore about lean manufacturing. It was organised by industry body KASSIA in association with the government run, Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMSEs), the workshop is part of the Lean Manufacturing Competitive Scheme (LMCS). The event was inaugurated by Ministry of MSME secretary, Anup K Pujari.

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Free training for businesses in Tucson An organisation in the US called Thryve ScaleUp, based in Tucson, is offering free training to startups in their second year of trading and have revenues of $150,000 in order for them to help grow rapidly. There is $300,000 available in training for companies.

The programme lasts nine weeks and is an intensive programme, teaching business owners “the growth-focused methods of Silicon Valley startups”, experimentation, validation and lean business practices. The course covers a

wide range of subjects including accounting, hiring practices, legal and marketing.

The Thryve ScaleUp is funded by a $1.44m fund from the US Small Business Administration’s ScaleUp America programme that is funding the project over five years. Director of Thryve ScaleUp said, “Our goal is to build $20 million to $25 million companies, or to get them on that track.”

NEWS

Lean makes significant contribution to Best Factory Award win Oxfordshire-based Siemens Magnet Technology recently won the overall Factory of the Year 2015 prize at the Best Factory Awards in London. The company also scooped the People & Skills Development Award as well as Best Engineering Plant Award. Operations Manager, Frazer Mackay firmly believes that lean working gave the company the edge over its competitors on the night.

To win the Factory of the Year award, the company had to demonstrate improved performance across the board; reducing lead times, improving productivity and delivering outstanding product innovation.

Siemens designed and manufactured the ultra-light magnet at the heart of a revolutionary MRI scanner and this was all made possible by a major redevelopment of the plant’s entire manufacturing area.

To help with this, Mackay called upon the services of Gosportbased Lean business specialists, Fedden USP who, in partnership with MIT Skills, has been undertaking the LEAN Business Improvement Techniques (BITS) NVQ Level 2 and 3 programmes at the factory over the last four years. Over 200 (>95%) of the employees on the shop floor volunteered to be trained in NVQ Level 2, Level 3 or a one day lean appreciation course. This learning is backed up by the company’s structured approach called Lean Improvement Projects, which ensures that everyone’s training is applied on a routine basis.

Fedden has managed to change the way of thinking at Siemens and now everyone contributes ideas for improvements, as Mackay explains:

“Continuous improvement is embedded in everyone’s day job, it is considered to be business-asusual, not something special and everyone is well aware that if we stand still, we will fall behind”.

The results of lean working in 2014 speak for themselves: 268 ideas from employees were implemented, yielding more than £1.3m in operational savings and more than 11,900 production hours saved.

Siemens team who had already embraced the lean enterprise culture and made significant improvements in the operation when we arrived on site. We have been able to embed the principles more thoroughly and support the team during their increased learning and understanding phases, prior to implementation of a further step in advancing their lean culture and enhanced improvement activity”.

Mackay added: “Winning the awards is a fantastic achievement for Siemens Magnet Technology and earlier in the year, we also achieved ‘World Class’ status from a Global Lean assessment, so as you can imagine, we are thrilled with all these accolades.

Embedding and thinking lean in our daily working lives required a cultural shift and throughout our journey we have been fortunate to work in partnership with Neil Fedden and the team at Fedden USP and MIT Skills, who understand our specific demands and tailored the training accordingly. We already have a cohort of trainees lined up for the next NVQ2 and NVQ3 courses and through Fedden USP have now started to deliver training in the offices”.

“It was a real privilege to engage with the Siemens team who had already embraced the lean enterprise culture and made significant improvements in the operation when we arrived on site”

Neil Fedden commented: “It was a real privilege to engage with the

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PRINCIPLES AND PURPOSE

Common ground?

Postponement and lean strategies in the future of manufacturing Lean is one of the most well-known process strategies in modern manufacturing. It has become the industry’s default best-practice approach and has been widely adopted in facilities worldwide.

As the manufacturing industry recovers from the recession and moves into a growth phase, analysts are starting to once again pick up the lean dialogue. Lean manufacturing has two main building blocks: reducing waste and creating customer value.

Continuous improvement is the ultimate goal. To achieve this, manufacturers strive to eliminate information silos and then standardise and optimise the flow

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of products and services through the entire value stream—across departments, processes, and equipment to customers.

However, manufacturing has changed dramatically since lean principles were first adopted, especially in the areas of manufacturing technology and customer demand. When many companies first rolled out their lean initiatives, the Internet was in its

Phil Lewis

VP Solution Consulting (Europe), Infor

PRINCIPLES AND PURPOSE

infancy, and few could imagine a workplace that included mobile devices, online portals, and global, real time collaboration.

But what no one saw coming was mass customisation. As consumers buying highly customised products got a taste of what manufacturing can accomplish, they’re no longer willing to settle for mass produced, generic products. Customers now demand individualised products— but at the same speed and value as mass produced items.

In response, many manufacturers are turning to postponement strategies and late-stage assembly as they redefine workflows, quality control and inventory management.

It’s a new manufacturing environment, where innovative concepts are being devised and tested every day.

In many ways postponement is a direct contradiction to the lean principles that dominated manufacturing for the last two decades because simple linear flow of production is not the best way to accommodate the high degree of variation that customers demand. Instead, a postponement strategy delays the assembly of the final product as long as possible. This allows the manufacturer to personalise orders and to change the product mix to reflect changing demand patterns.

So the question becomes, stuck between a legacy of lean and postponement shaped horizon, how does a manufacturer even begin to evaluate processes and technology for the future?

Redfining demand and finding the common ground The immediate benefit of postponement is avoiding the risks and costs of making undesired products. With postponement, manufacturers produce and stock sub-components up to the point of differentiation and then complete a customised version of the product to satisfy a unique or small-lot requirement.

This has immediate links to the lean objective of zero waste as – done correctly - a postponement based operation should only ever manufacture (and therefore only ever order in supplies for) that which it has sold.

Modern IT can drive these initiatives by helping companies take proactive measures to minimise waste in the purchasing of raw materials and warehousing of products just in case unexpected orders come in.

Driven by a new understanding of demand, postponement can take this lean goal one step further.

Modern business intelligence (BI) software helps companies accurately predict market demands, rather than just report on historical transaction trends.

This means purchasing agents and production managers can more accurately forecast order trends and plan accordingly.

This quickly reduces the high cost of inventory. Maintaining stocks of multiple variations of a product is cost prohibitive. When companies offer hundreds of choices of styles, colours and features, the SKU

implications become staggering.

The short-lived product lifespan also makes maintaining inventory of a particular version risky. No brand manager wants to be stuck with yesterday’s bestseller when the consumer is looking to purchase the new and improved version. Likewise no operations manager wants to be the reason a manufacturer missed the boat on a huge, short lived market.

As a result, just-in-time inventory concepts has evolved into “ondemand” manufacturing.

Not that this improved visibility has made everything easier.

Expectations for speed of delivery have drastically changed since lean strategies were first developed. At one time a sixmonth delivery wait may have been tolerated by customers; today, in some industries, six days or six hours may be too slow.

As a result it is not just a case of knowing what is going to wanted when, where and by whom but

“Customers now demand individualised products—but at the same speed and value as mass produced items.”

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PRINCIPLES AND PURPOSE

also where, when and at what stage are the components, sub assemblies and work in progress needed to satisfy that demand.

Just as expectations for demand visibility have drastically changed, supply chain tracking and planning have evolved to be more insightful.

And it is not just about the quantities within the supply chain.

Although customers expect highly specialised products, they still look for reliable quality. It is up to the manufacturer to ensure a level of consistency among the many variations produced and shipped under their name, even when various subcontractors and third party logistics partners may be involved in completing the product, packing and shipping.

Innovation and waste: the occasional argument?

However, some fundamental tensions remain: how can manufacturers reconcile repeated, disruptive innovations and lean efficiency? For example, how can a manufacturer balance new product or process development, which brings some natural waste as ideas are tried and discarded, with the lean mandate to minimise waste?

Manufacturers must strive to overcome this fallacy that branching into uncharted territories to develop new products is wasteful and against lean philosophies. Innovation can’t be curtailed as it is vital for growth.

Disruptive technology brings some degree of waste as new systems and workflows continue to be

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refined until best practices are reached. But put this in context – it is best practice for a better market (if we define things by being aligned to that market).

Lean concepts can still be used to guide the workflows and keep waste in check, without totally restricting some tolerance for the trial and error and experimentation that come with any new approach.

From reducing excessive inventory to eliminating gaps in processes, both strategies strive to streamline operations and cut extra steps. This can include a range of tactics, from unnecessary structures to over-reporting and duplication of tasks. Removing unnecessary motions, from ergonomics to disparate IT systems, saves time, increases productivity, and, therefore, saves money.

Multiple process tactics and IT tools are required to make on-demand manufacturing feasible—and profitable— from product configuration to component subassembly, comanufacturing partnerships, and latestage assembly.

Best practices now include new production norms and higher standards of operational excellence for speed and value-add services. Early lean consultants didn’t address technologies such as 3-D printing, smart sensors, and the Internet of Things (IoT) for one important reason: These concepts were little more than visions and prototypes in early lean rollouts. In lean 2.0 these disruptive technologies can be leveraged to provide greater value, with less waste.

Modern software can bring these concepts together into one streamlined flow. Today’s highly flexible, cloud-based ERP system acts as the central nervous system, connecting processes and workflows and enabling speed, diversity and standardisation to coexist across the manufacturer and supply chain.

A reassessment of lean comes at an opportune time, as many of the early adopters of lean transformation projects are reaching retirement age and the markets have moved on.

Whilst a new generation of manufacturing personnel is being introduced to the lean vocabulary and striving to put the lean concepts in context for their jobs, their roles, and their priorities, the new demands of the markets have created even more complexity.

This isn’t always easy, but it’s certainly necessary.

It’s time to revisit some of the lean concepts and assess how they are still relevant and still valuable to manufacturing. When this lean 2.0 is paired with the postponement strategies and controlled by flexible software, the potential is truly limitless.

“ This isn’t always easy, but it’s certainly necessary.”

PRINCIPLES AND PURPOSE

Man v Machine None of us are perfect, but with great leadership and the correct handling we are capable of more than machines ever could be. Joe Bell of Evoke People Development contends that regular 121’s can make all the difference The art of leadership is understanding and harnessing motivation. It is connecting with others in a way that builds trust, galvanises them to action and inspires people to peak productivity. Successful leaders are willingly followed by people who believe in them and their intentions.

Machines, on the other hand, do as they are told. They are literal. They follow instructions, run to programme, execute as directed. Machines do not become unhappy, de-motivated

or go beyond what they are simply told to do.

In my experience not enough time is spent exploring the nature of motivation when educating new leaders. Motivation leads us to behave in a certain way yet team leaders (TL’s) are poorly educated in this area.

Three conditions are prevalent in any business: 1) the working world is more crowded and competitive than ever; 2) we require teams to be solution-

Joe Bell,

Director, Evoke People Development driven, creative, autonomous, flexible, and dynamic; 3) TL’s are time-poor with rising expectations. Knowing this, it is clear that leaders need to be able to get the very best from their teams if the business is to succeed. Therefore, they need to motivate others.

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PRINCIPLES AND PURPOSE

Working with emerging TL’s in the manufacturing industry recently, I found that they longed for the simplicity of the transactional relationship they have with machines. A machine obeys, runs to standard, executes. This idea is attractive with human resources also, finding a way to eliminate variables that can be so distracting. People can be complex, distracted, challenging.

It is therefore understandable that we should try and elicit the same response from the people capital within the business that we do with our mechanical assets.

Basic leadership development (for any emerging leader) has to begin with understanding… that although people can be unpredictable and changeable, they are easily the most prized asset and must be treated as such. Learning HR policies or appraisal forms may be necessary in leadership development of but it is not sufficient. Fear (or lack of appreciation) of the emotional context (in regard to motivation) when leading others can be disastrous for all parties.

I believe that TL’s need help tuning in to understand that humans are remarkably similar in the following ways. They value involvement and communication. They prefer leadership to be a partnership, founded on mutual trust and respect. They generally can – and want – to develop skills and competence without being assisted.

Let’s link this to leadership and motivation. In the simplest terms, when we feel valued, positive and free to exercise our initiative our output will be creative, entrepreneurial and dynamic. When we feel negative our energy is low, our attitude sickly. Feelings of hopelessness, disenfranchisement or dread does not lead to good work.

So what does this mean, in practical terms, for the TL? According to a Corporate Leadership Council*survey, 7 of the top 9 ‘A-Level Performance Drivers’ in employees are directly attributable to line manager leadership. Line manager feedback, focus on strengths, clarity and standards all figure highly in this list.

Although regular 121’s require investment, connecting with people and working in partnership towards a common goal - they are crucial to unlocking potential and over time, producing increased outputs.

Something as simple as regular 121’s can be hugely impactful.

Using 121’s to motivate, stretch and re-connect with teammembers can be hugely rewarding. What is important for TL’s to understand is that each 121 will carry a slightly different meaning: for some it may be clarification, for others development, for others recognition. Underscoring each 121 is an emotional context and interaction which, when skilfully executed, moves a 121 from a management process to reestablishing – or reinforcing – a connection.

So whilst machines require investment and maintenance to produce results, so do our human assets. The leadership secret is to begin with an understanding of what makes them tick.

“Although people can be unpredictable and changeable, they are easily the most prized asset and must be treated as such.”

*Source: Corporate Leadership Council 2002 Performance Management Survey

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PRINCIPLES AND PURPOSE

Demystifying Leadership: Setting Leaders up for Success only two junior employees have been held accountable.

Introduction The genesis of this article was a question the author asked himself:

•

A culture in the BBC where serial sex offenders were provided with their own rooms thus facilitating the abuse of vulnerable children and adults - a failure that was repeated by the UK’s National Health Service for DJ Jimmy Saville.

•

Widespread failures of leadership in financial, regulatory and political systems contributing to the financial crash in 2008.

“How is it possible to spend so much money on leadership development and to produce such high levels of variation in the quality of leadership?”

Look around the world and you can see superb leadership, but you can also see: •

A hospital in the UK were up to 1,400 patients died from preventable causes such as dehydration, starvation and the switching off of heart monitors. A failure for which

From the 90s onwards the author diagnosed why organisations get a poor return for their leadership

Frank Devine Managing Director, Accelerated Improvement Ltd

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PRINCIPLES AND PURPOSE

development investment.

This article outlines the major findings of that diagnosis and explains a method of addressing them, which has been applied successfully across many sectors.

Some lean experts argue (e.g.

John Seddon, 2012, who argues that “culture change comes free with the …… method”) that to create a high performance culture we only need the right Continuous Improvement process, because “if you change the process, you change the behavior”. This article argues that it is much quicker if continuous improvement is implemented in an already positive and receptive culture (the purpose of mass engagement) sustained by the approach to leadership outlined here.

Before diagnosis, let’s look at leadership from a customer perspective, from how an employee experiences it.

How employees experience “culture” – the issue of variation in leadership How many times have you heard executives claim that the culture of their organisation is X or Y? How can they possibly deliver this consistently for individual employees unless they ensure that every people manager in the organisation, models that culture?

Given that employees are, in one sense, the customers of “leadership”, if we tolerate variation in the standards of leadership how can we prevent the employee experience of the culture being random? Semirandom inputs will produce semirandom outputs. Employees truly join organisations but they often leave their individual bosses.

Having established why variation is so damaging let’s look at

“How can they possibly deliver this consistently for individual employees unless they ensure that every people manager in the organisation, models that culture?”

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why traditional leadership development has not addressed this issue and has, in fact, compounded the problem.

Diagnosis: Why does traditional leadership development suboptimise?

This section will outline some of the key findings of the initial question – why is leadership development producing such a wide variation in leadership outcomes?

The key causes found were: •

Time interval between usage

•

Academic over specialisation leading to systems effects being underestimated

•

Unnecessary complexity

Time interval between usage - the Wayne Rooney example In 2009, Wayne Rooney of Manchester United (the World’s 3rd largest sports organisation by revenue, Forbes 2014) scored an overhead kick in a big soccer game; what do you think all the soccer kids in the UK were practicing that afternoon in the park?

How many times in a season will a soccer player use an overhead kick? [For people who do not understand soccer, the answer is fewer than ten times a season.]

How many times does a soccer player need to control the ball regardless of which part of the body it is about to make contact with? [For those who do not understand soccer – thousands of times a season.]

PRINCIPLES AND PURPOSE

So if we want to produce a good soccer team, which of these two skills should we spend the more time improving?

Unnecessary Complexity

When the author looked at the contents of most leadership development programs, he found a large coverage of the equivalent of overhead kicks, and little time devoted to mastering the foundations.

Every year the author runs hundreds of workshops where employees describe how they see their leaders and their organisations (a key part of the mass, rapid employee engagement process which compliments the leadership approach outlined here).

Academic Over specialisation The issue can be summarised by the comparison below between the contrasting priorities of individuals as they become more senior in academic and organisational careers:

Employees hear their leaders describe what appears to be the same issues in very different ways depending on individual leaders’ organisational and educational experiences and favoured models.

This complexity is experienced by many employees not as evidence

of sparkling intellectual diversity but rather as a lack of alignment and competence!

The Cathedral/ Higher Purpose Model explained below reverses this process and delivers a few key skills (henceforth “The Brilliant Basics”) well and often enough to move the culture forward.

This approach (combined with the mass engagement approach outlined in the sidebar) contributed to the awarding of the Shingo Prize to DePuy Jonson & Johnson in 2014 and has led to numerous large increases in employee engagement scores in global organisations such as Roll-Royce, Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson and GKN. (internal organisational data 2000-2015)

Area

Academic

Executive

Focus

Focus Deeper and deeper knowledge of the “expert” area

Broader and broader as responsibility increases over more and more organisational units, legal, political and cultural systems and people

Advancement of science but decreasing sensitivity to boundary and system issues remote from the particular deep knowledge and not necessary for career advancement

Because systems do not optimise by focus on their parts, executives develop increasing sensitivity to and skill in optimising interrelated systems (necessary to achieve organisational success without which career success is unlikely)

Consequence

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PRINCIPLES AND PURPOSE

The Cathedral/Higher Purpose Model The title of the model emerged from a story used to illustrate the deeper, more emotional and values-based aspects of the model.

The story goes that a visitor to a building site looked down into an excavation and asked one bricklayer what he was doing. The bricklayer replied “I’m laying bricks, what do you think I’m doing”.

The visitor then went to a second bricklayer in a separate excavation and asked the same question. The response this time was “I am building a Cathedral”. Many leaders see the logical significance of the second bricklayer’s response, - that he sees the big picture and where his work fits within it. Unfortunately many leaders miss the emotional aspect of his response, his pride in his work.

The Cathedral/Higher Purpose Model Quality x Quantity

Setting Expectations and Managing Over Commitment

Recognition

Coaching and Delegating

Constructive Feedback

Escalation

Accountability Coaching Process Comparison of Expected vs Actual triggers use of the above skills

Cathedral/HP +Values & Self Awareness + Behavioural Standards Establishes the context in which the above skills operate Bottom up

That pride and ownership is key to employee engagement. “involved” or “consulted” about the culture, the workforce directly creates and codifies the new culture with senior leadership, a much more meaningful process

Let’s build the model!

The Cathedral/Higher Purpose Model Quality x Quantity

Setting Expectations and Managing Over Commitment

Recognition

Coaching and Delegating

Constructive Feedback

•

the spatial sense of all of the skills in the model being based on a foundation of values and employee-created behavioural standard

•

the values both of individual employees and of the organisation

•

the idea of self-awareness as an integral aspect of humility, a key aspect of the approach

Escalation

Accountability Coaching Process Comparison of Expected vs Actual triggers use of the above skills

Cathedral/HP +Values & Self Awareness + Behavioural Standards Establishes the context in which the above skills operate Bottom up

The Foundation Levels of the model addresses: •

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the differentiating approach of creating bottom up behavioural standards (see sidebar)“When Employees Create Their own Culture” whereby the high performance culture is agreed and codified by the workforce itself. The workforce is not

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The arrow in the model has 2 meanings: 1. It demonstrates the sequential nature of the model: •

progress starts with building a strong foundation of creating a sense of Cathedral, and sometimes a shared Higher

Purpose, based on values and behvaioural standards.

•

it then adds brilliant basics skills all delivered at very high levels of quality and quantity.

•

finally, these are continuously improved by the application of the accountability coaching process. (similar to “Check, Act” in PDCA)

2. It is not enough to deliver individual skills in isolation to the quality recommended (see over specialisation above); the model is a system and by working on the foundation level and the left of it leaders “earn the right” to move rightwards in the model i.e. become more assertive and directional where appropriate.

The first pillar addresses setting, expectations and managing over commitment.

PRINCIPLES AND PURPOSE

Setting Expectations and Managing over Commitment The first pillar addresses setting expectations and managing over commitment.

The Cathedral/Higher Purpose Model Quality x Quantity

Setting Expectations and Managing Over Commitment

Recognition

Coaching and Delegating

Constructive Feedback

Escalation

Accountability Coaching Process Comparison of Expected vs Actual triggers use of the above skills

“set clear and mutual expectations”

Cathedral/HP +Values & Self Awareness + Behavioural Standards Establishes the context in which the above skills operate

Setting Expectations: In Gallup’s Q12 Employee Engagement Survey (Gallup 2015) the first one is - I know what is expected of me at work?

When setting expectations is done by mutually agreeing what we expect from each other, this reinforces values around respect, teamwork and mutuality inherent in the foundation level discussed above.

Such mutuality sets the scene for the type of joint evaluation of workload outlined in the 2nd part of this pillar “Managing Over Commitment”.

Managing Over Commitment Imagine this scenario – an over committed employee does not arrive one morning for a meeting; everyone is surprised as it is out of character but everyone is relieved when she arrives 45 minutes later feeling uncomfortable for sleeping in.

Let’s look at a different scenario – she is driving home one night after a very long week and she falls asleep at the wheel of her car and kills a family in another car.

In both cases the organisation’s toleration of her over commitment led to her sleeping when she shouldn’t have; in the

Bottom up

first case she slept in the safety of her bed and did not hear her alarm; in the second case she fell asleep while driving her car.

if employees voluntarily giving of more and more discretionary effort are simply taken for granted and over worked?

The only difference in the outcome of these two cases was luck.

To avoid acting contrary to the values on which this approach is based we have to actively manage over commitment.

No organisation that aims to operate on the basis of values can tolerate such random outcomes.

How do we treat employees who habitually, offer discretionary effort? These employees are reluctant ever to say no or to disappoint anyone asking them to do work; what they tend to do is commit to doing the work and only afterwards, assess the amount of work required to deliver the commitment.

Poor/lazy managers will often just accept the commitment from the employee and assume that, as that employee has always delivered in the past, he or she will deliver on this new commitment.

The employee concerned tends to simply increase his or her workload by first increasing the lengths of their days, then gradually eroding their weekends.

What happens to the moral basis of the implicit contract between the organisation and the employee

We do this by establishing mutual expectations with both the commitment-seeker and the commitment-giver so that the cumulative impact of employees’ workload is calculated and appropriate adjustments made. By so doing we not only de-risk against random (and therefore, potentially catastrophic) failure but protect the moral basis on which the new culture sits, a key aspect of a sustained high performance culture.

The process to support this skill sets clear expectations on both the commitmentseeker and the commitment-giver.

It involves the mutual and nonhierarchical examination of real workload demand.

Having set clear and mutual expectations and ensured against over commitment we now need to ensure that no employee is taken for granted and that takes us to the recognition pillar in the model.

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PRINCIPLES AND PURPOSE

On its own recognition is not predicted to be capable of sustaining a quality culture and recognition programs in isolation can often sub-optimise but, as part of a system, genuine recognition is fundamental.

Recognition As we saw earlier, all of the skills sections of the model rest on a values foundation and for Recognition this differentiates the approach from traditional leadership development.

For years leaders have been told that the purpose of giving recognition is to encourage the repetition of already positive behaviors. This is sometimes referred to as “reinforcement feedback”.

This is a conceptual confusion between one of many positive consequences of recognition, namely reinforcement, and its purpose.

In the Cathedral/Higher Purpose Model we give recognition because it is the right thing to do; it is a values-based purpose.

Why do we rush to the aid of an old lady who falls in the street?

Not because we want to be included in her will but because it is the right thing to do. It is unconditional recognition; we do not do it to get anything back.

Human beings feel the difference between someone recognising them unconditionally and someone praising them because they want something in return.

Coaching and Delegation The distinctive approach to coaching is a unification of two unnecessarily separated streams of thinking, namely: •

The coaching stream usually owned by HR/L&D

•

The problem-solving stream originating in the “hard” sciences and owned by functions such as engineering, continuous improvement/process excellence etc.

The aim is to: •

•

•

•

• Coaching and Delegating

Constructive Feedback

Escalation

Accountability Coaching Process Comparison of Expected vs Actual triggers use of the above skills

Cathedral/HP +Values & Self Awareness + Behavioural Standards Establishes the context in which the above skills operate Bottom up

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Build mutual empathy and respect between the owners of the respective disciplines

Use of a push-pull coaching continuum to ensure that the person coaching is always consciously in the optimum place to maximise the potential of the situation

Quality x Quantity

Recognition

Add coaching skill to the myriad of problem-solving approaches in use

The skills developed here include:

The Cathedral/Higher Purpose Model

Setting Expectations and Managing Over Commitment

Add rigour to coaching especially re understanding data and challenging assumptions and logical errors

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Understanding of the use and sequencing of different types of questions to ensure that the process produces optimum results including rigorous diagnosis involving challenging assumptions, logical errors and lack of root cause analysis

•

Significantly increasing the quantity of coaching by applying the approach to situations that arise every day in informal conversations, meetings etc.

•

Appreciation of the limits to analysis and the value of experimentation. This involves multiple inexpensive experiments rather than being content to implement the analytically “best” solution (often not the best when it comes into contact with reality).

Coaching focuses on developing individuals; but sometimes the focus needs to be on dealing with a situation or performance that fails to meet the expected standards and requires the skill of constructive feedback.

The Cathedral/Higher Purpose Model Quality x Quantity

Setting Expectations and Managing Over Commitment

Recognition

Coaching and Delegating

Constructive Feedback

Escalation

Accountability Coaching Process Comparison of Expected vs Actual triggers use of the above skills

Cathedral/HP +Values & Self Awareness + Behavioural Standards Establishes the context in which the above skills operate Bottom up

“Why do we rush to the aid of an old lady who falls in the street? Not because we want to be included in her will but because it is the right thing to do.”

PRINCIPLES AND PURPOSE

Constructive Feedback

Escalation

The approach in this pillar is to debunk the idea that constructive feedback is negative so as to encourage quick, non-judgmental conversations to “nip any issues in the bud”.

The skills developed here include: •

•

The skills developed here include: •

•

•

When to use constructive feedback and when other options are preferable The precision of language and sequence of steps most likely to produce a constructive, mutually respectful and joint problemsolving exchange How to receive constructive feedback in a way likely to encourage its future use crucial for leaders especially when receiving constructive feedback from team members

Constructive feedback may not always be sufficient, or may be inappropriate due to the severity of the situation, requiring a more robust response. That is why there is a pillar called “Escalation”.

•

How to informally escalate while maintaining the relationship Increasing managers’ confidence to start a process of formal escalation by avoiding ruining legal and reputational risks Practical processes to shorten, simplify and make more operationally friendly existing HR policies and procedures covering this area

Having looked at all the skills sections we will now look at the roof of the model and explain what is meant by “Quality x Quantity”.

The Cathedral/Higher Purpose Model Quality x Quantity

Setting Expectations and Managing Over Commitment

Recognition

Coaching and Delegating

Constructive Feedback

Escalation

Accountability Coaching Process Comparison of Expected vs Actual triggers use of the above skills

Cathedral/HP +Values & Self Awareness + Behavioural Standards Establishes the context in which the above skills operate Bottom up

The Cathedral/Higher Purpose Model Quality x Quantity

Setting Expectations and Managing Over Commitment

“Human beings feel the difference between someone recognising them unconditionally and someone praising them because they want something in return.”

Recognition

Coaching and Delegating

Constructive Feedback

Escalation

Accountability Coaching Process

Comparison of Expected vs Actual triggers use of the above skills

Cathedral/HP +Values & Self Awareness + Behavioural Standards Establishes the context in which the above skills operate

Bottom up

Quality x Quantity: Leadership as a Contact Sport!

The Cathedral/Higher Purpose Model Quality x Quantity

Setting Expectations and Managing Over Commitment

Recognition

Coaching and Delegating

Constructive Feedback

Escalation

Accountability Coaching Process Comparison of Expected vs Actual triggers use of the above skills

Cathedral/HP +Values & Self Awareness + Behavioural Standards Establishes the context in which the above skills operate Bottom up

Imagine every leader had superb skill levels in all the key skills.

What difference would they make to the culture if they very rarely engaged these skills in conversations with employees?

The literature tends to focus on the quality aspect but the unsexy, repetitive, muscle memory aspects are crucial to providing and sustaining a culture. It does not matter if a pro tennis player has a world beating forehand if she cannot move quickly enough into a position where she can use it often enough to win games.

The Quality x Quantity section emphasises that while the quality of the conversation matters so does the number of conversations taking place. Many trends in business, from increasing spans of control to giving front-line leaders lots of administrative work go in the exact opposite direction….it is as if we said to the aforementioned Wayne Rooney “hey Wayne while you are making those runs in the game could you cut the grass and paint the lines…you are there”!!!

In summary, leadership is a contact sport and the amount of contact matters. Leaders can’t do it well in the settings many of them find comfortable such as email or via corporate communications.

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PRINCIPLES AND PURPOSE

Accountability Coaching Process and Managing on Green It is often said that “practice makes perfect” but if you practice poor quality you just get wellpracticed poor quality! It is perfect practice that makes perfect and this section explores how to strive for that.

This section is designed to: •

•

Sustain the gains made by the initial mass engagement, investment in leadership development and application of a continuous improvement system Continuously improve the application of leadership skills and adherence to any other standard such as a quality standard

shows appreciation and empathy for the difficulties in the situation?

The author’s experience is that managing on green is a rich source of information on how corporate initiatives are working when they come into contact with employees, suppliers and customers.

•

Using these conversations to gently (at first) nudge towards meeting those standards.

•

Ensuring that he/she is “managing on green” i.e. ensuring that the positive aspects of performance are recognised as well as moving forward on any underperformance discussed.

This is the opposite of managing by exception.

How do you think an employee will feel if he knows that any conversation with his boss, will be a rounded discussion on progress that

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Setting Expectations and Managing Over Commitment

Recognition

Coaching and Delegating

Constructive Feedback

Escalation

Accountability Coaching Process Comparison of Expected vs Actual triggers use of the above skills

Establishes the context in which the above skills operate Bottom up

Summary The overview of this process is: 1. Demystify (i.e. remove all unnecessary complexity) from the approach to leadership 2. (Ideally) combine with a powerful form of employee engagement (see Sidebar) 3. Apply systematically aligning with existing continuous improvement and quality systems This approach is currently: •

Systematically following up on previously established expectations by comparing what was expected to happen with what happened.

Quality x Quantity

Cathedral/HP +Values & Self Awareness + Behavioural Standards

The accountability coaching process does the above by the leader: •

The Cathedral/Higher Purpose Model

Helping to keeping factories and other workplaces open and, in some cases, to expand (one organisation mentioned here more than doubled its workforce in 6 years)

•

Creating workplaces that employees enjoy working in and that helps them selfactualise to a degree many thought was impossible

•

Removing artificial/failure demand that had previously wasted employee time and talent

•

•

Demonstrating that by creating mutuality of interests and equipping our employees with brilliant basic skills and processes we can help our organisations become competitive and reinvest the results of that competitiveness into striving for higher purpose Sustaining local communities, shops etc.

In doing so I hope that this article will inspire others to do their own experimentation, hypothesis creation and testing in these areas.

References •

Seddon, J (2012) Delivering Public Services That Work, Triarchy Press

•

Shingo Institute (June 2014), Press Release: DePuy Synthes Ireland Receives The Shingo Prize for Operational Excellence

•

Forbes Business (July 2014) The World’s 50 Most Valuable Sports Teams

•

Gallup website https://q12.gallup.com

•

Internal engagement scores are commercially confidential but the organisations concerned are willing to discuss the outcomes of this process if requested via the author.

•

Rother, M. (2010). Toyota Kata: managing people for improvement, adaptiveness, and superior results, McGraw Hill.

•

Womack, J (2010). Gemba Walks, Lean Enterprise Institute

For client examples see www.acceleratedimprovement.co.uk

PRINCIPLES AND PURPOSE

Lean is neither a Journey, nor a Destination The long, successful history of lean adopters - whether they started to integrate lean years ago or recently – has always been a crucial weapon against any failure story that could tarnish lean as a philosophy. Very few researchers dared to challenge the concept of lean as being the definitive framework to improve performance and realise business objectives. Dabhilkar and Åhlström (2013) highlighted many issues in terms of operation improvement, fuelled by lean thinking with a special focus on the missing role of sociotechnical systems in terms of lean. Moreover, Jorgensen (2012) shed light on the problem of deeply rooted lean capabilities to deal with emergency situation and short

term recovery in the technology sector. Additionally, early in 2005, Cox and Chicksand conducted a study of lean applicability in the UK food industry that resulted in many questions related to lean.

In the mid-nineties, Cusumano (1994) tried to get the attention of lean-adopting industrialists claiming that it is not all about lean and it is neither the ultimate goal toward which technologies and resources should be shaped. Nonetheless, too many businesses failed to apply lean after that, but there was a major tendency to attribute the failure to inappropriate application of lean instead of questioning the lean concept itself. This type of inability to criticise lean is reflected in many studies looking

Hafez Shurrab Project manager, IMI Hydronic Engineering at the suitability of lean across a wide range of industries and in geographic or statutory contexts,

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PRINCIPLES AND PURPOSE

which indicates that applying lean is not to be discussed once found to be possible. While it is easy to prove results by getting rid of simple wastes, this article recaps some major issues rooted in the principles of lean.

The Ambiguity of ValueAdding Characteristic and Lean Optimality in Relation to Environmental Issues Product and service functions and features are getting more and more complex and along with that, new customer needs are regularly identified. While it is relatively easy to categorise all activities that directly contribute to the transformation of a product or service as valueadding, it is still ambiguous to explicitly sort out the continuously evolving customer needs indirectly tied to the making process of a product or service.

For instance, to ideally apply Just-In-Time (JIT) for the sake of keeping inventories at the lowest levels, it is very likely to increase the transportation activities and related emissions consequently.

If low emission rates per product could be considered as an important characteristic for customers, it is then difficult to determine if keeping more inventory is to be regarded as more significant waste than high transportation activities. Which of these paradoxes should be sacrificed and how synergy could be explicitly achieved to appropriately apply lean? Does re-defining which activity is to be waste for individual cases make lean the concept really useful? In

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other words, tailoring the essence of lean (waste elimination) for the sake of business could be perceived as extracting what to be good from lean practices, not vice versa, since there should be one optimal version of lean to be called for in the first place. In general, the full applicability of lean has been rarely confirmed through different studies, which raises a question if lean is realistic enough in its currently presented package for organisations to address as the ultimate operational goal.

Natural Disasters and Emergency The globalisation of business and international dependencies embedded in many industries – such as the high tech sector – makes building resilient and flexible operations a success factor to survive in the global market. Jorgensen (2012) believes that natural disasters such as the earthquake and tsunami that hit the wafer-manufacturing facilities in many parts of Japan and the flooding that paralysed the harddisk drive industry in Thailand could be seen as evidence to the fragility of tight lean redundancies, which failed to keep the business running longer during recovery. The reaction to the natural disasters in Thailand was to build resilient and agile supply chains at the cost of lean.

Nevertheless, defining the right middle ground in which one or more of the lean principles are traded off is not clearly formulated in today’s research. Therefore, it is a challenge for executives to make scenariobased decisions in which businesses are able to more strongly stand against emergency turbulences.

Supply Chain, Technology Infrastructure, New Product Development and Innovation-Oriented Redundancy One of the main important concerns related to applying lean in a particular context is the uncertainties of customer needs surrounding that context up- and downstream (Kainuma & Tawara, 2006). That is to say if a company positioned as a first-tier supplier to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) is perfectly applying lean principles and toolkits, it is impossible for this company to smoothly run their operations without fluctuations if their suppliers (i.e. second-tier supplier) and their customers (OEMs) are not doing the same with extensive coordination.

Besides, Ross (2013) claims that to orchestrate a simple supply chain which revolves around a relatively simple product, years of extensive efforts and significant industries are required to streamline the supply chain operations according to lean. For this fact, it is assumed that no contextual hindrances are identified, meaning that aligning a whole supply chain with lean could take a significantly long time and a lot of money. This time is typically spent on decision making since each supply chain participant could possibly have

“new customer needs are regularly identified”

PRINCIPLES AND PURPOSE

more customers and suppliers to consider, and it is not that simple to favour certain parties by specifying levels of inventory, unit cost, order quantity … etc that could be exclusively fitted fit for them.

In terms of cost, organisational systems along the supply chain should be at least homogeneous - if not similar - in order to facilitate achieving the suitable degree of transparency and visual management, which lean calls for. Additionally, all machines and processes along the supply chain should be reconfigured and developed so that their cycle and changeover times do not exceed the maximum acceptable lead time for a product or service. In many cases, this type of chain is stumbled by problems that require technologically infeasible solutions.

Apart from the pain caused by the lean-oriented transformation for a supply chain, a more important point that should be raised is if the participants involved in this supply chain are not going to be substituted or magnified for the sake of innovation and new product development.

Which party needs to adapt and change to fit and how much will this change cost? What if an innovative supplier has much more to offer in terms of sustainable business growth but they are not willing to change their way of working according to lean from the corresponding OEM perspective? That is not unexpected since Cusumano (1994) discussed how Japanese automotive companies used to be difficult for international suppliers that are not used to Japanese culture, which eventually pushed several of them to terminate their partnerships. In addition to that, the rate of technological changes are more rapid and multi-

faceted than ever, and it is not expected to slow down. Therefore, product life cycles are far from being anticipated and investing in new product development - and thereby establishing new partnerships - is gaining more attention as a strategy towards sustainable growth and against business erosion. Based on that, building efficient lean supply chains may save significant amount of money, but at the same time, construct rigidities that hinder acting positively within innovation ecosystems.

The future operations hold a lot of surprises that require using contingent toolkits which could be in turn regarded as an efficient fit for the situation in hand. What could be crucial is the ability to build flexible operations that could enable efficient performance under unexpected market behaviours. Building redundancies in organisational systems is really waste from a lean point of view until an unforeseen need justifies its existence. Therefore, the challenge in lean is not how to eliminate waste, which type of waste is of a strategic ammunition for the organisation to keep so that to enable reacting actively with unideal business environment forces from lean perspective including suppliers, markets, legal frameworks, political turbulences, technology readiness, and cultural diversity.

Lean is undoubtedly a perfect fit if the operational environment is well prepared for it, but the question is if there is a guarantee for this environment to be unchanged for a certain amount of time ahead. In other words, lean is not a planned journey that aims at taking organisations to zero-waste level since the need for this waste reduction is uncertain, leading to an unexpected end of this

journey. Moreover, lean is neither a destination since organizations may need to re-use it as needed.

What I believe is that lean is an inspiring guide to develop custom tools dedicated to eliminate waste and enable capable, transparent and continuous operations for organisations that can prove the stability of their businesses backed up by specific timeframe for certain products or services. This means that lean shapes a path on a journey that is not necessarily the most effective one, nor literally reflects the ideal image of typical lean .

References Cox, A., & Chicksand, D. (2005).

The Limits of Lean Management Thinking:. European Management Journal, 23(6), 648-662. http://dx.doi. org/10.1016/j.emj.2005.10.010 Cusumano, M. A. (1994). The Limits of” Lean”. Sloan management review, 35, 27-27.

Dabhilkar, M., & Åhlström, P. (2013).

Converging production models: the STS versus lean production debate revisited. Int Jrnl Of Op & Prod Mnagemnt, 33(8), 10191039. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/ ijopm-08-2012-0316 Jorgensen, B. (2012). Supply Chain: The limits of lean.

Kainuma, Y., & Tawara, N. (2006).

A multiple attribute utility theory approach to lean and green supply chain management. International Journal of Production Economics, 101(1), 99-108.

Ross, D. F. (2013). Competing through supply chain management: creating market-winning strategies through supply chain partnerships.

Springer Science & Business Media.

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PRINCIPLES AND PURPOSE

Why is it so hard for middle managers to disrupt the status quo?

In my experience, over 6 years of implementing lean, I have noticed that most of the organisations that I worked with faced a problem called: ‘we don’t need to improve as we don’t have a problem’. More than 70% of the time this isn’t said by top management, CEO’s or shop floor employees but by middle management.

This group of people play a significant role in process improvement programs, especially when the company is going to implement not just lean tools, but lean culture. They are responsible for executing the strategy to achieve business goals, for the communication from higher management to staff members, running the business effectively

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and also motivating employees to contribute and make the work place better.

If they are so powerful, why do just 30% of change management programs succeed? Why do lean culture implementations or process improvement initiatives mostly start top down, in some cases bottom up, but not from the middle layer?

Martyna Kuczynska Brooks Senior lean consultant, lean project manager, coach and trainer.

PRINCIPLES AND PURPOSE

An article by Cardiff University called ‘The Alienation of Middle Management’ highlighted that middle managers are “costly, resistant to change, a block to communication both upwards and downwards. They consistently underperform... reactionary, undertrained and regularly fail to act as entrepreneurs”.

My colleague from a consultancy company used to say: ‘If you want to successfully implement lean culture in your company, you need to change 70% of your middle management’. When I heard this for the first time, it seemed to be very black and white. Why do we have to do this? Maybe special training and coaching will help? Everything depends on the culture of the organisation and how motivated the people are. After running several projects on my own, working in different environments, seeing what is happening on the other side (because from the outside the grass is always greener!) I can now understand why he said this. Why don’t middle managers want change? Why it is so hard for them to question the status quo? Even though they seem to be committed, they prefer their comfort zone.

In all the places that I have worked, which went through a structural change, outsourcing or downsizing (and this often meant flattening the structure) the middle managers felt less powerful when it came to making decisions and taking the initiative. Why, by flattening the hierarchy, giving more empowerment to shop floor employees does this make middle management scared? How do you motivate a middle manager to act as a lean leader and make them feel that they have impact?

How to avoid situations where the company will potentially lose several months on a change management program and everyone will say ‘why hasn’t it worked again’?

What I would like to share with you are three main messages, which will help to improve the flow of your lean adventure and engage middle managers.

Clear Vision & Mutual Goals The top management has to clearly communicate to the whole organisation why the company wants to be a lean company. What are the current issues and where is the gap between current state and desired state (True North). The True North has to be translated into quantitative indicators. Next to that the strategical goals have to be translated into mutual goals for processes in the company.

Why is it so important and why is the old method of implementing key performance indicators (KPIs) less effective?

If I work as a director of account managers in a bank and (so far) the main KPI for my employees was sales (let’s say how many new & renewed loans I have in my portfolio) but they didn’t look at the risk factor of new customers, my colleagues from the risk department will flag it as a bad deal, as it will not make a negative impact on the portfolio and they’ll block it. If the team has no income, they will not get a bonus. If there were mutual goals with the risk department, my people could just chase ‘healthy deals’ and increase the ‘first time yield’.

Training & Coaching – Middle Managers as a Lean Leader Organisations where top management decides that the priority is to make middle management lean ambassadors, the launch of process improvement initiatives was smoother and had a greater impact on progress. It is crucial that middle management get intensive lean leadership training,

“Managers are costly, resistant to change, a block to communication both upwards and downwards. They consistently underperform... reactionary, undertrained and regularly fail to act as entrepreneurs”

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PRINCIPLES AND PURPOSE

that the top management are sure that they understand the vision and mission and that middle managers will communicate those changes to other employees.

than 70% of their time is paper work, meetings, and firefighting!

So where is the time for Gemba and to help people improve their daily tasks?

Of course many people will say ‘I can’t leave the business for several days for training. Everything will collapse’. Believe me, it won’t. It is obvious that you need to find someone who will take over your most important tasks that will not stop the business and remember, it’s no different to when you go on your summer holidays.

I remember one coaching session with a manager, we were preparing his standard work. As we went through his calendar, 90% of his time was meetings or conference calls and preparing for those meetings or conference calls. He said: “let’s do something with this, I have no time to be with my team and concentrate on what is happening with the business. I have to stay behind for hours and my wife is already not happy that I am coming back home at seven or eight in the evening.”

Why I am not a fan of a two day lean leadership training, which is the standard for most training courses?

Because you will never learn how to act as a lean leader in two days, you can get a little idea about what you should do, but the training sessions should be mixed with coaching sessions, exercises in Gemba and visiting benchmark companies. This process should last several weeks.

Many of those leadership training courses are part of a big change management program aimed at big companies, but if your company is just starting with a lean journey and you don’t feel confident enough in your own capabilities, you can always hire an external consultancy company with experienced trainers.

There are no failed experiments. There are just experiments with unexpected results.

What I have also noticed is that, on a daily basis, middle managers are overwhelmed with administrative work and bureaucracy. During multi observations studies I have collected data that says more

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He started to experiment with his daily calendar, changing priorities, suggesting to run 30min meetings with clear agendas instead of 60 minute discussions with no outcome. After a few weeks he could see that he needed to take a step back in order to move forward.

Team leaders say that there is no time for a real PDCA in the company or there is no failure policy. They have many problems to solve, as well as the day-to-day running of the company and acting as firefighters. This picture sums up what I’m talking about when it comes to taking a step back.

Managers often say that they have implemented problem solving and teams do often implement PDCA. Yes… Once in few months, when there is a process improvement project and lean people come to help. That’s why a proper understanding of ‘why we are doing this’ is more crucial than understanding which tool we need for which action.

First give me the problem, the tools will come later!

Dear Manager, please don’t be afraid to fail with your experiments.

There are no failures, there are just experiments with an unexpected result. And if you will not try, you will never know what will have the biggest impact or if your assumptions had justification.

Think about tomorrow…

Many say that ‘you can’t teach an old dog new tricks’, and that if a company has been running successfully for 30-40 years without lean, there is no need to change.

Is this true? Do you know what is happening on the market? What are your competitors doing, new technologies, methods? Are we agile and flexible enough to adapt to changes if we need to? Are we constantly developing our business towards customer needs?

Don’t find excuses to do your daily Kaizen. Even though there will be obstacles, don’t lose your motivation.

As Martin Luther King Jr once said…

“If you can’t fly,then run, if you can’t run, then walk, if you can’t walk, then crawl, but whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward.”

Those three messages are my theories along with daily practice.

They are always adapted to the different organisations and environments I work with or in.

There can’t just be a copy and paste theory. It will never work perfectly, so be smart. Will it help you in your case? I can’t say: yes or no, so go and try. Do your own experiments. Your comfort zone is a magic place, but nothing happens there. Do you dare to go and question the status quo?

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CASE STUDY

Can Customer Retention be Predicted and Improved? – A Case Study Customer retention is the number of customers retained by the company. In other words, customer retention is the number of times a particular customer bought a product or service from the same company. If customers are satisfied with the product or service then they will keep coming back for more which may ensure brand loyalty. Hence, customer retention brings an insight to the strength or weakness regarding the product or service of a company.

Customer retention can be calculated in various ways. One way is to find the number of customers in the start of the period and the number of customers at the end of the period. The calculation contains information in three different aspects: 1) The number of new customers acquired during a period – N 2) The number of customers at the start of a period – S 3) The number of customers at the end of a period – E

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Hence customer retention number is given by (E-N). In order to calculate the percentage, customer retention has to be divided by the number of customers at the start of a period (S) and multiplied by 100.

Equation 1 shows the formula to calculate the Customer Retention Rate (CRR). 

CRR = ((E-N) S ) * 100 Equation 1

Smriti Neogi

Sr. Analyst – Quality & Transformation James M. Anderson Center for Health Systems Excellence Ideally, the CRR should be 100% which means that the company never lost any customers. But, in reality a study finds that this number is close to 50%. If a company loses its customers and strives only to acquire new customers then it will never grow. In such a situation, if a company aspires to grow, then it

CASE STUDY

Significant variables important to the customer Perceived value for the money Overall satisfaction and commitment to the brand Intention to re-purchase

Intention to recommend

Customer Retention and Growth Figure 1 Flow Chart of Customer Behavior Leading to Customer Retention

should make up for every customer lost in addition to a new customer gained. Studies show that by keeping a close watch on CRR and trying to improve it, a company can actually save money.

Data analytics and customer retention Conceit metrics such as an increase in “Facebook likes” can incorrectly bloat the sense of success. As shown in Figure 1, the road to customer retention lies in the fact of identification of significant variables that provide them with the sense that they are getting value for their money.

Once the significant variables are identified then the metrics should be aligned to measure these variables. Data analytics can help solve this problem.Data analytics has the ability to figure out particular variables that may be significant to a particular customer retention scenario.

Prediction models and significant variable selection In order to predict if the customer will re-purchase or not, it is important to understand what motivates the customer to buy a particular product. It is very difficult to build customer loyalty and hence retain a customer

if customers are not paying attention to you. In order for the customers to listen, the company should have an idea of what gets the customers motivated to buy.

Figure 2 shows some of the factors that could motivate a customer.

Companies should use words that customers love to hear such as “free”, “new”, “instantly,” etc. Another factor could be to reward a customer for repeated business. One unique promotion idea that is used by many credit card companies is giving reward points based on the amount spent on the card. Another factor could be any evidence of good social impact such as a company donating 10% of their income to the charitable trusts.

If customers have evidence that

Words Customer Love to Hear

Speedy Quality Service

a company is associated with community service then they want to be part of the good work by buying goods from that company. Giving emotional importance to customers can also improve customer retention is another successful idea. Some customers like to be labeled as “Elite members” or “Prime members.” This strategy is used by many airline industries in which their elite membership is based on points accrued by the member.

Depending upon the membership type, the members can enjoy perks such as free checked bags or priority boarding. Other customers like to do business when it is personal. This strategy is used by spa owners. Most spa owners or employees know their customers by name. This helps build a relationship with a customer and as a result the customer feels privileged. Last, but certainly not the least, is that most customers like to have quality yet speedy service.

However, it is important to note that the above mentioned factors might vary from one industry to another. The prediction models can be parametric and nonparametric in nature.

Rewards for Customer’s Repeated Business

Customer Retention

Customers Enjoy Business when it is Personal

Evidence of Good Social Impact

Label Customers as Elite members Figure 2 Factors that could motivate Customers

February 2016 | the-lmj.com

29

CASE STUDY

70

Introduction to logistic regression

y = ß0+ß1 x1 + ß2 x2+ß3 x3+ E Equation 2 Logistic regression is a special case of the regression family where the response variable (Y variable) should be binary in nature. This means that the response variable or the variable of interest should have only two categories such as “0 and 1” or “Yes and No”. In the following section, a case study is analysed in which the response variable is binary in nature hence logistic regression is used.

X2: Payment Mode

60 50 Number of Members

Regression is a popular prediction model. Equation-2 shows a simple linear regression model. The “Y” variable is called the response variable and is dependent in nature. There are “X” variables which balance the equation and are called the predictor variables.

The X variables (x1, x2 and x3) are independent in nature.

Any change in the X variables will cause a change in the Y variable, which is the dependent variable. “ß0 ß1 ß2 and ß3“ are the parameters of the equation. Since a model is just an approximation of the real situation, the error term which is the difference between actual and predicted value is represented by “ E ”.

X1: Renewal Number of Years

40 30 20 10 0 0

5

10

15

Figure 3

Figure 4

Insurance Member - I 21%

Customer Payment Mode at the Health Club

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February 2016 | the-lmj.com

25

30

35

- Customer Renewal Number of Years at the Health Club

Case study of a local health club membership This paper uses the data from a local health club - anytime fitness. Data was received from the health club as they just started collecting the information. The dependent variable (“Y” variable) that is of interest is the customer membership renewal which is a measure of customer retention.

The response variable is binary in nature where it has only two values: Yes and No. There are three independent variables (“X” variables) in this case study and each one of them is described in detail in the following section.

X3: Elite Membership

1) X1: Renewal Years – This variable provides information regarding the number of years the customer has renewed the membership in the past. Figure 3 shows the histogram plot of renewal years. As seen from the plot, most of the customers fall in the distribution of 1 to 5 years.

2) X2: Payment Mode – This variable provides information about the payment mode. The membership of the customers at this health club is either paid for by their health insurance which is shown by “I” or is paid by the customer as shown by “S”. Since there are only two categories for the X2 variable, it is binary in nature. Figure 4 shows the distribution of variable X2.

3) X3: Elite Membership- This variable provides information about elite membership status of the customer. This variable is binary in nature and has two values: Yes and No. Figure 5 shows the distribution of variable X3.

No 69% Self Paid Member -S 79%

20

Renewal Number of Years

Figure 5

Yes 31%

Elite Membership at the Health Club

CASE STUDY

Analysing significant variables using logistic regression The dependent variable, “health club membership renewed,” is binary in nature hence Logistic Regression is used in this scenario.

The model has “health club membership renewed” as a function of “renewal years”, “payment mode,” and “elite membership.” The analysis is done on statistical software called “R”. Figure 6 shows the output of the analysis.

As shown in the figure 6, “Pr (>|z|)” is the factor that determines if the variable is significant or not. The analysis in the previous section found that two out of the three variables were found to be significant to affect customer membership renewal.

These statistical results found using a business intelligence tool accomplished the task of finding the significant variables. These findings can be translated into the marketing strategies by using some creative ideas by the company.

The following section describes an example how the two steps can be achieved.

1) The analysis shows that “elite membership Y” is significant. This means that customers who were elite members are more likely to renew their membership and the logical choice is to focus attention getting customers interested in becoming elite members. One way to make customers elite is by giving them sign-on bonus points. Another idea to make customers elite is to keep a threshold point system.

2) The second significant variable in the analysis was “customer payment mode S” which means that when customers

Figure 6 Logistic Regression output of R

were self-paid they were more likely to renew their membership compared to customers who paid using their insurance. A logical reason for this act might be that the customers who paid with their insurance really do not care about a particular health club membership. These customers do not have a brand loyalty for this particular health club because it is not personal. As a result, they are less likely to renew their membership at this particular health club.

One possible way to retain the insurance paid customers is to bundle activities at the health club that may help reduce their health insurance as well. Activities such as preventive health checks that are mandatory in many health insurance programs could be added at the health club, and, may be helpful in retaining the customers who paid with their insurance.

“When customers were self-paid they were more likely to renew their membership compared to customers who paid using their insurance.”

February 2016 | the-lmj.com

31

CASE STUDY

Conclusion Customer retention is difficult to maintain in this competitive era.

The key to create a successful customer loyalty and retention program is to know what and why customers re-purchase a product or service. This can be achieved in two steps: first know what motivates the customer to buy, and second to channel the marketing strategy to enhance the factors found in the previous step. There are many ways to find significant factors that lead to customer retention. The most logical way is with data analytics. Techniques such as Logistic Regression predictive modeling can help understand the significant variables which can help to improve retention.

In this paper, a case study was

32

February 2016 | the-lmj.com

analysed where data was collected from a local health club customer database. The response variable was customer renewal membership, which is binary in nature, hence logistic regression modeling is carried out for its prediction. Three predictor variables namely, customer renewal years, payment mode and elite membership were used in the model. Out of the three variables, payment mode and elite membership were found significant. Once the significant factors are found, the next step is to use creative marketing promotions to improve the factors. Hence, data analytics can predict and thereby improve customer retention.

References 1) Baxter Strategies Inc., Customer Retention: A Business Imperative 2) Liang, K.-Y., and Zeger, S. L., Longitudinal data analysis using generalized linear models, Biometrika, vol. 73, no. 1, pp. 13-22, 1986.

3) Myers, R. H., Montgomery, D. C., and Vining, G. G., Generalized Linear Models-with Applications in Engineering and the Sciences, John Wiley&Sons, New York, 2002.

4) Neal, R. M. (2003) “Slice Sampling�, The Annals of Statistics, 31:705-741.

5) Wang,Xin., and Montgomery, Alan., The Effects of advertising on Customer retention and the profitability of Auctions, ISBM report, June, 2003.

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OUT OF THE BLUE

Come Together and Mind the Choice Bill Bellows, President, In2:InThinking Network

Beginning with the June 2015 edition of the Lean Management Journal (LMJ), I will be preparing a monthly column, titled “Out of the Blue.” As with the articles I have been writing for the LMJ since 2009, these columns will highlight concepts associated with an integration of ideas from W. Edwards Deming, Russell Ackoff, Genichi Taguchi, and Tom Johnson, amongst many other systemic leaders, with applicability to improving how individuals and organisationsW think together, learn together, and work together. In keeping with the use of the expression, the aim of these articles is to present concepts to the LMJ community which might appear to be “out of the clear blue sky,” yet could be immensely valuable to lean practitioners.

Five years after adding their music catalog to iTunes, The Beatles joined the music streaming club on December 24th, 2015. Within days, old and new fans were treated to an anthology of 200+ ditties, melodies, anthems, and ballads, with Come Together the early favorite. My interest in the title is the second word, the latter term in a long list of two-word expressions which end with “together;” phrases beginning with eat, join, drive, sit, live, pull, stand, grow, sleep, sing, learn, work, and play. As for the song itself, explanations of John Lennon’s puzzling lyrics to this popular tune

34

February 2016 | the-lmj.com

range from an election movement jingle for psychologist and community activist Timothy Leary, who coined the campaign phrase “Come Together, Join the Party,” to a song with stanzas wwritten for each Beatle, with the opening one a tribute to George Harrison (“Here come old flattop he come grooving up slowly”).

definitions include taken or considered collectively or conjointly and without intermission or interruption; continuously; uninterruptedly. Synonyms include jointly, mutually, collectively, concurrently, and simultaneously.

Antonyms extend from separately, apart, individually, and alone, all the way to independently.

Building upon my last column, Vision Therapy, casting a spotlight on together is meaningful when depicting organisations through a lens of resolute collaboration.

As for what is implied by together,

Dating back to the ancient Greek slave and storyteller, Aesop, in his fable, “The Four Oxen and the Lion,” we have been continuously reminded of the moral, “United We Stand, Divided We Fall,” something

OUT OF THE BLUE

“Come Together, Join the Party” grasped, then ignored, by the oxen, but reclaimed centuries later

by Alexandre Dumas in his tale of The Three (“all for one and one for all”) Musketeers. From 20th century industrialist, Henry Ford (“Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.”), to 19th century artist, Vincent Van Gogh (“Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.”), choosing to transform any enterprise from working separately to working together offers an undeniable economic, as well as competitive, advantage of deliberately managing our organisations with an unambiguous sensation of unity.

Towards this end, would anyone name their football club, Manchester Divided, and operate it accordingly?

While I have never found disagreement in the need for teamwork in organisations, aside from an errant interpretation that teamwork implies allowing everyone on the team to participate in every decision, what can be said of the daily practice of teamwork?

In the spirit of teamwork, can we agree to a shared definition? A customary explanation is “a group of people working together towards a common goal,” whether they are employees of Virgin Trains, serving their customers, or Members of Parliament (MPs), serving their constituents. In the private sector, what happens to the laser focus on common goals as a prototype

product or service is delivered, demand builds, and the start-up adds staff and gradually expands beyond a size which can be housed in a kitchen, with a garage serving as the R&D laboratory? With the initial series of tasks performed by small team of founding members, what happens to the common goals when a highly synchronous and potentially handcrafted effort is subdivided into apparently independent tasks by Departments of Engineering, Manufacturing, Quality, and so on, and then assigned to newcomers, both internal and external, also known as suppliers? While not the focus of this article, every day we are reminded of the challenges in representative government when elected delegates focus on the goals of their party and/or electorate, rather the common goals of their country, in a system that also includes the future.

As explained by systems theorist Russell Ackoff, in a transcribed (see http://www.acasa.upenn.edu) 1992 conversation with W. Edwards Deming, “The characteristic way of management that we have taught in the Western World is to take a complex system, divide it into parts, and then try to manage each part as well as possible. And, if that’s done, the system as a whole will behave well and that’s absolutely false.” What is missing, explained Ackoff, was the parts “wouldn’t fit,” to which Deming added, “They would not work together.” Ackoff followed with, “Good. So it’s the working together that’s the main contribution to systemic thinking, as opposed to working in parts separately.” Deming followed with, “Yes, so easy it is to observe, to see, to understand, and yet people do not know about it.”

As illustrated in my November 2013 article, Super Models, Mental

Models, and Interdependent Value Streams, one inspiration for challenging the mental model described by Ackoff of “managing each part as well as possible” is the 1983 discovery by Ford Motor Company of a dramatic difference in warranty claims between automatic transmissions designed

by Ford and built in two locations, one in Batavia, Ohio, the other by Mazda in Japan. As noted in this article (see Henry Neave’s book, The Deming Dimension, for details): Much to the surprise of Ford’s corporate warranty office, the number of complaints associated with the erratic shifting of the transmissions produced in Batavia were a factor of 3 greater than the complaints against the transmissions built by Mazda. Upon close examination, Ford realized that Mazda’s manufacturing focus was to actively manage the gap between the outer diameter of the valves within the transmissions and the corresponding diameter of the valve bore. In doing so, Mazda’s efforts realized the existence of an ideal gap, resulting from ideal (“target”) values for both the bore and valve diameters, with an awareness that variation in gap size matters. The Ford factory, by comparison, produced a bore diameter as small as possible, yet within tolerances, and valve diameter as large as possible, yet also within tolerances. As a result, the larger gap between them was passively managed, resulting in complaints by customers about erratic shift points. Following Mazda’s lead, Ford responded by shifting their mental model from “minding the good parts” to “minding the gap” between the bore diameter and the valve diameter. In a videotape produced for in-house use, as well as use in their supply chain, Ford’s VP of Powertrain and Chassis Operations February 2016 | the-lmj.com

35

OUT OF THE BLUE

concluded that “building parts to print isn’t good enough.” He added, “If we are to be competitive, we must start with processes under statistical control and dedicate ourselves to continuous improvement in the uniformity of the parts being produced.”

In a rare example from the public domain of the stark contrast between minding parts and minding gaps, Ford and Mazda used a given product design to deliver products with vastly different performance characteristics.

In sharing this example with countless audiences for many years, the difference between how Ford and Mazda approached this fabrication effort is not easily grasped. For reasons to be explained later, many attempt to fit Mazda’s solution into the current paradigm, like that of Ford, of minding parts. Instead of accepting the solution as fundamentally different, as different as “independent” and “interdependent,” it is far more likely for someone to suggest that “all Mazda did was change the requirements.” Not exactly. While starting with the same requirements for each component of the transmission, Ford’s 30-year old finding supports the distinction explored by Ackoff and Deming; the potential for organizations to choose to shift their focus from one of minding parts, separately, to one of minding gaps; how well the parts work together.

In the case of Ford, variation in meeting the requirements for each task, such as producing a bore diameter within a specified tolerance, is simplified and ignored, in the 200-year old tradition of “interchangeable parts,” when defining quality as “conformance to requirements.” Yet, if no two snowflakes are the same and cloning does not produce identical offspring, then no two

36

February 2016 | the-lmj.com

completed tasks, pieces, parts, or components will ever be the same. In accordance, Mazda realised that the variation in how the requirements for these dozens and dozens of elements of the transmission were met could be aligned (“Mind the Gap”) instead of simplified and ignored (“Mind the Part”). In essence, teammates within Mazda, performing as craftsmen, not-so-subtly shifted their focus from the quality of their respective (i.e., independence) parts to how well they worked together (i.e., interdependence).

The difference between these approaches by Ford and Mazda can also be explained as resembling a fundamental difference between Western and Eastern thought. In his book, The Geography of Thought, in a chapter titled “Living Together vs. Going It Alone,” author Richard Nisbett reflects on general differences in thought he has researched between Eastern and Western societies.

His assessment adds clarity to the contrast between how a Westerninfluenced Ford (“Mind the Part”) and an Eastern -influenced Mazda (“Mind the Gap”) approached the fabrication of Ford’s transmission.

According to Nisbett, “…Easterners are constantly being “primed” with interdependent cues and Westerners with independence cues. This raises the possibility that even if their upbringing had not made them inclined in one direction or another, the cues that surround them would make people living in interdependent societies behave in generally interdependent ways and those living in independent societies behave in generally independent ways.”

Nesbitt also notes, “Independence vs. interdependence is of course not an either/or matter. Every society – and every individual – is a blend of both…..”

With awareness of the difference between Ford’s and Mazda’s solutions to producing a transmission, coupled by an exposure to the differences between independence and interdependence, between a Manchester Divided and a Manchester United, between working separately and working together, between mechanistic thinking and holistic thinking; one is left to decide which approach, which paradigm which world view, best fits in a given situation.

That is to say, it depends!

When building a handful of transmissions, for R&D needs, perhaps it is more economically viable to mind the parts, due to an added expense of minding gaps. As volume grows and the system expands to include customers, minding gaps may be the preferred path to profitability.

In closing, there is a time and place for minding parts and a time and place for minding gaps.

Let’s Come Together and Mind the Choice.

“Independence vs. interdependence is of course not an either/or matter.”

LEAN ONLINE

Lean Online Jeremy Scrivens describes what a lean social enterprise is in this video: http://bit.ly/1ZhSn3O The LMJ’s Netland Torbjorn has been contributing to a blog all about continuous improvement across a variety of topics and sectors, well worth a read: http://better-operations.com/ This motivational tweet comes from @LeanSixSigmaHub Mohamed Al-Baroodi, senior quality manager, has written an interesting piece about some common mistakes that are made during the problem solving service: http://bit.ly/1W3ucGm Michael Balle has written a blog all about how a gas station maintenance company reduced their inventory and the results that came from it.

Read it here: http://bit.ly/1Q2ot2T

February 2016 | the-lmj.com

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The summit aims to give attendees knowledge that they can use as soon as they get back to work, great networking opportunities and motivation to help you make change in your organisation. There is a keynote from John Shook and speakers from companies such as Legal Seafood, Nationwide, Sunpower and more.

A meeting of continuous improvement experts to share, learn and network. The event boasts over 50 concurrent breakout sessions and caters for every experience level. There will also be awards handed out at the event for the first time, “Deployment of the Year”, “Project of the Year” and “Innovation of the Year.”

The 17th Annual Process Excellence Asia will showcase new case studies and techniques including lean six sigma, robotic process automation, standardised systems, digital transformation and effective business process management systems, all delivered by industry experts.

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