If you want to really improve your productivity here is the one question you need to ask first!

I overheard a conversation in a café the other day between a few people sitting round a table in what I presume was an off site catch up for the management team. They were discussing some of the challenges that they were having and how tough things had been throughout the covid pandemic for them. They had managed to get through by being really cash conscious and only spending where they needed to. Now things sounded link they were picking up as they were talking furiously about how they could accept a new order for delivery in what appeared to be a fairly tight timeframe. There were talks of investment in things, hiring people and a whole bunch more as this new order would be able to fund it. It was quite interesting, unfortunately (from an interest point of view) at that point the person I was meeting turned up and I had to stop eavesdropping.

Reflecting back on that conversation later on I was slightly amused. This company had done so well and were pretty proud of the fact they had managed to get through being cautious about spending money and now that things seem to be improving the main thinking was to open purse strings. Why?

The One Question 

I have a question I ask all companies that I work with when it comes to getting them to think lean, I make a joke of it at the time about not just being a Scottish thing, but the question always makes them laugh for a bit until I point out I'm deadly serious. Here's the question:  

If I said you cannot spend any money, how would you improve your organisation's productivity?

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Is it possible? 

About half the time I get the answer (pretty quickly) that you just can't do a productivity improvement without spending any money and to be fair if we (and you should) include the internal costs of any labour you use then yes, it'll still cost you money, but it wont cost you a lot of money. We talk a lot to our lean clients about engaging the bring before the wallet. It's easy to go off and spend a bunch of money (you don't actually have) to buy a new bit of machinery or hire new staff to 'make a productivity gain' but in reality, it's probably going to make you less productive, certainly in the initial phases anyway and lumber you with more long-term overheads.

If we compromise and this and said OK, the only money you can spend is internal costs of labour what could you do to dramatically improve your productivity? Here's a very easy list of things you could do that we know will result in a productivity increase in your organisation.

1. Implement daily stand-up meetings – by taking 5 minute sat the start of the day to review yesterdays performance and talk about what needs to happen today and how you can support each other to achieve that you will instantly raise awareness of the challenges and the performance. You will also engage the collective brain of the organisation and focus it on the real problems.
2. Implement quality stops – How quickly would you be forced to fix a problem if you actually stopped production when a failure occurred? If the fix you applied didn't solve it, then I bet the 2^nd round of conversations are also going to be more useful in understanding why the original approach failed.
3. Teach your staff critical thinking skills and give them time to use them! Critical thinking is about stepping back and asking questions to really understand things, to be able take the real facts and apply them to the situation to come up with a solution. It's not coming up with a solution based on gut feel and then hammering them home till the situation fits the solution!
4. Implement a 5s approach – Sorting out only what you need in a work are means that it's easier and faster to find things, Set in order means that you have a consistent way of things being arranged that is correct for that work place, not that particular person but for the way the operation should work (think standard work!), Shine is about creating a cleaning and maintenance routine that is going to help improve the reliability of the area or the equipment, it's going to stop things getting damaged because it gets contaminated or scratched, Standardise is about creating routines where you will keep the cleanliness up you will keep up the layout of things you will work in the same way all the time and build repletion, the more people are used to doing the same thing the faster and more repeatable they become and then finally Sustain – which is all about the discipline of having the habit of doing things, of keeping up the practices of the cleanliness and so forth. 5S not only creates a better, safer work environment but it also drives improvements and employee engagement. If a work area is clear of clutter, you find problems far faster than you would previously have done.
5. Implement standard work routines – for every job you do there is 1 current best way to do it. Everyone needs to follow that one best way until someone come sup with another best way. Having a standard allows you to easily identify where things aren't working well and tune them up either from a quality point of view or a technique point of view.
6. Remove all the WIP! – for some reason there is a belief that having a lot of work in progress shows you are busy, it doesn't it shows you are probably out of control and have a lot of cash tied up in product that is half finished and cant be sold. Reducing your wip (work in progress) level will increase the speed of things moving through your operation and make it easier to find the bottlenecks that re holding things up.
7. Find and fix the bottlenecks! The bottleneck of the process is normally easy to find, you go where the biggest pile of WIP is and it's probably your bottleneck. It's harder to find however if work in progress is everywhere. Improving the performance of the bottleneck will improve the output of the entire operation, improving anything else is just a waste of time.
8. Use your team doing the operation to find the improvements, it's also good to add 1 person not in the direct team to act as the one who asks the annoying obvious questions. This not only solves the problems faster but again engages your team and lets them feel like they own things. If everyone did 1% better each day at the end of the year you are 37.78% better in a year!! Everyone can fine 1%

All 8 of these things are steps you can take today that require zero capital investment and you don't need to hire a team of people, what you do need is to give people focus and the permission to go out and improve in what they do. You need to encourage and enable them to solve the problems your business has, that is what lean is about. It's about solving the problems that limit the flow of your product from raw materials all the way to the customer delivery. Solve them and you will be unstoppable.