Why Lean Outside the Factory?

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

I wrote a book about it – (The Remedy). Why did I bother?

Because Lean is about reducing waste & variation -- and most of it is outside of the factory.

The past few decades, factories, and Operations in general, have gotten better and better.

There’s still much opportunity, but in many industries they are no longer the bottleneck.

Suppose you order a new Toyota Avalon, Total lead time (i.e. time between your order and delivery) will be something like 30 days.

How much of that time does the vehicle spend at the Toyota Kentucky factory?

A day or so. Most of the lead time is outside the factory and comprises administration, transportation, and plenty of waiting. So where is the opportunity?

Sales, Marketing, Design, Engineering, Finance and so on are the "undiscovered country".

How do we support the good people in these areas?

Here are a few questions to get us started.

For each zone, ask:

1) What is waste?

2) What is value?

3) What are some core mental models?

If we can build on these to define our Purpose clearly, we'll can start to pull in powerful Lean tools to help us achieve that Purpose (Getting the Right Things Done)

Best regards,

Pascal



In case you missed our last few blogs... please feel free to have another look…

Too Often, Power Means the Power to Do Stupid Things
When You’re Convinced You’re Right, You’ve Lost Your Ability to Learn
On Labels – ‘Expert, Master, Sensei’ and the like
Fred Taylor & the Illusion of Top-Down Control - Part 2

Why Lean in Sales?

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

Why indeed? Isn’t Lean a factory thing?

Well, no…Lean is a business system comprising the entire enterprise.

The Toyota Business System, for example, addresses the three critical “loops”:

1. Design
2. Make
3. Sell

Guess which one is considered most important? Sell – because it’s closest to the customer.

Sales are about information. What features does the customer want? At what price point? What promotions does he respond to? How does she want to receive her products or service?

How was our last promotion perceived? And so on...

Production (Operations), usually our most valuable & expensive asset, runs on information. We only make what our information tells us to make.

If our information is wonky, our most valuable asset is unlikely to operate in its sweet spot. Result: overproduction, inventory and all the associated ills.

So how do we introduce Lean in Sales?

Here are some questions to get you started:

1. What is value in Sales? (Who are our internal & external customers and what do they need from us?)

2. What is waste?

3. What are some core mental models in our Sales department?

4. What are our current processes for delivering this value?
5. How aligned are they to delivering the value our customers expect?

6. How do we improve them?

Lean is harder outside the factory – because our product & processes are typically invisible.

If you make scrap in a factory, everyone can see it. “Hey, we made a whole pile of junk yesterday…”

In business processes, by contrast, you can’t see the scrap. A good forecast & a bad forecast look identical…

On the plus side, sales folks are usually smart & creative. If you introduce the fundamentals with finesse, they run with them.

All for now.

Pascal

PS For more, check out The Remedy – Bringing Lean Out of the Factory to Transform the Entire Organization.




In case you missed our last few blogs... please feel free to have another look…

Back to Basics - What is Value?
You Want to Get More Done? Do Less…
Strategy Deployment & Language
Where Lean Has Gone Wrong & What to Do About It, Part 2

Reprise - Why Lean Outside the Factory?

By Pascal Dennis,

I wrote a book about it – (The Remedy). Why did I bother?

Because Lean is about reducing waste & variation -- and most of it is outside of the factory.

The past few decades, factories, and Operations in general, have gotten better and better.

There’s still much opportunity, but in many industries they are no longer the bottleneck.

Suppose you order a new Toyota Avalon, Total lead time (i.e. time between your order and delivery) will be something like 30 days.

How much of that time does the vehicle spend at the Toyota Kentucky factory?

A day or so. Most of the lead time is outside the factory and comprises administration, transportation, and plenty of waiting. So where is the opportunity?

Sales, Marketing, Design, Engineering, Finance and so on are the "undiscovered country".

How do we support the good people in these areas?

Here are a few questions to get us started.

For each zone, ask:

1) What is waste?

2) What is value?

3) What are some core mental models?

If we can build on these to define our Purpose clearly, we'll can start to pull in powerful Lean tools to help us achieve that Purpose (Getting the Right Things Done)

Best regards,

Pascal

Pascal Dennis Bio

Lean Outside the Factory - Reverse Magic!

By Pascal Dennis

A few years back, I had the pleasure of taking my teenage daughters, Katie & Eleanor, to Las Vegas.

We'd hoped to see the great magician, David Copperfield, who I'd seen make tigers, elephants and the like disappear. On TV I saw David make the Statue of Liberty disappear.

Sadly, he was out of town & we had to settle for Cher...

Anyhow, somehow I made the following connection. (Must have been the desert air...)

Lean's next frontier is the office -- sales, marketing, engineering, design, planning & scheduling, finance and so on.

Deploying the "profound system of knowledge" here requires us to perform reverse magic.

David Copperfield makes visible things, invisible.

We have to do the opposite & make the invisible, visible.

Office work, is what Peter Drucker called "knowledge" work - most of it is hidden in the box knows as a computer.

Our job is to take it out that box and put it up on the wall, where everyone can see it.

Otherwise, waste multiplies exponentially, and our office processes become our constraint.

Here's a challenge for you:

• Review total lead time for your top three value streams,
• Where is most of the delay -- in operations (factory, hospital ward, laboratory etc) or outside operations?

If you're like many organizations, most of the delay in outside operations.

Yet where do we spend most of our improvement work?

So...let's work our magic and make the invisible, visible.

Best, Pascal

PS That's what The Remedy is all about.

Pascal Dennis Bio