How to avoid liposuction... Lean yourself

In 1986 I worked for Vickers; a large UK heavy engineering company. All supervisory staff attended at least 10 days of training in Total Quality Management: a forerunner of Lean. Then some of us did many more days on Statistical Process Control (now called 6-sigma) and Statistical Experimentation (Taguchi and Plackett-Bogeyman). Over the next decade we were able to apply these techniques, as a team, and help the organisation become world class

Apparently recently, the Public Service of Canada has been very interested in Lean as an approach to improve service delivery to Canadians and to reduce internal red tape. Although Lean is relatively new to the federal public service, Canada is not the first public sector organization to adopt it. HM Government in the United Kingdom, has experienced failure with Lean: e.g. Pacesetter. One path that several public organizations in Canada are now engaging on is very similar to the path the UK took more than 10 years ago: creating armies of internal facilitators and over-relying on Lean workshops and tools. This path has proven to be unsustainable (Radnor, 2013).

The problem with armies of facilitators is the separation of work from improvements that reflects a lack of understanding of what Lean truly is: participatory science. Understanding Lean as participatory science is to understand that knowledge about problems (and countermeasures) resides with the people doing the work, in their context. Lean is about creating a culture of making everyone, at all levels (including senior management) responsible and accountable to solve problems in their work, every day. In such a culture, value is determined collaboratively with external clients, not solely by and for internal clients.

In contrast, armies of facilitators assigned to specific “Continuous Improvement Divisions” or “Lean Units” generally lead to a culture of improvement ‘experts’ who are responsible for planning, implementing and reporting on improvement activities. A hammer looking for nails. Solutions in search of problems. Daily work meanwhile remains disconnected from improvements. Lean in these organisations is unfortunately reduced to applying the same Lean tools regardless of problems. Lost is the strength of participatory science: a deep, shared understanding of the problem, of what holds value and of countermeasures, in context.

Work and improvements cannot be separated. The team must grow together!

Sales and Operations Planning: it still works in the 21st Century

Sales and Operations Planning is a process to develop tactical plans that provide management the ability to strategically direct its businesses to achieve competitive advantage on a continuous basis by integrating customer-focused marketing plans for new and existing products and services with the management of the supply chain. The process brings together all the plans for the business (sales, marketing, development, manufacturing, operations, sourcing, and financial) into one integrated set of plans.

S&OP is a formal business process used by the organisation’s leadership team to connect corporate business planning with tactical planning, driving more detailed service operations plans.

S&OP provides managers with an opportunity to review and update the strategic business plan to meet organisational and marketplace changes as they occur through time.

S&OP ensures that the demand and supply plans are realistic, synchronized, and support the business plan.

S&OP provides sales and marketing with an opportunity to periodically review and revise demand plans so that they are closely synchronized with actual sales occurring in the marketplace.

S&OP enables managers to review and revise service operations plans that support the demand plan while optimizing productive and financial assets.

S&OP uses the aggregate data of sales, production, and inventory along with aggregate planning time buckets and product families to ensure greater planning accuracy.

S&OP provides the opportunity to translate the business plans, which are normally expressed in monetary units, into product family units of measure that production can understand and work with (units, hours, weight, lengths).

If you want to find out more then follow this link http://www.slideshare.net/pkarran/sop-outline-50486935