Mar 3 2016
Last week, Beau Keyte sent me a copy of Chapter 10 of his book The Complete Lean Enterprise, entitled Leading in the Future State, and we have been exchanging thoughts about it by email since. Many of my words below are already in my account of the Central Coast Lean Summit, where this conversation started; what is new here is the back-and-forth.
Feb 14 2016
According to the previously cited guide from ERP Focus, choosing an implementation consultant is the second step of ERP implementation, right after selecting a vendor. In the consulting business, being a certification as an implementer from a leading ERP vendor is known as a license to print money. Even vendors of ERP products acknowledge that their customers spend more to implement the software than to buy it, and that much of this cost goes into consulting fees. The following are a few thoughts about the process of ERP implementation and the roles played by consultants, contractors, and the in-house IT team.
Nov 27 2015
In The Wisdom of Teams, Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith explained that, for a working group to coalesce as a team, it needs a common goal, complementary skills, and mutual accountability among members. It sounds simple, but it is in fact a tall order, and there is no evidence that it is sufficient. The authors don’t claim it is, but they found these characteristics among successful teams in sports and business, and found them lacking in unsuccessful ones.
Let us explore the meaning of these three characteristics in more detail:
1. A common goal. It can be organizing a successful conference, or JFK’s “before this decade is out, landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth,” or building a motorcycle that wins a race. Whatever it is, the goal must be clearly stated in few words, with obvious success criteria, for team members to sign up.
Nov 19 2015
Question seen in another blog:
I work as a deployment champion in a manufacturing company, but I don’t have the support of my managers because they don´t believe in the lean methodology. Which lean tools can be used to help them believe?
I have to assume you are not self-appointed. If you are “deployment champion” for Lean in a manufacturing company, it is because someone in gave you the job, presumably because he or she believed in Lean and in you at the right person to champion it. But don’t presume it, find out what the motivation is. If it is that the company must be “Lean-certified” in order to continue doing business with its biggest customer, chances are that the whole effort is window-dressing, and your own job in particular. If this is the case, you need to decide whether you want to play along.
On the other hand, if the person who gave you the job is the CEO, the company must improve its performance to survive, and the CEO is convinced that going Lean is the only feasible way to do it, then it is a real job and you have the backing of the one manager who matters most.
Nov 3 2015
Seen this morning in a Lean consultant’s blog:
“Two decades later, VW has topped Toyota as the world’s number one automaker, but Toyota generally is considered to be […] far more productive. In 2015, VW employs 600,000 people to produce 10 million cars while Toyota employs 340,000 to produce just under 9 million cars…”
Is it really that simple? VW produces 10 million/600,000 = 16.67 cars/employee/year, and Toyota 9 million/340,000 = 26.47 cars/employee/year. Ergo, Toyota is 60% more productive than VW — that is, if you accept cars/employee/year as an appropriate metric of productivity. Unfortunately, it is a bad metric that can easily be gamed by outsourcing.
Mar 20 2016
Sales, Marketing, and Manufacturing Improvement
The following reader question popped up in another blog:
The response was a set of tactical recommendations on the behavior of sales reps with customers. Strategically, however, you need to think about the role of Sales within the business. It is not just to provide a flow of orders every day. Marketing is often mentioned in the same breath as Sales, with good reason, because sales are the business’s best source of market intelligence.
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By Michel Baudin • Management 13 • Tags: Lean, Marketing, Quick response manufacturing, Sales, TPS