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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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