How to Fix Throughput Like a Boss with Damian White

Your questions answered from the event held on 24th March 2021.

Have more? Please feel free to drop me a message directly. Article is updated weekly with additional Questions and Answers.

One of the foundations of #LEAN is visual #management. Clarity | Lean & Visual Management have found any improvement that’s made on a continuous improvement journey or LEAN improvement #process in a #business, if it’s not sustained by creating a #visualmanagement infrastructure to maintain it, that LEAN #improvement will fall over.

There’s two reasons for that.

1. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.

2. If it's just #senior management that are engaged with the process, then it's likely to fall over as a result of that.

Clarity | Lean & Visual Management have a simple motto, "Making LEAN work". How do they do that? Putting it simply, the way in which Clarity help coach and train their clients, is for the #clients to #design visual management, take ownership of it, that is what sustains the LEAN #programme.

If we’re in business, we’ve all got a #sales #team within the business and we all set sales #targets. Normally sales targets are set for the salesmen and it's made sure the sales guys hit those targets. A better way around it is to get the #salesman to set the targets themselves, so they take ownership. Then they’re more likely to hit them, rather than having a #HiPPO saying this is your target, you will hit it!

A case study from Clarity Visual Management:

A client had implemented a improvement to make the quoting process LEAN. They set themselves a goal to get every quote out within one hour. The norm in their industry was approx. 2 weeks as accepted standard. But by innovating their sales process so that their inquiry to quote and improving that efficiency by engagement, their sales increased over 20% year on year since from that point!

There is many different #tools that are out there. There’s the different #platforms for #projectmanagement, there’s different #systems that you can Google and download. Whilst working remotely, #electronic #software solutions are absolutely great.

While there’s still the engagement of actually using a manual process, let’s not pretend that manual processes are here to stay!

Smartsheet is perhaps one of the top platforms at the moment. We’re all used to it, and probably has got the most #functionality. There’s lots of others that have been launched as a result of the #pandemic. But really, it’s a matter of understanding what your #processes are. If you’re going to make it #automated and #online, you need to really consider simplifying it as well. Otherwise, the spreadsheets become too big, the #meetings you have become too long, you end up spending more time uploading data than having meaningful conversations around the #results.

The key thing to any of these #implementations where there’s #visualmanagement, whether it’s electronic or manual, if there’s not ownership taken from #management in a kind way, right way, to hold people accountable to maintain it, it won’t it won’t be maintained.

Having an inhouse #RandD or #Innovation team is great, but what’s not so great is if they’re not properly serving the #company, the company’s #goals, and #strategic direction. Great, they can come up with these cool #ideas but if they can’t get anything into the #market, it's pointless. If you don’t get those ideas to market in a timely fashion, you might have to give up. A lot of the time you need to get ideas to market fast. If you’re R&D team is under significant pressure then you may want to consider reaching out to an external #partner. Innovolo can help create a #programme where our team works alongside your R&D or innovation team to get your great ideas into the market extremely fast, just for a fixed, low monthly #subscription figure. (Link in comments)

It's also great to get everyone involved. We call them the #naiveexperts; warehouse #staff, and other departments that are not in your R&D team.

Colgate-Palmolive were sitting around the boardroom table trying to decide how to #increase #sales and how to innovate one of their #products. Case in point; the cleaner in the corner of the room said, "If you make the hole bigger, the tube will push out more, you will #sell more". An example of how bringing in the 'Naive Experts'.

#innovation Clarity | Lean & Visual Management

We'd love to be able to give a formula that will give you a significant or the exact percentage that you can go away and tangibly measure! We can’t answer that question without understanding what the product is, how LEAN that facility is, we credit you and well done for how LEAN you have got the advancement too.

A case study from Clarity to show the results:

Large company UK- retail store.

Their throughput they were measuring was, (they’re an extremely LEAN organisation), their throughput, or what they wanted to increase was, their time from receiving goods in a store to get them on the shelf. So their production flow.

Clarity supported them in creating a visual management board. They were given a goal from the CEO of the company which was to save 10 pounds a day. Now you can do your own math, but that visual management put in place was to bring the teams together to understand what their target was each day. It created positive competition, that board now is tangibly saving them about 10 pounds a day in cost, because they’re increasing throughput. They have 500, just over 500 stores in the UK. So if you do 500 times 10 pounds times however many days you feel that the superstores are open in this country, it can show you the type of tangible increase.

We encourage you to reach out to Clarity for more information on how you can increase throughput in your own company. You would be surprised at the increase you can achieve!