Catalyst Consulting provides a guide to Everyday Operational Excellence, what it is and how to take the necessary steps to achieve it. [box]This article has been published in Fresh Business Thinking, 7th June 2016, and can be found here.[/box] All too often the discipline of business management is divided along the lines of binary decision…
Catalyst Consulting explores the benefits of using Lean Six Sigma methodology in the public sector, using their Lean Six Sigma award winning North Ayrshire council project as a case study. This is neither the time nor the place to rehearse the rights and wrongs of the government policy of austerity, but it is probably worth pointing out…
If you’re in business then your ultimate aim is to be as successful as possible, and this entails streamlining the processes via which you deliver your business to the point at which mistakes are reduced to the absolute minimum. In some cases, such as basic manufacturing, this may seem like a simple task,…
If it was easy to distil the art of good management to a few hundred words of advice then there’d be no such thing as a bad manager and, as anyone who has ever worked in virtually any kind of organisation or business will tell you, there quite definitely is such a thing as a…
How do you work? ‘Hard’ will undoubtedly be the answer you give to that question, since everybody thinks they work hard and, indeed, most of us do. There are exceptions, of course, and if you’re reading this in the workplace then the chances are that you just raised your eyes from the screen to glance…
Throughout a DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, Control) improvement project, developing a storyboard summary of the key decisions and outputs helps you review progress and share what you’ve learnt. A storyboard builds up as you work your way through your project by capturing the key outputs and findings from the DMAIC phases. And it also…
In much the way as Lean methodology and Six Sigma synergise into Lean Six Sigma to form a perfect partnership, so, too does Lean Six Sigma with the EFQM Model and its fundamental concepts. Let’s start by looking at the relationship between Lean and Six Sigma and the formulation of Lean Six Sigma. We need…
Take a tour through 40, Acacia Avenue, the House of Quality, it’s at the heart of the road to better design Last time we provided a brief introduction to the DMADV (Define, Measure, Analyse, Design and Verify) method for innovation and design. This time, we’ll take a tour through the House of Quality, otherwise known…
When designing a new product, service or process I’m reminded of ‘Lean on Me’, the old Bill Withers song, which opens with the lines: “Sometimes in our lives We all have pain, we all have sorrow” At work, this pain and sorrow is often caused by poorly performing processes that are full of waste and…
How are you doing with your customer satisfaction ratings? I’ve been taking a look at some Net Promoter Score benchmarking results recently, and it seems that not too many organisations are floating their customers’ boats. You probably know that NPS is based on the fundamental perspective that every company’s customers can be divided into three…