Lesson six, visual management. And the final part of our looking for behaviors and things to look for is that you'd be able to go into the factory, you'd be able to go into the office, you'll be able to go into the warehouse, or the yard, or wherever the workplace is, and you'll be able to see evidence of improvement projects, the results, and the savings displayed, and people will know what they are, they'll be able to tell you about them. And it'll be something that is celebrated within the team. So I've shown you this slide already, but this is just an example of a project from start to finish. So on the left hand side, you've got a measurement of the issues. So we have a lead time that is x and we'd like it to be more competitive.

And we've got another chart there. shows us the amount of times that we have a five day lead time and so on. We do a little process where we do some root cause analysis, we have a fishbone diagram, which is a way to do some root cause as to why it takes us longer than the five day lead time. And we have a goal that we set, we have a Gantt chart, which is a project plan, we then have the results on the wall that show what we've done and how we've done it. So it's a really good idea to publicize that and make it really, really clear. So just a word about getting some things in place before you start creating a culture of ci.

One is you need adequate measurements and control processes. So that's worth thinking about before you start getting to kind of be involved in creating a CI process. In order for you to get people involved in continuous improvement. They need to be able to measure What the current state is. So they need to know how many packs you're producing or how many customers you're letting down or what the lead time is, and so on and so on. So you need ways of measuring that.

It's good to get some of those measures in place. First, some basic KPI key performance indicator measures before you start doing ci. In a way, it's possible to do without that in place, because what you need to do then is before you actually do the improvement, you need to put a measure in place. So let's say you think that lead time could be shorter. If you don't have any KPI for lead time, what have you got to do? Obviously, you've got to measure lead time over the next month to find out what the actual lead time is.

If you don't do that, if you just work on lead time to make it shorter, then you will never know whether you made it shorter or not. We'll just be anecdotal, it'll just be a feeling that people get. So you'll say, is lead time better? Yeah, things like. So you're really going to need to measure it. So best to get some basic measures in place, because that'll help people focus on the areas that are most important.

Now, for most businesses, there's some really obvious key performance indicators that you can measure. So when it's related to service to the customer, things like lead time, things like complaints. When it's about things like manufacturing, its production lead time, it's rejects its productivity, its efficiency. You probably got measures in place. I'm assuming you've got some measures in place. If you don't have anything, then I would recommend getting some measures in place.

So how much of this do we do every week? How many customers do we service Out of those X amount of customers, how many complaints do we get? What is our current average lead time? What is our current packs per minute on this particular product? How many deliveries do we make in a day? How many deliveries do we make in a week?

What's the average. So start putting measures in place, because that will help you and your team to identify ways to improve. And then you can make an improvement, and you can measure the results. So that's kind of a first step if you don't have that in place. And I would suggest you get some measures in place. And then you can start to operate with a culture of ci.

Without those measures in place, it's going to be very difficult for you to create a culture of continuous improvement. So that's a word about measures. So here's some examples of the sorts of key performance indicators, measures of performance that you might Use productivity. So in other words, how much effort is putting in to produce a product or group of products? in manufacturing, we often measure productivity in terms of the amount of people that were involved in producing something. But in theory, it could be the amount of effort that's being put in to produce a product.

Contribution, the amount of contribution your team is making to the overall business's profits. Sale by value speaks for itself, market share the amount of your stuff on the market that's being sold, do you have a 2% market share or 20% market share? Do you want to make your 2% 3% you know, whatever it is, you can start to think about those goals but only if you know what the market share is. Are we as a manufacturing KPI overall equipment effectiveness, which is really about how effective your machinery your equipment is, how much it's being used, how much it's available, how quickly it's operating according to its theoretical maximum, and so on. Calls taken the amount of calls that are taken every hour every day, every week, what's the average per operator call taker? feedback data from customers?

Do you have a feedback form that customers give you a score out of 10 or something? Can you use that data? So it's good to start gathering some data if you're not doing that right now, then get some key performance indicators, and that'll help you to be able to find some improvement opportunities. So the other thing you can do with KPIs, you can help control your processes by making them visible. You might be wondering why I'm talking about this stuff. This course is supposed to be about continuous improvement.

Well, there is a real link Towards control and keeping KPIs in people's consciousness, and the culture of ci. So by having data visible for your team to see, like this example here where we've got delivery, our target is 100%. Our actual is 97%, or Oh, he is 80% or agile, 65%, and so on. We can look at that every day and quickly review. Now this generates a motivation to find ways to get our number to the target. So people start saying, Yeah, well, the reason that machine was late idle for two hours is because we didn't service it when we should have done and that's creates the problem.

Okay, so what do we need to do then in order to improve that? And we start to be a bit more sophisticated in our improvement opportunities. start measuring things and if possible, start putting it on the board. Another example of a review board, sales cold calls follow ups delivery. Feedback scores. So this is more of a sort of sales oriented board.

Again, you can review this every day really could look at it every day. And this starts to generate people's thinking, maybe I should do something about that that's an opportunity to increase that number from 135 to 150. Or I need to improve my follow rate, I need to do this in order to make that happen. So it's just generates ideas. The other thing that you might then do is have an action board where you can look at issues that have stopped you achieving your goal for the day or the week, and action that you're going to implement. Who's going to do it and when, in a sense, what you're doing here is you're creating some very quick continuous improvement activities.

So you're really living ci now. And this is what I mean about making it, the heartbeat of the role. Businesses where I've worked and implemented this stuff. We've had a KPI board And we've had next to it this action board. So the KPI board is discussed every day. And then the issues are identified that stopped us hitting those numbers with some actions.

Now that's in manufacturing, it might not be appropriate to do that every day in things like sales. But I think it is something that you should talk, perhaps on a weekly basis, at least. So identify some opportunities. And so again, for your sales issue or action board, you've got this product, a late delivery, what's the action? Well, we need to escalate to the carrier who's going to do that and so on. Some of these are actually improvement opportunities.

Some of them are just everyday put things right is another way to create that interest in continually improving and getting control of your processes and systems.