Business Excellence Blog

Many companies I have encountered search for ways to save "in the spotlight", meaning areas where it is easy to see and to attribute to a particular focal point in pricing – for example, purchasing, defective product, work costs or logistics. And an action whose objective is to strengthen employee bonds falls under Welfare and is usually considered a luxury, ending up being the first thing to cut.

The product was highly profitable, but still, it seemed we might be able to shorten the process and make it more efficient. So, the course participants suggested a few significant improvements and elimination of some of the stages.

When the dilemma is personal, I recommend making your own decision in all cases. Remember that everyone, including those close to you, has personal agendas and interests in your decision. However objective the person you choose to advise you may be, they will be influenced by their own attitudes and perceptions of the matter. When the decision is an organizational one, the situation is different, and I'll expand on this later.

This month will see the publication of my first book will: Manage! Best Value Practices for Effective Management. To celebrate it, I would like to dedicate this weekly article to the role of the ideal manager. 

This is the first chapter from my new book: Manage! Best Value Practices for Effective Management. The purpose of this book is to provide a fresh look on how you can improve business results by making your company matter to your employees.

Brainstorming is one of the basic tools in the development of ideas, problem-solving, creative thinking or any other group endeavor. When we develop Fishbone with the objective of arriving at the root cause of a specific problem, brainstorming is the basic tool we should use.

 The CEO of that company led the business and marketing development and wanted to ensure that they would never lack product to supply orders, and therefore their warehouses were full of product that turned out to be defective.

Many CEO's have attained their management positions without any training or preparation. Almost all the direct managers of employees that I have met (work managers, department managers, line managers, etc.) were promoted to their positions because they were good employees.

At a major public company's plant, output was never measured. Production planning was performed on the basis of machine work hours for each product, and there was no control undertaken on this either. As the objective is to produce some kind of product, or to provide a service, we need to measure output and not the hours during which we have manufactured or planned production.

If we address the 20% of principal products manufactured (see example later on), we can attain a significant improvement in results (eg. profits). In this way, we can concentrate our efforts and resources and be decisive and efficient.