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| Hall is national
bestselling author of Jump Start Your Marketing Brain and key note speaker
at MEP Convention Key #1
Understand how your organization adds real value to people’s lives and be
able to clearly communicate the truth about it to your employees,
suppliers and customers. Best selling author Doug Hall provided key note
speech filled with practical ideas. Not your typical business consultant
in manner, appearance or dress, Hall was more akin to Jimmy Buffet than
Warren Buffet; but Hall energized the event. I enjoyed Hall’s
scientifically backed advice and practical ideas. His recent book, “Jump
Start Your Marketing Brain” is a national bestseller. The one essential
key I learned from Hall is: “Understand how your organization adds real
value to people’s lives and be able to clearly communicate the truth about
it to your employees, suppliers and customers”. Focus on:
1. The benefit you provide 2. How you differ from others in a way that makes you note worthy, 3. And the ease with which people can understand your value proposition. This is the crux of completing strategic elements: mission, vision, values, and strategic plans, goals and milestones. If the activity doesn’t add value, it is waste. Take a quick poll in your enterprise- ask your employees “how do we add real value to people’s lives?” Document the results. If answers vary, you have work to do. Real life UP example: Brian Baccus entrepreneur/owner of Peninsula Powder Coat (PPC) in Baraga, MI, provides a great example of how PPC adds true value. In plain English Baccus clearly states Peninsula Powder Coat’s value. During a recent project team meeting he relates “ you know there are many paint shops out there that coat small parts- many can coat small parts better than us. But no body can powder paint large massive parts better than Peninsula Powder Coat. This is our niche.” With this short statement Brian focused an experience team of consultants, including myself, finishing, conveyors and material handling, ovens, and abrasive blast, to align forces on his expansion project. Baccus quickly and succinctly got through; clearly communicating this is what is important. Align and focus on this. This is leadership in action. Align your resources to add true value and support your strategic themes. Recommended reading Recommended Tool- Professional Development | ||||
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| Hinchliffe
specializes in the implementation of culturally effective business,
organizational and human capital strategies and presented at MEP National
Conference. As
business leader, regularly scan and understand the external environment in
which your enterprise operates. Analysis tools similar to the Hussey
Octagon, (acronyms include: PESTLE, PESTEL, PESTLIED, STEEPLE & SLEPT)
provide a framework to help stimulate dialogue in leadership teams to
identify external forces affecting a business. How will external forces
such as Political, Economic, Social/ethical,
Technological, Legal, Infrastructure,
Environmental, Demographics, and geography affect your
enterprise? Quality teams use a similar problem solving tool, the 5 M’s
and fish bone diagram to spur dialogue in process improvements. The tool
provides an easy way to identify common sources of process variation:
Man, Machine, Materials, Methods, and
Metrics, to identify root causes of problems.
Real life:Paul Essinger, Entrepreneur and owner of Hiawatha Log
Homes and Bob Heise, Marketing Manger, regularly scan the external
environment before investing resources. Essinger and Heise provide key
leadership by understanding and communicating to the rest of the
organization how externalities affect their business.
All these external factors, opportunities and threats, affect the enterprise. On other recent business visits to wood products manufacturers, I found well run companies, with good people, negatively affected, perhaps blindsided by outside forces. Many in the wood business feel effects of changing technology and it may be too late to catch up. No longer do these manufacturers just compete against other wood products manufacturers, an already highly competitive market, but leaders must also consider all the new competing laminate and oriented strand materials that are replacing glued-up panels and hard wood flooring. Recommended reading: Recommended Tools- Professional Development | ||||
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Key
#3 Choose the right Performance Measures to drive high impact continuous
improvement, encourage desired behaviors in your organization, and align
business activities to strategy.
The MEP Convention spent much energy on Metrics; and rightly so. You get what you measure. Bernie Smith, Plant Manager and Dick Thomason owner, Bessemer Plywood, can tell you the importance of using the right measures. During a team improvement project, Smith’s Kaizen team identified a key process with obscure, hard to visualize metrics, normally calculated in the office. Current measures held little value or understanding to employees running the process. The team came up with simple easy to understand metrics. It was such a simple change. Productivity went way up. Shifts starting competing using the new metrics driving desired behavior of higher productivity. I have also seen how misused metrics drive unwanted behavior
Recommended Reading
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| On the tactical
side
MEP
dedicates huge resources to LEAN because LEAN consistently provides the
most impact of any assistance offered. Kiyoshi Suzaki wrote the bible on
continuous improvement. “The new Manufacturing Challenge, Techniques for
Continuous Improvement”, although published in 1987 is still the
definitive hand book that has helped more lean practitioners than any
other work on lean manufacturing.
The basic keys to continuous improvement for all manufacturers
These very simple principles should be part of your organization’s culture for they provide the foundation for continuous improvement. Strong correlation exists between clean, organized, and standardized operations and high quality, excellent safety records, high employee moral and enterprise profitability. Conversely – in dirty, unorganized plants you will find poor quality, unhappy employees, poor safety records and low profits. More keys to focus on, especially for process industries such as paper mills, plastics molders, veneer mills, ceiling tile makers:
After establishing the basics in your culture, process owners will need to improve skills for increased flexibility. Plant layouts will change to improve flow. Visual controls will strengthen nerves and muscles of the organization. Suppliers will become strategic partners. Soon you will be able to exploit new found capacity, speed and quality, and use it as a competitive advantage. Recommended
reading: Recommended Tools-
Professional Development
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