I have been thinking about this for some time and in fact I will sending a short newsletter on this topic to my client list over the week end. What brought this to my particular focus is recent newsletters I have received advising how to survive the recession. All of them almost without fail focuses on:

• Ensuring you reduce you debtors
• Cutting costs, usually with a particular focus on cutting staff costs.

Yes of course these are important, but I am not sure I agree this the only two things a manage can do. yes controlling your debtors is important. Yes you need to reduce unnecessary spending. However, I cannot believe these people continue to over look the costs of poor inventory management (and the resulting inventory turns you achieve or more importantly don’t achieve) and the costs of holding inventory or that they overlook the impact of non-value adding activities that occur within each business. When looking for cost savings it seems that everyone immediately runs to the most obvious cost - that is the physical bodies standing in front of their eyes without really using their eyes and looking to find where the waste really lives.
I have found Mark Graban’s blog and podcasts (found at www.leanpodcast.org) to be a great resource for seeing how other people have successfully used Lean techniques to improve their operations. There are some great ideas how to identify and reduce waste at this blog. It is by using these techniques that a manager can surgically remove the unnecessary costs in a business rather than using the chainsaw method used by most companies. I know i’d rather a doctor use a scaple on me rather than a chainsaw and likewise a business.

As times get tougher, its time to become the surgeon not the tree fella.

(For our international readers - fella is an aussie term for person and also treefella is someone who uses chainsaws to cut down trees)

I was reading a job advertisement that a friend of mine sent to me recently. They were thinking the company could be a good target for my skills and in many respects they would be - however the advertisement clearly highlights a challenge I have as a consultant. Lots of target companies that could use my services, but sadly, a much smaller group of companies that understand they need the help and are ready to accept the help.

What particularly took my eye in this advertisement was the following text (This is an add for a Lean Specialist whose role would be to implement Lean tools and techniques and their number one Essential Criteria was…), “Able to achieve set target in 5S and Lean Audits“.

Sadly I often see organisations simply cherry picking the tools they WANT to implement so they are able to pass some arbitrary audit, and not the philosophy as a whole. And then they wonder why they don’t get the results they wanted/were promised. Companies like this, even when they do use the tools - tend not to implement the tools correctly. Take 5S as an example. This tool is often the number one tool implemented by consultants/companies. However the 5S program rarely? includes the standardise and sustain. It is usually the sort, stabilise (and this is often questionable) and shine. In other-words, its nothing more than a clean up and a shine. In my opinion the key ingredients to the success of this tool (and this is dependent upon it being used as an ingredient of the whole philosophy and not in isolation) is the standardise work and the sustain. That is kaizen - the continuous improvement of these standards.

How we get through to these companies remains a mystery to me, if you have any ideas how to achieve it - let me know.