Hi, I'm Steven Mathur, and I'm a director at pro Peck business improvement. We're going to talk to today about how to improve your processes, using lean tools and techniques. These are the tools that we use when we work with many of our major corporate clients, and helping them to improve what they do and how they do it. The first thing to understand really about Lean is is a way of thinking as opposed to just as a set of tools and a toolkit. It's a way of thinking about problems. It's a way of looking at how to improve things.

And at the heart of lean is this idea that it's really about a war between value and waste. value being something you want waste being something you want to eliminate as much as possible. So what do we mean by those two terms? Well value. A common way of describing it is it's anything that the customer is willing to pay. pay for.

But that perhaps doesn't really explain it fully. So what do we mean by value? Well, if you think about any business, really what you're trying to do is produce something that the customer wants that the customer values. So if you're making something if you're in manufacturing, it's about taking a bunch of raw materials, processing those raw materials in some way, and making something that the customer wants to buy. In theory, they could get hold of those raw materials themselves, and get somebody to make them or make them themselves. But it's too difficult.

You've got the expertise, and you can do it better. So your activity in changing those raw materials to something that the customer wants to buy, is really where the value lies. That's why they're employee that's why they want to buy it from you. The same would apply to any sort of service, many services that we give to our clients. People could in theory do themselves, but the added value That we do them better, more efficiently and to better standard. So anything that we're doing that is giving the customer something that they require is value.

So any activity in our business that helps do that is considered to be value adding activity. Waste on the other hand, I like to describe it as values evil twin basically. So it's is anything that you're doing within your business that isn't contributing to adding that value. Now, it could be stuff that you think is important, but actually the customer doesn't see as being value. So anything that's like that is considered to be non value added activity, and therefore waste. So waste takes a lot of different forms, and we're going to talk about those in a minute.

But really, the philosophy behind lean is to remove as much waste as possible. So any lean improvement project is really focusing on reducing waste in the system or the process. So what I'm going to do now is just introduce you to a very simple improvement process, which is one that we use with our clients when we're working on lean projects. This simple improvement process starts with asking the question, why do you want to change something? So why do you want to put this new process in? Why do you want to improve?

Whatever it is that you're doing? What's the reason for it? So just worth exploring that and identifying that, so we'll have a look at some reasons why you might want to change something in a moment. The second part of our simple improvement process is you need to really understand what's currently happening. So we call that the current state analysis. So what's currently happening, and we're going to introduce some tools to you to know how to do that.

The third step in the simple improvement process is defining your Goal, what is it that you want? And when you do that, you start to identify the gap between the current state analysis and what you want as a result of the project. Next, you start to plan what you're going to do. So you identify actions and plan your improvements. Of course, then you implement. And then you review.

Before we go on, it's just worth having a think about culture. So my business which is propane talks about process people and culture. So at this point, we always like to just ask the question, how do you involve your teams? So a question here is when should you involve the team or when should you get the team involved in this improvement projects? So is it there when you're on implementation and you need to sell it to your teams, you need to get them to change what they do. Think about different things.

Better ways of doing things, maybe give them some training and so on. So is that when we'd want to introduce them to this project? Well, obviously not. It's quite clear that's too late. What about at the stage when you start to identify what changes you're going to make? So you get the team involved at identifying what changes they should make, and how you should do things better?

Well, I would argue that it's too late. What about the goal defining stage? Should they be involved with that? Well, yes, definitely. But I would say that's too late at that point. So in our experience, when we're working on improvement projects, we find that getting the team involved as early as possible, is the best way because then you don't have to sell the idea to them.

They're already bought into it, they already own it. So they're engaged in the process straightaway. they've identified the improvement opportunities. You've worked with them, obviously to help them understand what they need to be looking for. But now you're in a better place. So then you can involve them all the way through.

So I wanted just to make that point, because it is possible after programs like this, that managers might go away and sit in a darkened room somewhere, and plan an improvement project and then come up against barriers when they come to try and implement it because people don't know anything about it or suspicious about it. So simple message, get the team involved right at the start. And the great news about the tools that I'm going to show you today is that those tools can be used with teams and in groups. So this simple improvement process actually brings together a number of models and approaches that are already out there that you may be familiar with. So the first one, as you can see, there is PDCA. So let me just very briefly describe what that is.

PDCA stands for plan, do, check, act, and it's a cycle. So it's a way of making sure that whatever you do, it's continuous improvement. So Plan, do check, act, plan, do check act. So it's a continuous improvement cycle. Another tool that is quite common around lean is something called DMAIC. And de Mayock, again is another acronym really, which stands for define the problem, measure, analyze, improve, and control.

So again, this is another structure in terms of improving something and using lean techniques. So these are all great tools, and we use them all the time. Now, as you can see, you've got domain, they're already within the simple improvement process. So we've already got those elements that you use in domain. So we've got defining you go, we've got measuring, we've got analysis as part of your current state, we've got your improvement and your control would come into the review process. So actually, the domain is in there.

As these PDCA plan do check act really sits at the end there, the last three so identify actions and plan Improve, review. And you go around that cycle again. And the third model that we tend to use is the grow coaching model, which I'll talk to you about very briefly. And Grow stands for helping individuals set goals, identifying the current reality of what's happening with them and the problems that they're trying to solve. They need to then come up with options to identify what they're going to do. And then they decide what they need to do.

And that comes from the quite well known book really coaching for performance in 2014. So if you want to know more about coaching, and using grow, then obviously that's the place to go. But it's interesting that growth fits so neatly into this simple improvement process. As you can see, define your goal. Well, that's your goal setting part of it. Reality is your current state analysis, and then your options and what to do sits in identify actions of plan.

So this simply improvement process SAS incorporates the make PDCA underground model, and indeed lots of the tools and techniques. So that's why we use it, it just brings it all together and puts it in a logical order. The other thing to say about the simple improvement process that we use is that it is a continuous improvement cycle. So, those same steps if you just turn the ends on, in on themselves, you can see that it goes around in a cycle. So the last part of that process, which is to review, one of the things that you will be reviewing, is there any more reason why In other words, is there any more improvement we can get from it? If the answer is yes, then essentially what you do is you go around that cycle again.

So it is a continuous improvement cycle.