Frankenstein wins Tour de France!

Consider the enterprise excellence model to be a body – as a model it creates exceptional customer value, as a body it creates healthy happy life.

The body is made up of systems that enable life to happen. Digestion, movement, growth, thought, breathing etc. All these bodily systems have to happen in an intergrated way in order to enable life.

The enterprise excellence model is the same, it consists of systems that all need to be integrated in order to realise customer satisfaction. Strategy formation is thought, order fulfilment is movement, exercise is maintenance etc.

A body and a model is only as strong as its weakest performing parts. If a body does not eat it dies, if an enterprise excellence model has poor sales growth it dies too.

We can take the analogy further in order for our bodily systems to work they require tools and tasks. Take eating – we use tools to eat our breakfast- we have developed eating as a form of standard work and become competent in the use of spoons and tea cups.

The enterprise excellence model requires the use of strongly defined tasks and tools to enable its systems, we need to ensure the competence of our people to perform these tasks.

Consider Dr Frankenstein’s creation. You steal the best systems from other bodies and set them up into one body- does it work? As I remember he went a little bit mad and ended up being chased by a load of pitch fork totting villagers, all intent on giving frankie a good old roasting- very similar experience to my own experiences of 1990’s automotive component manufacturing. Probably not we need to develop specific systems that enable us to satisfy the needs of our customers, grow and train your organisation so it is capable of producing what the customer needs now and in the future. Robbing systems from other organisations rarely work without customisation.

Finally, Tour de France riders spend hours analysing their training, nutrition and performance to enable them to carry out a super human sport. So system performance data is also critical- consider leading measures to take us into the future as well as lagging measures to tell us about our past.

So if Dr Frankenstein’s monster takes the yellow jersey at next year’s tour, please feel free to hurl as much abuse as possible at me.

Simon Grogan