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Lean Accounting Lessons 1 – Create stability first

by Chris Cooley

In other articles, I have talked about the whole process of implementing lean in finance. The fundamentals of the continuous improvement cycle apply in any lean implementation. Lean QCD have undertaken a recent improvement project to use lean techniques to improve the Finance, Sales Order Processing and Purchasing systems of a MBO manufacturing company in [...]

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Quality Case Study #3

by Chris Turley

Organisation profile Automotive fuel systems supplier: Toyota, Honda, Nissan, BMW, Jaguar, Land Rover, Lotus, Ford, GM, Aston Martin, Daimler Chrysler Turnover: Circa £25 million Employees: 240+ Location: Leicestershire, UK Situation Having gained basic control of the day to day quality situation and having achieved a reasonable degree of stability, we started to consider how to move the organisation away from [...]

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Quality Case Study #2

Organisation profile Automotive fuel systems supplier:    Toyota, Honda, Aston Martin Turnover:    Circa £40 million Employees:    800+ Location:     South Yorkshire, UK Customer quality performance:    > 550ppm against the industry target of < 25ppm Open complaints:    > 40 Repeat Concerns:    >50 p.a Customer concern responses:    < 10% accepted [...]

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Quality Case Study #1

Organisation profile Automotive fuel systems supplier Toyota, Honda, Nissan, BMW, Jaguar, Land Rover, Lotus, Ford, GM, Aston Martin, Daimler Chrysler Turnover: Circa £25 million Employees: 240+ Location: Leicestershire, UK Customer quality performance: > 10,000ppm against the industry target of < 25ppm Open complaints: > 120 Internal quality performance: Very poor but details unknown as not [...]

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Performance excellence in service

The application of lean, leadership and a robust strategy should be applied to any type of organisation. The successful application of these elements will help you to satisfy your customer, satisfy your employees and maximise your resources. Definition of service industry Service is anything that has a customer and doesn’t deliver a physical product that [...]

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Lean Finance Department

Like any other business area Finance provides a service to others – the service provided by the Finance team is multi-faceted and for each customer distinct. The key to achieving performance excellence is customer satisfaction, whether internal or external customers. Whilst the requirement for each customer may be distinct, the processes involved are invariably inter-connected. [...]

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Daily Problem Solving

If problem solving is to become a mindset, yet the detailed approach whilst effective, is too resource consuming for all problems, how do you embed daily problem solving into your organisation ? Daily problem solving Symptoms Symptoms are what most people treat as the problem. Addressing the symptom directly is a cause of waste. Use [...]

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Problem Solving – a mindset and a tool

Problem solving is a mindset Problem solving is often just seen as part of the lean toolbox. This makes it all too easy to fix the problem and then move onto the next problem without fully taking the lessons on board. Even worse if the behaviour is actually to just focus on the symptom and [...]

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Poka Yoke in the service sector

The power of error proofing in the service sector Poka Yoke is a term most widely associated with manufacturing however the concepts are fully applicable in any business where processes exist i.e. all businesses. The goal of Operational Excellence, is applicable across all business, and while manufacturers primarily consider errors made by the manufacturing process, [...]

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In pursuit of performance excellence

Delivering Performance Excellence Performance Excellence is more than just operating better, it is maximising the full potential of your organisation to achieve your business goals. It is the sum of satisfying your customer, having a workforce that is empowered to complete their work and fully engaged in the business and delivering your product or service [...]

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Factsheet: ‘Poka Yoke’ Error proofing

Process excellence through Poka Yoke In order to achieve Operational Excellence it is vital to have processes capable of delivering Zero defects. Poka Yoke is the concept of eliminating process errors, ensuring the output is defect free. Eliminating errors and preventing defects not only improves quality but enables improvements in productivity and delivery and increases [...]

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Leadership Lessons: Asking the ‘obvious’ question

Asking questions is the ABC of problem solving The most effective approach in leadership, as it is in problem solving is simply the asking of questions, and it’s certainly true that ‘if you don’t ask the right questions, you don’t get the right answers’, so why don’t we ask the ‘obvious’ question? In early 2000 [...]

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Factsheet – Plan, Do, Check, Act

PDCA – supporting performance excellence Continuous improvement is a critical factor in achieving operational excellence, one of the three factors of performance excellence. Continuous improvement is ‘making changes in a controlled way’. PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) is a process to follow when you need to make a change or have a problem to solve. [...]

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Factsheet 2 – Root cause analysis

Cause & Effect in problem solving The key to effective problem solving is root cause analysis, or separating the symptoms from the cause, to identify what’s really causing the problem. You can then apply, validate and embed your countermeasures in the knowledge that it will eliminate the problem. In order to achieve this successfully you [...]

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Factsheet 1 – Root cause analysis

5 Why analysis in problem solving The key to effective problem solving is root cause analysis, or separating the symptoms from the cause, to identify what’s really causing the problem. You can then apply, validate and embed your countermeasures in the knowledge that it will eliminate the problem. Ask why the problem occurred, then continue [...]

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