The integrative improvement blog discusses and provides commentary on the latest topics in the business performance improvement sector.
In today’s disruptive and competitive environment, organisations are increasingly facing demand variability challenges. If not properly managed, these variations can mean increased costs, decreased revenues, increased risk and reduced profit margins. Here are seven ways to improve your demand variability management.
Like the first, second, and third industrial revolutions before it, Industry 4.0 will precipitate major changes in the way products are manufactured. But it also signals an important shift in quality processes and systems from being isolated to following an integrated quality management approach.
It’s important to instil the discipline of setting aside regular quality time for learning activities at a leadership level. An ideal way to focus on the concerns and challenges of leadership is by establishing a learning community. By meeting on a regular basis, the collective intelligence and talent can then focus on resolving critical issues.
Ask any young employee in your organisation how they spend their free time and the answer most likely will have something to do with board games or video games. This affinity for games and rewards provides fertile ground for introducing gamification as a tool to improve organisational effectiveness.
Digitisation, automation, analytics, design thinking – all are competing for the attention of lean leaders in a constant search for new ways to improve customer experiences. These capabilities all matter. But to find the right combination, you need every worker to be more engaged and productive than ever before.
Conflict in the workplace is unavoidable. You can’t escape it – it is natural and expected. But conflict rarely resolves itself. In fact, conflict normally escalates if not dealt with proactively and properly. Resolving workplace conflict takes strong negotiation skills, patience, and a healthy dose of emotional intelligence (EQ).
Raising awareness of Early Equipment Management (EEM) and how to incorporate this into best practice capital project delivery is an invaluable lifecycle factor during equipment acquisition. This is because EEM impacts directly on the future ability of the organisation to achieve asset lifecycle goals.
By leveraging big data, the new Stable Operations TRACC delivers fresh insights and provides a faster way to scale predictable, reliable and stable manufacturing operations across multiple sites. The main focus of the TRACC is on eliminating variation and saving time – time in which your people can unlock new ways of delivering revenue.
The extent to which asset utilisation is beneficial depends on the business model, but research has revealed one important conclusion: whether average asset utilisation is low or high, companies that have improved on it delivered, on average, 7.6% more value to shareholders per year than those with declining asset utilisation.
A poorly designed organisation is like a colander: you can pour your best talent and hours of effort into it, but much of this capacity will leak through the holes or be used up trying to plug the holes. A well-designed organisation uses its talent effectively and limits the waste that occurs. So, what then, constitutes good organisational design?
