Operational Excellence (Lets just go to the doctors)

Too many companies read a book, go to Toyota or get bullied by their customers into “doing lean”. Invariably these companies fail as they copy another organisations approach. We all know our people are different and cultures individual –so why copy?

We have developed the S A Partners improvement journey and coupled this with Peter Hines’s lean business model to help us understand where an organisation is on its change journey. We have defined the maturity conditions from reactive to way of life to enable us to correctly diagnose the organisation and what needs to be done to improve it.

Often, mature solutions are copied without the management rigor and commitment behind them, they thus lack the robust foundations to make them stick. In addition, we see companies doing too much too soon, throwing everything at the organisation instead of focusing on the key issues. Finally the worst disease of all is the Company that is “doing lean” because it has to. For me we need to commit or stop, Lean can be fantastic, but don’t play with it.

Would you take a headache tablet to fix a broken leg?