Engagement - give us a ring!

Times are tough. You and your businesses will be straining every sinew just to make sure that you can maintain a positive cash flow and get yourselves to the point where things start to take a turn for the better.

To get to that point you will have reduced your stocks to a minimum, cut back on all unnecessary expenditure, re-negotiated your overdraft with the bank manager (if you could ever find him available to talk to you) and maybe you may have had to let some staff go, as well as a whole host of other prudent measures to suit these turbulent times.

So is there anything you can think of that you may have forgotten? What is the most abundant resource you have at your fingertips? Who knows, better than anyone, how best to get your products out of the door or how to prevent that quality problem from ever happening again or knows your customers even better than you do? Yes that’s right, the knowledge and experience of the people who work for you.

Just maybe, you are one of the fortunate ones who have already got your staff contributing daily to the continuous improvement process within your business. Turned onto first class customer service, working together in multi functional teams to eliminate problems from ever happening again (how many times have you driven into that same brick wall?) and constantly looking at the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) you produce for them, to see how the business is performing on a monthly / weekly / daily basis.

I am going to assume that you are not one of these fortunate few and try to give you some pointers on a roadmap to exploiting the most potent resource at your disposal.

Be Committed

The first step you need to take is with yourself. You need to be committed and believe that the path you are about to embark on – this road to a LEAN, fast reacting, modern, customer centric business that can cope with anything the world (finance world) can throw at it – is where you are comfortable. If you need to get more information or training then do it now – understand what you need to do.

Get your team on board

Now you need to make sure that your immediate team are also bought into this process. Again some training can be useful at this point and you should do that together: good team building as they understand what they need to do. They are not going to fight you as they want to see the business survive and succeed just as much as you do. As with all of this process there will be those who wholeheartedly accept and assist it, those who sit back and wait to see what happens and the BEARS who resist change no matter what format it comes in. It just depends what motivates them. (Link here to the Motivational Maps solution and the motivation article). I have always found that if you can get around 60% of them on your side then the rest will follow as they see the positive changes taking place. You will rarely ever win them all over!
A few years ago a team I was responsible for set up a new plant (600+ people) which involved retraining ex-miners in a completely new skill while at the same time introducing them to TPS (Toyota Production System) techniques and methods. As a policy all office doors were always open, including mine. One day two employees came into my office and said (paraphrased) “just shut the ‘office’ door and tell us what to do, we can’t stand this constant pressure to think for ourselves”. Be aware, everyone might not make it. In this case the vast majority did ‘make it’ and were responsible for the major part of the success.

Now Train – Train – Train

So now it’s time to select your staff for the first training group. You will know who to choose or who will volunteer. Make sure that you get the right organisation to help you with the training. Why not use Government grants to get your staff qualified in NVQ ii in Business Improvement Techniques? Whichever route you choose your partners should be looking for the quick wins, which will demonstrate to you, the group and the business that things are starting to change. 5’s is the foundation of LEAN and always a good place to kick off. The quality partners you select will start in one area of your business and get things working properly before moving onto the next area. Plan that you are going to train your entire workforce and don’t stop short.

Find your Change Agents

While the first group is still training you and your training partners will have spotted some change agents. Some of your staff will be so turned on and motivated by the changes they are making happen, they will hardly be able to contain themselves (definition of potential change agent). Now is the time to form your Steering Group / Lean Team / Improvement Team – you will find a name that suits your business. Add in members from your immediate reports and give them the responsibility of managing and measuring the improvement ideas and changes. Rotate members as more groups go through the training process. You will be astounded at the positive changes they can make and often at zero or minimal investment.
Another example comes to mind of an engineering works I once managed. When I first went in stock was all over the place and yet we could not seem to deliver what the customers were asking for every month. The problem was that the production plan was subordinated to a forging press with the sole aim that that was working as efficiently as possible. The Lean Team changed the plan to reflect what the customer was ordering and within 4 months stock levels had been halved and we were delivering on time with 95% of our orders. Just think what a reduction in stock levels could do for your cash flow.

Encourage – Encourage – Encourage

You can never say ‘thank you’ and ‘well done’ enough times. That goes for your management team as well. Build the projects into your business plan and measure and report to everybody just how effective (£) the improvements have been.
Government health warning When the process is fully engaged you will be buried in potential improvements. This is where your ‘LEAN TEAM’ can be encouraged to direct their efforts to the ideas which will impact on the constraints in your business. Better still if you have built the improvements into your business plan and that plan has been disseminated to every department, who each know their tasks (role) in the big picture (in TPS terms that’s called Hoshin) then the selection of the improvements becomes quite simple. The entire business moving along the same path, focused on the same GOAL.

I am producing a MindMap which details this approach and gives some tips and pitfalls. If you think that you might find that useful just contact us. Or if we might be able help with any part of the process just use the link...

Written by Phil Topley our Operations guru