Process Management

In my four years as a company co-founder and Managing Director, experience has taught me and my team that there is often a variance between the level of change an organization is looking to deploy and that which its culture and infrastructure is capable of supporting. One expression consistently resonates in our ongoing quest for continuous improvement; maturity assessment.

Lean Six-Sigma, TQM and Process Improvement will create efficiencies and reduce cycle time, of that there is no doubt.

But these improvement programs are not sustainable, if they are temporary surges in cost reduction and in the absence of a whole systems perspective create downstream costs and hidden costs due to regrettable losses of mission-critical talent and employee engagement issues for those who are not involved directly in the improvement teams.

The change needs to pull together the whole system or it will be a short term illusion.

For businesses today, the requirement to be able to change is integral. Continuous Improvement (CI) can be a means of ensuring your organisation is keeping up-to-date with the world around them. Although the challenges are numerous, CI can be successful if organisations consider the following 4 recommendations:

To remain competitive in the modern era, staying still and simply functioning is practically prehistoric. Businesses must be efficient and ahead of the curve, which can be done in a number of ways, one of which is through implementing a culture of Continuous Improvement (CI). Firms are competitive, not by their product/service, location or process, but by what it knows about how it behaves in various situations and understanding how to improve the efficiency of this behaviour. CI provides this knowledge and allows an organisation to constantly act on this knowledge.

Recently I was asked to speak at a leadership event for representatives from all over NHS Scotland, to share some examples of what we had experienced as the critical success factors for delivering improvements in organisations, to ensure lasting results.

Upon reflection, it certainly felt that the 10 factors to deliver sustainable improvements, had a lot of resonance with the challenges and the opportunities the NHS faces at 70.

Nowadays the term Lean Management (LM) is widely used and mostly understood. However, implementing a proper LM program requires some expertise to guide you through the different stages and fully achieve the desired results. Here's a quick guide of what you need to consider in order to successfully implement such a program.

To be honest, I haven’t totally figured out all of the details of the inner workings of the blockchain technology. And, I do not think I will ever try to as some of it is very technical. I also do not believe that Procurement professionals should do it either. However, it is important to understand the implications of the blockchain technology. Because of the way the blockchain works, it has unique characteristics that represent a breakthrough with tremendous value for Procurement.

You’re about to embark on a change programme, you’ve spent weeks or months planning the changes behind the scenes and you’ve announced the changes to your people. You’ve got a communication plan with all of the announcements, the meetings and the emails scheduled and still your people don’t seem engaged with the changes or understand the reasons for them – what’s next?