Joe:  That’s one of the big resistances to Lean is the perception that you are standardizing all the work and making robots out of everyone. But standard work is kind of what you’re saying that ISO is all about. It’s making work standard. I mean, being explicit in what it is. And that’s not a bad thing because if there is a deviation from it, you would raise the flag, or in the Lean terms, someone would pull an Andon cord.

Lindsay:  Exactly. You find me one new employee joining an organization that will ever complain that there is something in documented form that tells them how they should be performing something. They cry out for it. But how many times do you hear people say "Oh yeah, it’s baptism by fire here." Nobody likes to be in that situation. I mean I’ve been through it myself; it’s disconcerting. People want to be productive; they want to get up and running fast. What you tend to hear from the more seasoned people is "Oh, but it’s so unique, what we do. There’s no way you could possibly standardize it." Of course that’s complete nonsense. There are certain things, obviously, every order is different. The flavor of what a customer wants versus the next one, absolutely.

Related Information:
MOCGISO You Tube Videos
Agreeing on Standards in a Lean Enterprise
Is Standard Work needed in Sales and Marketing?
Where is the path in Continuous Improvement for Sales and Marketing?
Why does sales and marketing operate to a different quality standard?

Share this:

When you first think about, you may think that Quality Management and a continuous improvement methodology like Lean are one in the same. You may also think that they are willing partners. Many disagree with that thought. My thoughts are that I find the ISO standards as a way to involve people from all departments to ask them how you do things. As a result, procedures and documentation are created to evaluate the current method of doing things (the first step in standard work) against the requirements of a standard (ISO).  As a result, you develop performance gaps for continuous improvement. Others believe that this would hinder the development and flexibility of standard work documents and prefer that they are divorced from each other.  

I probed this question with Lindsay and on a Lean Blog Post on Standard Work. The answer I believe to be correct is that ISO 9001 should not be the continuous improvement strategy just that it should be one metric by which continuous improvement is measured. However, I still believe using ISO as a standard to start the process for developing standard work is not a bad place to start.

About LJ Nichols: Lindsay’s career has been entirely devoted to management consulting, working with Grant Thornton LLP ? the fifth largest accounting and management consulting firm in the nation, assisting them develop a ‘center of excellence’ for their quality, environment and regulatory practice, and P?E International plc/PE Handley Walker the largest management consulting firm in Europe, where she was integral in establishing their ISO presence in the US.

Related Information:
MOCGISO You Tube Videos
Agreeing on Standards in a Lean Enterprise
Is Standard Work needed in Sales and Marketing?
Where is the path in Continuous Improvement for Sales and Marketing?
Why does sales and marketing operate to a different quality standard?

Share this:

Marketing your Black Belt is a 28-day program starting May 6th. Marketing your Black Belt is based specifically on addressing these issues: Customer Acquisition, Marketing, Customer Retention and Communication & Collaboration. Specifically designed for Quality consultants.

Get Clients NOW – 28 Day Program: Program starting on the Monday, April 18th: 3:00 PM to 4:00 PM (GMT-0500).Program Structure and Agenda: During the first three sessions you will receive all the tools and training needed to design your individual 28-day marketing action plan. Specifically Designed for the Professional Consultant.

Value Stream Marketing: is a 28-day program starting Thursday, May 12th, from 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM (ET). We want our participants to learn how to utilize a Sales and Marketing Value Stream implement through the use of a Marketing Kanban. Specifically Designed for Organizations.

Limited Amounts of Attendees.

How many times has a good idea failed because of a poor plan or execution? For start-ups and established organizations alike, Business901 provides effective but easy to use methodologies. They are flexible enough to allow you to apply your own ideas, while giving you guidance before, during and after. We will provide practical, information-rich, immediately applicable direction that can have immediate impact on the success of your organization.

P.S. 90 Day Program – ask for details about our Achieving Expert Status Program

Share this:

From what I understand, the greatest difference in Deming vs. Juran thinking is that Deming views are describing a transformation and Juran describes how to manage quality functions. Dr. Juran says quite frankly, that the way you talk quality to executives is through the language of money.

Dr. Juran provided a systematic and linear approach to managing for quality. He looked at improvement on a project by project basis with emphasis on the vital few and useful many (Pareto Principle). This project by project basis closely resembles continuous improvement and the PDCA cycle.

Dr. Juran concepts are explained in the well-known Juran Trilogy which is comprised of three stages: Quality planning, Quality control, and Quality improvement. I have taken the liberty to adjust them to a sales and marketing perspective and hope I did not do too much damage to the overall message. The part in bold is Dr. Juran’s heading.

Quality Planning

1. Identify the customers, both external and internal: Since this is about sales and marketing – customers should be segmented using the Pareto principle placing more of your emphasis on your most important customers.
2. Discover your customers’ needs: Determine not only what your customer values but your market values. But don’t stop there, identify the vital few and useful many that drive these markets.
3. Develop products features that respond to the customer needs: Understanding the vital few and useful many should drive each improvement and innovation.
4. Develop a process that can produce the product features: Be able to engage the sales team into meaningful collaboration with the customer to understand and express what they value.
5. Prove process capability: Determine metrics in achieving these standards.

Quality Control.

1. Choose and establish Measurement: Determine metrics in achieving these goals. These metrics should not be based only on closed sales but also on critical touch points. Use statistical tools for analysis.
2. Measure and interpret actual performance to operating goals: Using statistical tools, data and “tribal Knowledge” interpret the any differences between actual versus standard.
3. Take action on differences: Since you are working off of standards, you should find that differences can be attributed to identifiable causes or breakdowns.

Quality Improvement

1. Prove the need and identify specific projects for improvement: The projects should be identified that will provide the most financial gain (most profitable sale) and the amount of potential (customer evangelism) the project may have.  
2. Organize to guide and diagnosis causes: In the Juran type of thinking this may lead to the formation of a Quality Council. In sales and marketing this may be a hierarchy that will look at these decisions from a broader perspective than an individual sales team.
3. Provide effective remedies: Remedies based on root cause and ones linked to the critical to quality issues discussed in the planning stage. This may also include training and additional resources.
4. Provide for control to hold the gains: In sales and marketing we want to prevent backsliding with a customer or prospect. We may institute additional or even a different type of support such as a sales team with a stronger service or product background at this stage.

This post was just an exercise for me to walk through the Juran Trilogy from a sales and marketing perspective. In my mind, I was creating a high level outline for an improvement project in the sales process. The purest of each methodology (Lean/Juran) may beat me up for this comment but the Juran approach does not seem that much different than the Lean/Toyota mindset of PDCA. It resembles a 3-step approach to PDCA. You could possible look at in a macro (1 overall PDCA) and a micro approach (3 individual PDCA cycles). 

P.S. Did you Know: Juran is widely credited for adding the human dimension to quality management. He pushed for the education and training of managers. For Juran, human relations problems were the ones to isolate. Resistance to change—or, in his terms, cultural resistance—was the root cause of quality issues. Juran credits Margaret Mead’s book Cultural Patterns and Technical Change for illuminating the core problem in reforming business quality. He wrote Managerial Breakthrough, which was published in 1964, outlining the issue. – From Wikipedia

Related Information:
A Newer Edition: Juran’s Quality Handbook 6/e
Understand Scrum, Understand Implementing PDCA
The differences in Lean and Agile
Continuously improving thru PDCA

Share this:

The Juran’s Quality Handbook: The Complete Guide to Performance Excellence 6/e , was co-authored by Joe DeFeo and the late Dr. Joseph M. Juran. This authoritative resource shows how to apply universal methods for delivering superior results and organizational excellence in any organization, industry, country or process. In the podcast, Joe will give two people the opportunity to win a copy of the handbook.

P.S. What do you talk about before a podcast begins? I left some beginning remarks in place. However, I have to correct a statement that was made, WKRP was in Cincinnati.

If you have any problems with podcast - Go Directly to the Business901 Podcast Player.

Upcoming Events: Juran is conducting blended Lean Six Sigma workshops for Green Belt and Black Belt certification beginning in April 2011. The workshops begin with required online independent study of e-learning modules. The estimated 24 hours of independent study must be completed by the start of the onsite, instructor-led portion of the workshop. The onsite workshop training, held in Southbury, Connecticut, will expand upon the topics covered in the e-learning modules. Training will be interactive with group case study exercises, problem analysis and statistics practice. Here is a list of all the workshops Juran currently has scheduled for 2011:

• Lean Six Sigma Blended Green Belt – (Beginning April 4, 2011)
• Lean Six Sigma Blended Black Belt – (Beginning April 4, 2011)
• Lean Six Sigma Upgrade to Black Belt – (Beginning May 2, 2011)

To register, or for more information, please call 800-338-7726, or email Tina@juran.com.

Related Information:
Juran Institute Website
ASQ Columbus Spring Conference will host Marketing with Lean
Need to grow by innovation, consider the little i versus the big I.
Integrating Value Networks
Understand Scrum, Understand Implementing PDCA
Why does sales and marketing operate to a different quality standard?

Share this:

The good news is that the methods, tools and know-how now exist to use quality in your process to drive market share and increase revenue. Sales and Marketing needs to become part of the quality process within your company. Not only to improve their own methods but to lead their companies out of this dilemma of surviving in an economy of an overabundance of supply. What’s not in place is the culture of continuous improvement and the ability to understand the changing perception of customer value.

In the new Juran Quality Handbook, they listed the lessons learned by organizations that were successful in their quality initiatives. Their analysis showed that despite differences among the organizations, there was much commonality. These common strategies follow:

1. Customers and quality have top priority. Thus customer satisfaction was the chief operating goal embedded in the vision and strategic plans. This was written into
   corporate policies and scorecards.
2. Create a performance excellence system. All organizations that attained superior results did so with a change program or a systematic model for change. This model enables
   organizational breakthroughs to occur.
3. Do strategic planning for quality. The business plan was opened up to include quality goals and balanced scorecards, year after year.
4. Benchmark best practices. This approach was adopted to set goals based on superior results already achieved by others.
5. Engage in continuous innovation and process improvement. The business plan was opened up to include goals for improvement. It was recognized that quality is a moving target; therefore there is no end to improving processes.
6. Offer training in managing for quality, the methods and tools. Training was extended beyond the quality department to all functions and levels, including upper managers.
7. Create an organization-wide assurance focus. This focus is on improving and ,ensuring that all goods, services, processes, and functions in an organization are of high quality.
8. Project by project, create multifunctional teams. Multifunctional teams, adopted to give priority to organization results rather than to functional goals, and later extended to include suppliers and customers, are key to creating breakthroughs in current performance. They focus on the “vital few” opportunities for improvement.
9. Empower employees. This includes training and empowering the workforce to participate in planning and improvement of the “useful many” opportunities. Motivation was supplied through extending the use of recognition and rewards for responding to the changes demanded by the quality revolution. Measurements were developed to enable upper managers to follow progress toward providing customer satisfaction, meeting competition, improving quality, and so on. Upper managers took charge of managing for quality by recognizing that certain responsibilities were not something you could delegate—they were to be carried out by the upper managers, personally.
10. Build an adaptable and sustainable organization. Quality is defined by the customers. Customers are driven by societal problems. Quality now includes safety, no harm to the environment, low cost, ease of use, etc. To succeed, all organizations must focus on attaining sustainable organizations.

Your organization may be doing many of these things very well. I challenge even the most successful companies to rate their sales and marketing by the same standards. What would you find? Just citing one area, do you measure improvements of processes, or do you compensate people? These ten strategies are possible in sales and marketing. However, quality improvements are seldom obtained without a methodology. The installation of a methodology, a process is required for improvement. Ultimately a different culture has to be developed for quality to be truly achieved.

This is why I believe the Future of Marketing is Lean!

Related Posts
The Future of Marketing is Lean
PDCA for Lean Marketing, Knowledge Creation
Lean Marketing Creates Knowledge for the Customer
Why Lean Marketing? Because it is the Future of Marketing …
The Pull in Lean Marketing
The 7 step Lean Process of Marketing to Toyota
The Marketing Knowledge Spiral

Share this:

I have recently started using the Kano model in providing a better definition for my clients of putting their product and features not only perspective but defining that clarity issue. The Kano model relates to three factors:

Basic or must be or the expected needs. Without these the customer would be dissatisfied. This sounds very straight forward but if these are not adequately defined during the marketing process they are simply deal breakers and questions that either party may ever asked.

The second aspect is the performance factor and to define that performance think about the term, “more is better.” The more this performance is met, the more the prospect is satisfied. This is the area that the customer measures the value of the product or service they are receiving. In a few cases, these features are the ones that have meaning to some clients and others could care less. They even may cause dissatisfaction to some. Herein lays a great opportunity to improve these areas which many times can be done at relatively inexpensive option. Or, you may even be able to remove them completely for a few of your target segments. If you can, are these segments really your target customer?

Another way to leverage the performance factor segment is to have a better definition of your target market and how it relates to these factors. You may find that making these an option or even using them in a way of further segmenting your customer base may ultimately give you an advantage over the competition either through price or features.

The third factor is the delighters. If these are absent, they will not cause any dissatisfaction at all. The customer does not even expect these. But when they are there, they cause extreme happiness. OK, maybe that is a bit much. An interesting side note that needs to be recognized about the delighters is typically they do not increase the value in the product or the service. Seldom will you get paid more because of them. The delighters may also in time, even become a basic need. What is a delighter today, may be an expectation tomorrow.

The Kano Model is constantly shifting but it is a great method to use to gain a better understanding of your prospects values that are critical to success and to prioritize the requirements for further development activities. Just as importantly, I think it really lends itself to understanding your market segment characteristics better. And if you divide your marketing segments better, you will increase throughput and develop better budgets as a result.

By the way: Another important feature of the Kano Model is that it gives you a better understanding on what  tradeoffs you might have in your marketing cycles. You certainly could not trade off a basic need, but you might be able to reduce the level of a performance factor.

Share this:

As Tony said in the podcast it is not a book filled with ideas from PHD’s. It is a book filled with authors that have CEO, V.P after their names and companies from Boeing to Atlas Air and BzzAgent to Ogilvy. What I found interesting in the book is the diversity of the content. I called it a book of short stories! Great reading, Great knowledge of information.

Anthony G. Bennett (Washington, D.C.) has worked in marketing for over 22 years, including as an international marketing research analyst with Union Camp (now International Paper), general manager/vice president for Hunt-Marmillion Public Relations (now Ogilvy), Special Assistant promoting the first Bush administration’s National Energy Strategy, and marketing consultant to small companies and national organizations. He now teaches marketing at Georgetown University.

Related Posts:

Your first Step in Achieving Expert Status
Marketing is about Content and Circulation not Cute and Clever

Share this:

Applying Lean and Theory of Constraints to this concept opens up a completely different understanding of marketing cycle. It simplifies it for many individuals and companies that have difficulty looking at marketing as a system. It puts theory into actual practice.

I have not found a quicker and easier method from converting a stagnate and non-systematic marketing effort into a flood of increased sales. Not only will this method increase sales, but typically it will decrease your marketing cost in a relatively short period. The end result also includes a continuous improvement process to keep your marketing ahead of the competition. Join me in this 60 minute webinar. If you want to go straight to the registration page, click here!

By the way, did I say this webinar is free! If you cannot make the time please register and I will send you a link to the recording. I am working out the details on a special offer for attendees.

Related Information:

Registration Page

Share this:

Glenn has over twenty years of professional experience, he has managed and assisted organizations through a variety of improvement strategies and tactics, ranging from organization-wide Performance Improvement efforts to facilitation of Value Stream Mapping or Kaizen events. A Six Sigma Black Belt, he utilizes tools and methodologies from Lean, Six Sigma, Theory of Constraints, and traditional process improvement techniques to improve operations. Glenn also authors the Process Improvement Blog.

Share this:

Applying Lean in HealthCare –

Related Blog Posts:

Mark Graban Podcast

Building a Lean Healthcare Value Stream

Related News Relaease

Share this:

Change acceleration process is a philosophy & tool set designed to help overcome cultural barriers to change by creating a shared need, shaping a vision, & mobilizing commitment.  Fast track decision making (North Shore’s version of GE work-out) is a rapid problem solving approach with team involvement and in-meeting decisions.  It is a catalyst for change focusing on the process to drive improvement and empowering the people closest to the process to develop & implement appropriate solutions.

In her role as Director she over sees 3 system master black belts, teaches the six sigma and lean methodologies as well as mentors projects through out the health system. Working with senior leadership, she translates strategic goals and initiatives into six sigma, lean, or FTD (fast track decision making) projects to drive improvement across the organization.

Nancy will be presenting Taking Six Sigma and Lean beyond projects in Healthcare at The Global Lean, Six Sigma and Business Improvement Summit. This summit represents the largest gathering of leading experts and senior executives across various industries who are passionate about achieving process and business excellence.

Share this:

Jeff: “It’s a great concept to talk about because what we’re really trying to say is: How do we achieve that perfect experience for the customer? They order it; they enjoy the ordering process; we manufacture it in a timely manner for them; and we deliver it at the time that they requested it be delivered. So in a sense, you’re trying to achieve this perfect experience – this perfect order.

Applications of Lean Six Sigma to the Supply Chain

Related Posts:

WCBF’s 4th Annual Global Lean, Six Sigma Conference

Application of Lean Six Sigma to the Supply Chain

Share this:

Here is a description and a picture of their template. Tools for standardized work are the most important tools in your Lean toolkit – because they avoid backsliding into old habits

The Standard Work Sheet Excel template is 5 tools in 1:

1. Value Add Analysis (auto-calculates pie chart)
2. Work Balancing (auto-draws work load balancing bar chart in relation to Takt Time)
3. Standard Work Instructions & Analysis
4. Quick Changeover tool for setup reduction.
5. Standard Work Combination Sheet visual time chart.

What makes these templates unique is that they are built on Excel spreadsheet platform.

You have options to:

• Auto-draw a Standard Work Combination Sheet with a single click of a button.
• Create a separate time chart for each operator, or display all operators in a single chart.
• Use either stopwatch or video Time Observation to observe and time your standard work procedures
• Split your Value Add Pie Chart into your own user-defined types of waste
• Plot as many as 4 chart lines – for Takt Time, Target Cycle Time, Cycle Time, and even a 4th user-defined chart line (perhaps for out of cycle work?)
  Draw the chart with or without labels
• Include up to 200 lines of work elements on a single chart
  (and spread even larger processes over multiple charts – perhaps with summary data rolling up to each higher level)
• Define your own header data field labels
• Link to or from another worksheet for calculations such as Working Time Available, product mix, or master scheduling…
• Paste a picture of your Spaghetti Diagram on the same page with your Standard Work Combination Table!
• Use this as a Quick Changeover tool for Lean SMED setup reduction

I think it is a pretty unique product. You can download a free trial but I think it will take a commitment to use these templates. So if it is free, you may just never commit.

Share this: