Industry Forum Blog

We all know it’s vital to get senior management engagement if we want our improvement programmes to be successful. We also want our managers to lead them with the right attitude to change. Here are two quick exercises you can use to help you influence the approach management teams take to improvement initiatives. They require… Read more »

1 million parts per month, from brackets to fully functioning coffee machines. An average batch size of just 36 parts and the introduction of 450 new parts per month. Yet the employees at this fast moving engineering firm still found time to save £435,000 last year. I went to catch up with Operations Director, Keith… Read more »

There is an overwhelming, and sometimes conflicting, amount of advice about must have key performance indicators. Try these ideas to help you select the most useful for your particular business. Choose the KPI appropriate for the level you are measuring at In your organisation you have different groups of employees. They require different information in… Read more »

  Do you find that no matter how hard you try you always seem to have some people who refuse to join in with your improvement initiative? How do you deal with them? Well here is a really useful analogy I learned from my training days with the Nissan, Toyota and Honda master trainers. It… Read more »

  Appointing a project manager for each project has been identified as one of the six basic success factors to improve your ability to get new products to market quicker and cheaper. In essence the project manager has the authority to run the project on a day to day basis and is responsible for ensuring… Read more »

    Whether you have chosen TPM, lean, EFQM, 6 Sigma or another method, you need to ensure it supports the achievement of your operational targets and your strategic goals. But each organisation has finite resources in terms of the people, time and money that can be dedicated to achieve these. Typically we find that… Read more »

Today’s managers are under tremendous pressure to meet delivery targets with less and less resource, let alone meet the changing demands of the customer. Shorter deadlines, smaller delivery quantities, tighter quality standards and all of that cheaper please! Who needs the added pressure of lean improvement programmes or a Kaizen event? Releasing people from their… Read more »

Do your team leaders need to lead, manage and motivate their team as well as improve the quality, cost and delivery performance of their area? If so, do they have the necessary team leadership skills? Team leader training is a very popular request from clients and courses are usually bespoke to the client’s needs. However over… Read more »

There are over 200 Computerised Maintenance Management Systems on the market and these asset management applications are changing all the time. The danger of just buying a system off the shelf without considering what your business really requires is shown by the results of a survey (A.T. Kearney 1993). Out of 3300 CMMS users, 80%… Read more »

We all know how easy it is to get bogged down creating detailed guidelines, slavishly following stepped structures and learning new terminology. Over the years I have deployed many lean and Total Productive Maintenance techniques across a wide range of businesses. Recently it occurred to me that instead of creating ever more complicated explanations it’s… Read more »