Recruit, Reward, Retain – A Huge Challenge For UK Organisations

Many of our UK clients are finding it hard to recruit, reward and retain good people. Inflation is surging, household budgets are stretched, and the labour market is tight. Unusually, there are too many jobs chasing too few people. Flexible working, home working, hybrid working, four-day weeks, joining bonuses, and other innovations are just some of the “headline” ways that employers are trying to cope.

As consultants, we’re seeing the effects at first hand. More and more clients want us to provide resources they simply don’t have. We help them tackle new projects, coaching and mentoring their in-house staff. We provide concentrated part-time resource (the Operations Director that isn’t yet a full-time role). And we help them to develop a whole range of reward, recognition and incentive programmes.

Growing businesses often find that their payment and bonus systems become opaque, demotivating and no longer fit for purpose. In urgent cases, we can often recommend simple, transparent systems to relieve some of the pressure points. This buys time to follow up with a more nuanced and effective approach, yet still keeping it simple and transparent. Most importantly, the new systems need to be seen as fair, and reward the right actions and behaviours. Simple grade structures, payment for skills schemes, group productivity programmes, and individual performance reviews are all part of the arsenal! If you find your own organisation struggling with the “three R’s”, simply drop an email to info [at] nicholsonconsultancy [dot] com, and find out how we can help…

Guide to Powder Coating

Powder Coating Performance Characteristics

Manufacturers can’t succeed if their products don’t live up to customers’ expectations. This is true no matter the industry, but it’s amplified when it comes to sectors such as aerospace, automotive and defense. These industries demand more of their equipment. Whether it’s the extreme stresses placed on it through intensive use or the punishing conditions of the environments in which they’re used, the products have to endure a lot.

This is why industrial manufacturing companies and their employees rely on durable powder coatings to help protect what they build. The rugged nature of these finishes makes them superior to liquid paint in multiple ways, because they offer added protection from damage and wear. However, there are numerous types of powder coatings, and not all are created equal. Each one brings something different to the table.

Understanding a powder coating’s unique characteristics is essential for finding the right one for the specific application. For instance, choosing an epoxy finish makes the final product extremely resistant to chemicals. This finish is not UV-stable, though, so it must be used indoors to get the best performance. Its qualities are well-suited for finishing vessels or pipelines that would be used inside a chemical processing facility. Although polyurethane is more stable than epoxy, it must be cured with much higher temperatures. This limits the number of applicators that may be able to provide such services.

Manufacturers and industrial workers rely on powders to help protect their equipment, but choosing the wrong one can be counterproductive. For more information on powder coating characteristics, see the accompanying guide.

Powder Coating Guide from Rhinehart Finishing

Continuous Improvement – how far do you go?

A colleague of mine once asked a plant manager how their CI programme was going and was amused at the reply – “Oh the CI programme? We finished that a couple of years back”

Joking aside though, it’s sometimes tempting to think that our Lean / CI “journey” should continue forever – a relentless, unending pursuit of unattainable perfection. But is that true?

Back in the 1980’s, one of the many newly discovered concepts from Japan was this idea of constantly pursuing perfection – “Chasing the last grain of rice” became a well-known phrase in business. I was at Hewlett Packard at the time and like most of the managers there was running several TQM (Total Quality Management) projects. After several years of wholeheartedly buying into the TQM philosophy (aka “drinking the Kool-Aid”), senior managers began to question this philosophy and realised that “spending 10,000 dollars to solve a 500-dollar problem” didn’t make good business sense.

That’s one reason why I often remind people not to lose sight of two of the most important tools in the Improvement Toolbox – “Common Sense” and “Judgement”.

As in many aspects of life the answer to the question is: “It Depends”.

Along with Investment, Innovation and Improvement are the lifeblood for any business wanting to survive and prosper in the long term. Overall, we need to maintain a relentless focus on improvement but we also have to apply “business common sense”, and keep asking:

How likely is it that the benefits will justify the resources required?

Can we deliver the results in a reasonable timescale?

Are the outcomes / benefits we’ve achieved “good enough for now”

As part of your PDCA cycle it’s good practice to regularly review your improvement activities, check that they’re on target, and consider whether some of them should be “culled” to make way for better projects.

For help with managing your improvement activities, please contact Andrew.Nicholson@ImproveMyFactory.com

PDCA
Continuous Improvement – How Far Do You Go?

Simply Sustaining 5S

Many people find the first three stages of 5S fairly easy to do, but Sustaining 5S activities can be a real challenge. So here’s a simple approach you might find helpful:

Working with the people in each area, decide on a small number of things you really want to be better organised (the “vital few”).

Describe in simple words what good looks like. If you possibly can, phrase this as a simple “Yes / No” question, where “Yes” represents the desired outcome. Examples might be “All tools back in the correct places on the shadow board at the end of the shift?”, “All gangways clear of any obstruction?”, “Floor clear of any packaging materials?”.

Create a simple checklist for each area, listing these questions.

At agreed times (hourly, at end of shift, daily, weekly, etc). check the work area against the items on the checklist, giving each a “Yes” or “No” answer.

Record how many items have been checked, and how many of these reached the standard (a “Yes” answer). Calculate your score as the number of “hits” (items that were a “Yes”), divided by the number of checks carried out, then mutiply this by 100 to create a percentage score.

Set a target / desired level for the next period of time (eg “95% by March 2020”), and compare this with your current score.

Make the scores visible, tackle the reasons for any “No” results, recognise the team’s efforts and watch your 5S performance improve.

Periodically raise the standard – add new items to the list, make the standard more demanding, challenge the team to do better.

As always, please let us have your own thoughts, experiences and examples. And if you’d like some help in developing a sustainable approach to 5S, simply contact andrew.nicholson@improvemyfactory.com

Sustaining 5S - tackling S4 and S5

Waste-Added Tax (WAT) – how much are you paying?

Waste-Added Tax

Waste-Added Tax

Every activity that doesn’t add Value for the Customer costs you money. Money that increases cost, reduces margin and makes you vulnerable to leaner competitors.

It’s the tax that you pay for inertia and inefficiency. And it’s the tax that keeps on taking. Every day that you aren’t implementing Lean. Every day that you lose focus on improvement. Every day that you keep on doing what you’ve always done.

With labour and materials costs continuing to rise, and customers wanting price reductions, it’s the tax that you must avoid. In fact, reducing Waste-Added Tax should be part of everyone’s daily activities.

Here’s a suggestion: show WAT as a line in your Management Accounts. Measure it, publish it, hold people accountable, set targets and apply your problem-solving process to reducing it.

 

Better, Cheaper, Faster – myth or fact?

I regularly meet people in manufacturing who still see life as full of trade-offs and compromises. “There’s no such thing as perfect”. “If it goes any faster, it’ll break down”. “We can get better material but they won’t pay for it!”. “if we turn up the speed, we’ll get more rejects”.  “If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys”. “We make the best, so we have to charge top dollar for it”. “We might be able to do it faster, but it’ll cost you!”.

Any of these phrases sound familiar? I’ve spent my whole working life listening to them. And I don’t believe any of them. Let me tell you why…

From the day we’re born, our reptile brains are hard-wired to learn about cause and effect. “Cry – get fed”. “Touch the stove – get burned”. As human beings, we’re very good at seeing these links. So good in fact that we can see links that don’t exist! And soon, many of these false links come to be accepted as true.

“You only use 10% of your brain”, “Alcohol helps you sleep” “Humans lose most of their body heat throgh their heads”. Common knowledge? Common myths, in fact.

And the moral of the story? If you’re serious about making step changes in your manufacturing performance, start with your own myth-busting. Challenge preconceptions, focus on the facts and run some experiments. Change the dialogue – “Where’s the data?”, “What’s the evidence?”, “Show me the facts”, “Humour me – let’s try it.” Many’s the time I’ve seen a machine run faster with absolutely no decrease in quality at all.

So what’s your own experience – and which myths have you helped to bust?

QCD - Quality, Cost and Delivery

QCD

 

Japanese Manufacturing Techniques – the early days of Lean in the UK

In the late ’80’s I was fortunate to join a very fast-growing electronics company that was one of the first UK manufacturers to adopt what was then known as “Just-in-Time Production”. I was employed as Materials Manager to implement a new MRPII system and to introduce Just-in-Time supply to a reduced supplier base. The concept of “Lean” was not then known, and the main focus of business improvement activities was around Total Quality Control, Zero Defects and Quality Circles.

One of the very few English language books available at the time was Richard J. Sconberger’s Japanese Manufacturing Techniques, first published in 1982, and still on my bookshelf. Even the title of the book shows that the main focus then was simply to copy what were thought to be the main techniques of successful Japanese manufacturers. In fact, each of the book’s nine chapters deals with one of these “techniques”.  Chapter 4 in particular indicates this thinking: “The Debut of Just-in-Time Production in the United States. Lesson 4: Culture is no obstacle; techniques can change behaviour”

Sadly, this view still persists to this day with some manufacturers. They still see “Lean” – as we now call it – simply as a set of tools and techniques to be learned and applied. Not surprisingly this narrow approach rapidly leads to disappointment and then a search for the next “initiative”.

Over the last 30 years we’ve come to realise that Lean is a company-wide philosophy that requires strong Leadership at all levels, a respect for people and a willingness always to look for a better way. Yes, the right tools and techniques are important, but there’s much, much more to Continuous Improvement than tools and techniques.

If you’d like to share your own experiences of “Just-in-Time” and Lean, please register and comment. And if you’d like some help with your own Lean journey, please email me at Andrew.Nicholson@ImproveMyFactory.com

QCD is out of date – you need CxVAR

For decades now manufacturers have measured their performance in terms of Quality, Cost and Delivery. These days that’s no longer good enough. If you really want to raise your game here are some measures you need to be thinking about:

Cx – Customer Experience. The customer’s total life-time experience of your products, services and brand. Think customer journeys, Net Promoter Score, Fault-Free Years in Service and the like. Talk with them, partner with them, have the difficult conversations, grow old together.

Value-Add. This goes to the heart of what manufacturing is all about – taking a whole load of inputs and resources and turning them into something more valuable. Value-add per employee is a critical measure of productivity. At the plant level, it’s one of the “critical few” measures, and at a national level increasing productivity is the only real way to improve living standards.

Responsiveness. Simply delivering a product “on time” (which date exactly?) doesn’t really cut it. How agile and responsive are you to customer needs? Do you know exactly what’s important to your customer? Can you flex volumes, delivery times and specifications? Do you need to offer guaranteed lead-times, short lead-times or both?

If you’d like an up-to-date, independent review of your KPI’s and objectives, contact Andrew.Nicholson@ImproveMyFactory.com

Being Busy and Being Efficient – What you Need to Do When

We’re all aware of the “Busy Fools” syndrome – high output, high costs, high stress, and high risk. When you’re up to your neck in alligators it’s tempting to just keep ploughing on, Head down, bottom up, you know that you’re wasting time and money but you hope for the day when everything “quietens down” and “gets back to normal”.

If customer service deteriorates, this might be self-fulfilling. An IT industry insider once described to me the typical cycle of a high-growth IT business – rapid growth leads to poor service, which slows growth. Service improves, the company grows, service declines, ….. and so the cycle continues.

If we can avoid this decline in service levels then we’ll need to accept that things won’t just “quieten down” and that “busy” has become the new “normal”. So we need to know what to do about it.

And businesses who are “Quiet” and “Efficient” also need to have effective strategies.

That’s why some years ago we developed this simple “Busy” / “Lean” Grid, to help business leaders understand where their business is, and what they need to do about it. Let’s have a look at each of the four quadrants:

  1. “Busy and Inefficient” – the “Busy Fools” scenario. The busier we are, the less efficient we become. Stress levels increase, service declines and productivity tails off. One of our biggest challenges (as a management consultancy and training organisation) is in persuading prospective clients to stop chopping down trees and spend some time sharpening the axe! In this situation very few business leaders have the courage to make everyone “down tools” for a week to transform the way they operate, so we need to find another way. The solution is to spend a couple of hours training staff to identify the main sources of wasted time and effort, to generate improvement actions, and to implement a prioritised improvement action plan. Pretty soon, productivity increases, stress levels are reduced and morale improves.
  2. Quiet and Inefficient” – the “About to go out of business” scenario. At this point, massive action is needed to turn around the company’s fortunes. Sales, service and efficiency all need to increase – often with little or no investment available. Fresh thinking is required, often driven by new Leadership.
  3. “Quiet and Efficient” – the “All dressed up with nowhere to go” scenario. Being Lean is all about adding value and eliminating waste. Many organisations like eliminating waste but far too few focus on increasing the “value-add”. If you find yourself in this situation then you need to get close to your customers, understand exactly what they value and are prepared to pay for, and find more and more ways of providing this. As part of our work with clients in this quadrant we focus on VAST – Value-Added Sales Techniques. In the longer term, this needs to become part of effective Supply Chain management.
  4. “Busy and Lean” – the “making it look easy” scenario, where most of our clients are! When you’ve truly embedded Lean thinking and Continuous Improvement, the rewards are very clear. Even in a recession, sales increase, margins improve and people still find time to make this month better and more efficient than last month. These World Class organisations invest broadly across the business, they innovate their products and processes, they look to inspire their employees and stakeholders and they understand “why” they do what they do.

Whichever quadrant your business is in, if you’re keen to improve contact info@NicholsonConsultancy.com. We can help you add value, reduce costs, and “work smarter not harder” – all at the same time!

How to break out of the “Too Busy to Improve” trap

Once you’re up and running with Lean and Continuous Improvement, you’re in the “virtuous circle” where you’re continuously becoming more efficient, saving more time, and investing some of that time in becoming even more efficient.

But if you’re very busy and you haven’t yet started your Lean journey, what do you do?

The biggest danger to avoid is just to “wait until things quieten down”. This approach can be self-fulfilling – but not in a good way! If you don’t improve then the downside of “being busy” can be longer lead times, higher costs and reduced performance. All of which can lead to a permanent – sometimes fatal – reduction in business as customers go elsewhere. This is often called the “busy fool” approach – putting in more and more effort, but getting back less and less benefit.

Instead, you need to get started on the virtuous circle by finding ways to “force in” about 10% of additional time and resource “up front”.

To do this, you need to do a bit more of the things you always do to increase your capacity: work some short-time overtime, cut back on time-consuming unprofitable work, bring in additional labour, contract out some of the workload, reschedule low-priority work, etc, etc.

And then you use some of that time to provide some short, sharp awareness training about Lean, non-value-added activities and the Eight Wastes. People will soon identify where the problems are, and come up with improvement ideas. Then you help the teams to prioritise their ideas and implement them. Focus first on improvements that save time and make the job easier. In no time, you’ll start getting some “quick wins”. Productivity increases, morale improves and people start to smile again.

Pretty soon, you’ll experience the unusual sensation of having time to actually stand back and think. And then you realise that the virtuous circle has begun….

If you want help to break out of your own “Too Busy Improve” trap, contact Andrew.Nicholson@ImproveMyFactory.com. Pretty soon, you’ll be getting better results with less effort. And who knows, you might even start to enjoy work and live longer!