Lean Marketing House » Lean

Quality through Individual Actions Presentation

admin — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 03:47:00 +0000

Below is a presentation that I will be giving this week to the Plantmix Asphalt Industry of Kentucky. It will be during the winter training school and focus on Building a Quality Program through your Actions. This an hour long presentation and I noticed a few parts that the subject matter may seem to jump off course but it actually flows pretty well for me. What are your thoughts? Any improvement ideas?

Improving Quality

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Lean Sales and Marketing works because of Leader Standard Work

admin — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 03:32:00 +0000

People struggle with Lean in sales and marketing because they don’t believe that many of the fundamental concepts of Lean, such as Standard Work can apply to the S & M discipline. If you review the slide shows under the Lean Engagement Team section on Slide Share, I think you will find how much they are based on standard work. Think about Leader standard work, it is intentionally designed to focus multiple layers of attention on the same process. For example:

The Team Leader’s Standard Work might including adding new call scripts into a follow-up campaign for a certain webinar or trade show. The team leader also heads a brief daily stand-up meeting with the team which is part of the regular agenda to ensure that appropriate action has been taken or initiated. The Team Coordinator should attend but not head the meeting.

The Team Coordinator might then work with the team to go over playback of scripts for training. He may bring in additional trainers as part of a weekly program to improve delivery. The TC ensures that program has been coordinated with other actions in the marketing communication department.

The Marketing Communication department sends follow-up emails, auto-responders and/or direct mail.

The Value Stream Manager might allocate budget for calling program and meet once a week to check progress and to lead a regularly-scheduled meeting with the TC, TL and MC to discuss the problems or opportunities.

It is this way that standard work is layered to ensure focus on the processes that produce the results. It is one of the most challenging aspect of the transition from a traditional results-only culture to a lean results-and-process-focused culture.

A quote from Dr. Michael Balle, “Lean is not a revolution; it is solve one thing and prove one thing.” Leader Standard work is the foundation of Lean Sales and Marketing and the fundamental process that replaces the "Silver Bullet" found in most typical marketing jargon.

What are your thoughts? Is your marketing efforts based on standard work?

Systems2win(who I work with) has an excellent description on the website, Leader Standard Work tool.and a new video out (below) that explains Standard Work.

Blog Carnival Annual Roundup 2011: How to implement Lean Thinking in a Business

admin — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 03:55:00 +0000

Tracey Richardson’s How to implement "Lean Thinking" in a Business is my third and final blog review for the John Hunter’s Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog Carnival. Tracey is a trainer, consultant and principal of Teaching Lean Inc. She has 22 years of Lean experience and worked at Toyota Motor Manufacturing KY as a team member, team leader and group leader in the Plastics Department from 1988-1998. She has over 460 hours training in Toyota Methodologies and Philosophy and currently is a trainer for Toyota, their affiliates in North America, and other companies upon request. Tracey experience in Toyota methodologies including: Lean Problem Solving, Quality Circles, Lean Manufacturing tools, Standardized Work, Job Instruction Training, Toyota Production System, Toyota Way Values, Culture Development, Visualization (Workplace Management Systems), Continuous Improvement (Kaizen), Meeting Facilitation/Teamwork, and Manufacturing Simulations.

Tracey also was the 2010 recipient of the Business901 Podcast of the Year! The podcast discussed A3 problem Solving.

Tracey likes to discuss the culture before jumping into problem solving but she takes a look at culture from a different perspective than others. It just about comes across as an attitude (in a very polite way) and there is type of swagger about the whole thing. Why not? When you become #1 in the world such as Toyota did and you are #1 methodology in the world which Lean probably is, why not have that swagger to your discussion? It is not pompous, it is an attitude that what you are doing works! She doesn’t write enough in my opinion because of her commitments as a trainer but her blog is one you should follow, you do not want to miss a word she says. You can also find her answering questions on the Lean Enterprise’s A3 Dojo Website.

What does the word "Lean" mean to you or your Company?

As I travel around the U.S. working with various companies that make a variety of different products, I realize a common denominator throughout them. How do they define the word "lean", as well as the word "culture"? What I have realized is very interesting!

When I first started consulting I felt it was all about the "tools", and that’s what companies seem to want, so of course, that’s what they got. As I have matured as an instructor/consultant I, like many, I have led and learned at the same time. In my experience at Toyota, especially back when we were led by the Japanese and their questioning approach; we all as new leaders were being led but at the same time leading others, so it was bringing about the "respect for people" and developing the workforce as a team. I can’t ever recall in my time at Toyota (Toyota Motor Manufacturing KY – TMMK 1988-1998), that we ever labeled what we were doing in a specific word like "Lean", nor did we really think about our daily actions as a "culture". It was just in the atmosphere. It wasn’t until I left Toyota to teach others, that those words started to surface. Somehow we felt the need to give it a name, and as I’ve experience the last 13 years as a consultant, I feel that can have somewhat of a hindering effect…..

Pathway to creating a "Lean Culture"

As I travel around to various clients they are always asking me, "How do you implement or create a culture like Toyota has"? I tell them that’s a very loaded question :). There are so many aspects of creating that culture it’s hard to give a short answer or even "wave a magic wand" to say… "Here is what you should do!!". I wish I was that good . How I see it, you really need to differentiate the People side of Lean versus the Tool side. The People side will always be the most difficult aspect of the discipline needed to create this thing called Culture. The tools are just what they are, mostly countermeasures to change some discrepancy in our process. For the tools to be successful, People must understand their involvement or the purpose behind the tools. As I have stated in previous blog posts you must explain from the company perspective the WHAT, HOW and the WHY of any change or expectation within a persons work….

Tracey’s website: http://teachingleaninc.com and email: tracey@teachingleaninc.com

Lean and Six Sigma training to deployed Soldiers

admin — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 03:32:00 +0000

Just received a copy of an article, Resolute’ brigade provides Lean Six Sigma training to deployed Soldiers from Tim Fowler, a CPS Professional Services contractor assigned to Task Force Resolute at Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan. Tim is teaching a group of U.S. Forces about Lean and Six Sigma. They are applying this training immediately through improving the logistics capabilities of the command. More information can be found in the article.

Quote from the article:

“Through Lean Six Sigma, soldiers and leaders will learn how to properly manage time and resources while delivering a top quality product the first time,” said Chief Warrant Officer Jackie Vuorinen, the TF-Resolute safety officer. “This is a program all soldiers can use to save Army resources while providing higher quality products.”

Tim appeared on the Business901 podcast, Are right brain thinkers better leaders? Tim is a University of Kentucky Certified Lean Master, a Goldratt Institute Theory of Constraint Supply Chain Expert, an ASQ-Certified Six Sigma Black Belt, and a Licensed Social Worker with a SECRET clearance and his website, BusinessLeadership.com is a popular venue for leading edge thinking.

Thanks Tim for passing this on and wish you and everyone else at Kandahar Airfield a safe and Happy Holiday!

Deming was just simply wrong about variation…

admin — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 03:25:00 +0000

..when applied to Lean Sales and Marketing. We have all heard the saying attributed to John Wanamaker, a department-store magnate in the late 19th century, famously said that half the money he spent on advertising was wasted, but that he didn’t know which half. That theory is substantiated in a blog post, Why Should 50% of your marketing should fail (statistical proof offered by by Don Reinertsen). So I would offer a simple explanation that we do need variation for sales and marketing to work. But it goes much deeper than that, it is the thought of the average customer.

When continuous improvement is applied to sales and marketing most think about reducing waste and segmenting customers. As Deming said, “Variation is the enemy”. Sales and marketing is a process. If we can reduce the variation and the inputs to a process, we increase the predictability of the outputs and it makes it a whole lot easier to manage those processes. As a result, we can focus on things that really do need our attention.

This is supply-side thinking. We segment out customers till we can define the “average” customer”. People that understand variation know that average is a poor measure. You could have one foot in boiling water and another in ice cold water and on average you are ok. So why do we market to the average? It makes it easier!

If we focus on Demand thinking, we must focus and embrace variation. We must ask ourselves how our customers differ and how their experiences differ. Focusing on these differences and grouping them accordingly offers us a chance to market to a broader spectrum.

An example of this is the philosophy of Mass Customization. From Wikipedia:

Mass Customization is the method of effectively postponing the task of differentiating a product for a specific customer until the latest possible point in the supply network." (Chase, Jacobs & Aquilano 2006, p. 419). The concept of mass customization is attributed to Stan Davis in Future Perfect^[1] and was defined by Tseng & Jiao (2001, p. 685) as "producing goods and services to meet individual customer’s needs with near mass production efficiency". Kaplan & Haenlein (2006) concurred, calling it "a strategy that creates value by some form of company-customer interaction at the fabrication and assembly stage of the operations level to create customized products with production cost and monetary price similar to those of mass-produced products".

In a Demand Driven world, organizations must embrace customer variation. They must encourage it and make provisions for variation to increase. This is a key strategy in a demand driven world. It is where you find new customers and is a key to you innovation. Variation is not the enemy. WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY AND HE IS US. Embrace Variation; do not try to rid yourself of it.

Is your organization a learning organization?

admin — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 02:37:00 +0000

This is an interview with David Garvin and Amy Edmondson, Professors, Harvard Business School. Learning organizations generate and act on new knowledge. The ability to do this enables companies to stay ahead of change and the competition.

This is the the link to the PDF of article that is discussed in the interview, Is Yours a Learning Organization? Or, you can view it below.

Is yours a learning organization