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brainmeasures: become kaizen certified and get promoted

Allan — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 18:48:10 +0000

Kaizen is a Japanese word and philosophy which speaks about continuous improvement throughout the life. This principle is also applied in workplace. In the workplace this word reflects about the need for continuous improvement throughout the organization right from the CEO to the assembly line worker. This principle became the action force after world war ll. This principle was developed to encourage people doing repetitive tasks and routine work to perform experiments on their work using the scientific method. This principle makes everyone in the rung of ladder to work for the company. Kaizen principles make everyone involved with the company which gives the employees a sense of togetherness with the company.

In some world class companies such as Toyota Kaizen principle is applied extensively. In these companies small group of workers improve their work environment and productivity by employing small changes. These small changes done by each group of workers improve the productivity of the company in general and it also increases the research. These small changes made by the workers of Toyota have given the leader great edge in competition and innovation. This process also eliminated the need for greater overhaul in the process field. These small groups of workers are headed by a supervisor who spears head the entire development part of the work.

This powerful idea has been applied by many multinational companies worldwide. Companies worldwide have made it a necessary for prospective employees to possess knowledge and real time application experience of kaizen in everyday work life. Getting kaizen certification should be the basic and preliminary step for management graduates. Kaizen certification also helps in understanding lean management principles much more easily. Kaizen certification helps in improving innovation from lower rung employees to the higher top level management. There are various tools, techniques and software`s which need to be understood and learnt to understand and apply kaizen management in everyday life.

There are many companies which give kaizen courseware certifications but candidate should select a recognized and reputed kaizen certificate provider. Kaizen certification should give the candidate an edge over others in his management cadre. Also employees give promotions to those employees who stay abreast with the latest developments in their field of work. Many recruitment agencies and employers are opting candidates who have additional certification from reputed certification providers. Many multinational companies are using Kaizen principles in their everyday work life and they would like to have their prospective employee understand kaizen principles.

In many of the management books you will come across kaizen and kaizen principles. Management courses may teach you kaizen principles but a certification will explain your prospective employer about your qualifications and depth of knowledge about the subject. Right from CEO to junior management everyone needs to learn about kaizen principles and their relevancy in the organization. Top level management needs to understand the kaizen principles much more than others because they decide the future course of the organization and it becomes much more important for them. There are various different kinds of sources to learn kaizen principles out of which it is better to opt course material offered by certification providers.

www.brainmeasures.com presents its easy to understand and interpret courseware cum certification of kaizen at very affordable prices, to get more information just register yourself at www.brainmeasures.com and get the benefits of this worldclass courseware at very affordable price.

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Ways To Improve Your Company’s Operations

Allan — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 18:02:55 +0000

(1) Incremental improvement: is the pursuit of improvements through a process of small, ongoing changes. This kind of improvement is associated with bottom-up, people driven continuous improvement. It is based on the belief that an organisation should never be satisfied, and should always seek to do better. Some of the techniques associated with incremental improvement include:

* quality circle-regular meetings of groups of workers to tackle quality problems and undertake improvement activities in their immediate work area. * Employee suggestion schemes- encouraging, recognising and rewarding employees for improving products and processes.

The continuous improvement approach suggests that employees have natural creativity that must be tapped into. It also acknowledges that the people who are closest to the organisation’s operating processes, the operation staff, generally know more about processes than anyone.

(2) Radical improvements: are designed to provide a one-off, major advance changes in design, operating processes and practices, and with big investments of money and other resources, and rely on the introduction of new technology. Top managers have a reliance on radical improvements to achieve performance improvements.

Radical improvement is likely to be effective when an organisation needs to completely change its performance to compete effectively or even just to survive. However it is often much more risky than continuous improvement, since it disrupts established ways of managing operations.

Before thinking about improving your company’s operations, you should be aware of what to improve in the first place. Whether you are a service organisation or you are running a manufacturing firm, there are two ways in which the performance of service delivery might be improved.

(1) Increased customer involvement Customer can become involved in designing the specification of the product/service, so that it can be customised to meet their particular needs and requirements (specification). Customers can also be used to perform some or all of the activities, such as service themselves from a restaurant (co-production). Customers become responsible for the quality of part of the operation, for example in assembling flat-pack furniture (quality control).

(2) Increased use of customer feedback to improve service quality Service operations need to understand quality from the customer’s standpoint, and to identify where operations do not meet customer expectations.

Ivoireconsultancy.org is an online outsourcing site where businesses and consultants meet to work on projects.
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Selecting the Right Improvement Project

Allan — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 18:11:32 +0000

Once an organization has come to understand how goods, products or services flow through each step of their value stream, they can then look to apply measurement techniques at various stages, to help identify where improvement opportunities exist. Identification however, is only an initial step in the improvement process, as prioritization of these opportunities must then follow to ensure that any improvement activities focus on the right projects, for the right reasons, at the right time for the organization.

As organizations begin to truly “learn” the activities they are performing, they will almost immediately realize that the numbers of improvement opportunities are far greater than anyone originally anticipated. This realization often comes as the result of applying quantitative (or even qualitative) measurement techniques, as stated above, and the analysis of the resulting data which often yields surprising, if not alarming, results. At this point, it’s not unusual for an organization to see improvement opportunities almost everywhere they look.

While this may be an exiting time for individuals that are involved in the improvement initiative, this is also a critical stage in the initiative’s evolution. For most organizations, resources are extremely scarce and managers are inherently skeptical; they are concerned with the potential impact to their production schedules and in many cases, to their bottom lines. Applying a system of prioritization to these newly discovered opportunities helps to prevent any misallocation of resources (i.e., for the right project at the wrong time) which could work to validate this sense of skepticism and may severely impact the creditability of a fledgling improvement effort.

Perceptions of urgency and importance should therefore be balanced in line with business needs and objectives, as well as financial and other considerations. Personal “pet projects” should be considered cautiously, to ensure that projects are selected based on their overall value to the organization. Such consideration should also extend to the project’s probability for success, as initial gains are vital to creating a sense of momentum around the initiative. In many organizations, projects that meet these criteria are referred to as “low hanging fruit”, because of their relative importance and ease of completion.

Continuous improvement is so-called because it is an iterative process; improvement activities are on-going, evolving and adapting. Process variance is identified, reduced, reduced further, and in the ideal case, ultimately eliminated. In order to effectively manage this process however, prioritization of improvement opportunities is necessary to ensure that improvement activities target the right projects in a sequence and manner that is consistent with the overall goals of the organization.

Mark Randig is the President and Founder of MAS Solutions LLC., a Houston Texas based consulting firm that specializes in helping companies achieve breakthrough performance by focusing on Quality Enhancement and Productivity Improvement. To get your FREE copy of Mark’s newsletter “The Quality Specialist”, go to http://www.masquality.com.

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Grow Your Profits With Continuous Process Improvement

Allan — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 20:10:46 +0000

Continuous process improvement is a systematic approach to achieve both incremental and breakthrough improvements in processes. This results in effective, better and more efficient ways in producing products or services.
Why is continuous process improvement important? The world is changing daily. If you do not keep up with the changes that are happening, you will soon find that you will not be able to keep up with the competition either.
By using continuous process improvement methods and techniques, you can determine if your business activities are the way to serve both your customers and organization.
However, you must realize that this is not a one time effort. If you want to achieve total customer satisfaction and increased sales, then continuous process improvement must be an ongoing initiative. It must become a way of life. Systematic application of continuous process improvement methods will result in it becoming second nature.
The key steps are
- Select
- Analyze
- Measure
- Improve
- Evaluate
1. Select
It is important to select the process that needs improvement. Choosing one that is already working well is a waste of time and money.
The process you choose should also be one that is important to meeting customers’ wants and needs and also be one that is critical to achieving your organization’s goals.
2. Analyze
You now need to understand how the process currently works and analyze it. This will require you to document the process as it is currently practised. This is also known as the “as is” process.
Identify all the process tasks and create a process flowchart. This will provide a visual drawing to help you to identify tasks that may not be adding value.
You will then need to decide what are the processes you want to measure.
3. Measure
Measurement is key to process improvement. If you cannot measure, you cannot manage effectively.
An initial baseline performance level must be established first. Then continue to measure the process. Only then can you determine if any improvement has happened.
Gathering baseline data is important as what you think it is and what it actually is can be quite different.
The process performance gaps need to be identified next. Non-value added tasks are an example. You will be able to identify other problem areas by reviewing your process flowchart.
Common problem areas are poor communication, lack of training, use of outdated processes, unclear responsibilities, lack of clear procedures, insufficient delegation of authority to operations personnel and lack of management availability to make key decisions.
4. Improve
Process goals must be set to increase the probability of success. Achieving goals also provides encouragement for the team and acts as a measure for management to recognize employee achievement.
By its very definition to achieve continuous process improvement, goals must be set and work must be done to meet them. Then set higher goals and continually improve on the way work is done to achieve them.
You need to find improvement needs based on the performance gaps that you would have uncovered earlier. Confirm desired process performance levels based on your customer needs. You must also decide on any supplier prerequisites to be able to meet these targets.
Now look back at your earlier analysis to identify the root causes of the process problems. Identify opportunities to streamline and modify the process. You can redesign the process to be more efficient by eliminating or simplifying steps. Or you can also modify steps within the process.
There will be a number of ideas that you might get. Decide on the best one depending on the impact it will have, the amount of funds that you have, the skills required and the resources it will require.
Get back to your original flowchart and note the changes you have made. This will give a clearer picture of how your changes will impact your process.
It is better to test your solutions and see if they work well. If you get good results, you can then go ahead and implement the changes.
It is important that data is gathered on all key process measures. This is the best way to determine if your process changes are resulting in improvements. If necessary, you may need to add new process measures.
5. Evaluate
It may seem that you have achieved process improvement, but your job is not done until you get all the data and feedback for use in evaluating the outcome.
This step is necessary to ensure that the root causes of your process problems are reduced or eliminated. You also need to confirm that your customer needs are satisfied.
Once you are satisfied that your initial efforts have been successful, it is now time to standardize it and monitor the ongoing improvement. This step is crucial to ensure that people do not return to their old way of doing things.
It is now time to communicate the improved process flow and documented procedures. Training on the improved processes need to be conducted if required. Importantly, data must continually be collected to measure and monitor to ensure that the improved process is maintained and if possible improved.
Once a changed process has been put in place, there is the question of when to disband the team. It is best to maintain the team till a point when the improved process has been well established and has become second nature to the people handling them.

Kevin Sinclair is the publisher and editor of Be Successful News, a site that provides information and articles on how to succeed in your own home or small business.
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The Elements of Continually Improving Your Business Model

Allan — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 19:07:47 +0000

Continuing business model innovation is the most valuable process that any enterprise an engage in. But establishing the process is a problem for most leaders to take on. Why? They’ve never see anyone do it, and they have no personal experience.

To help overcome that problem, this article describes the key elements that such a process requires. With this template in mind, some leaders will be able to design and engage in the appropriate activities.

Here are the four elements in continuing business model innovation:

1. Understand and follow the current business model well. — Employ the optimum way that goods and services should be supplied now, by informing all stakeholders about what needs to be done to deliver the most benefits.

2. Understand and implement the next business model improvement. — Specify the next innovation to provide more stakeholder benefits through goods and services and how the transition will occur.

3. Understand and use a business model innovation vision. — The ideal benefits to deliver to stakeholders in your industry, which is used to test the appropriateness of developing future generations of potential business model innovations.

4. Ongoing design and testing of potential business model innovations. — Vision-defined probes and tests to elicit reactions to providing new benefits and various ways of supplying them.

A far more valuable approach to continual business model innovation also describes more than one future generation of innovations in terms of the second element.

For each of the first three elements of continuing business model innovations, you need to identify seven key elements — the who, what, when, where, why, how, and how much — viewed from the perspective of all direct and indirect stakeholders. Their combination of seven elements defines either a business model or a business model innovation vision:

1. “Who?” defines all the stakeholders you are serving or affecting.

2. “What?” describes the offerings and their benefits and negative influences that affect each stakeholder.

3. “When?” captures the timing of offerings’ effects on stakeholders.

4. “Where?” identifies the location for delivering the benefits and other impacts.

5. “Why?” gives the rationale for providing the stakeholder benefits you deliver.

6. “How?” explains your method of making your offerings available and being compensated for them.

7. “How much?” states the price customers and users pay and incur.

Why is it important to know what these seven elements are? By examining these areas, organizations will be able to focus on places where important benefits may be added.

Donald Mitchell is chairman and CEO of Mitchell and Company, a strategy and financial consulting firm in Weston, MA. He is coauthor of seven books including Adventures of an Optimist, The Irresistible Growth Enterprise, and The Ultimate Competitive Advantage. You can find free tips for accomplishing 20 times more by registering at: www.2000percentsolution.com
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6 Easy Tips to Continually Improve Your Blog

Allan — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 19:38:44 +0000

While improving your blog may seem like a daunting task, I will show you 6 easy tips that will improve your blog in no time at all. These are just a few of many that can accomplish this task, but are ones that I use to improve my blogs and they will work over and over again.Comment at related blogs – This is probably the biggest thing you can do to improve and promote your blog. It is very simple. Just make comments on other blogs that are related to yours. When you make a comment, it is standard to leave your name and URL. If you leave a relevant comment, maybe even with some free advice, other readers will visit your blog to see what you are all about. Write a weekly “best of” post – It is fairly simple to do. Make a weekly post that spotlights the best posts that you have read on other peoples blogs. By linking directly to the post, you create trackback links on other blogs and this will result in new readers to your blog. This is sort of works like a backwards blog comment.Be sure to link – A very important persona of your blog is the links that you provide. The more link outs you have the more your readers perceive it as more authoritative and valuable. It also shows that you are not trying to hide something and also show that you put credit where credit is due.Improve your blog’s look – Why use the same templates and designs that many other blogs are using? Use a design that is totally different than everyone else and people will remember “that cool looking blog” that they had seen earlier and come back to it. If you can not find a unique template or don’t know how to change your design, consider outsourcing to have it done. Know your readers – Just because you have a blog, don’t put yourself on a pedestal above everyone else. Get to know your visitors by responding to their comments, become friends with them and in return they will spread the word about you and your blog. Create reader friendly content – Make sure that your content speaks to all of your potential audience. Make it entertaining and interesting for all to read. You want your content to be shared, if it reads like a tech manual, readers are going to give up on it let alone share it.Remember that blogging is supposed to be fun, for you and your readers. I hope this will help you improve your blog and take it to the next level.

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Craig Andrews runs a successful Internet Business Blog who has written over 2017 articles in print and 17 published e-books.
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Quantitative Marketing: Continual Improvements to Your Strategy (Part 6 of 6)

Allan — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:34:18 +0000

We’re back with our last post of this series on quantitative marketing analytics. The last two blogs we posted were special entries to answer questions from our followers on Twitter. This returns to and concludes the marketing analytics series we’ve been working on.

In part 1 of our series, we showed that most organizations work like a youth soccer team: one is focused, one is upset, most are confused; and while a few are excited to be there, they have no idea what’s going on. See a visual on YouTube.

Over the past several blog posts, we’ve endeavored to show how your organization can perform like these insanely skilled fellows.

That’s incredible coordination. What separates clip 1 from clip 2 is their level of understanding. The first team has only a rudimentary understanding of what they are supposed to be doing and how to act in sync. The second team acts like a well-oiled machine, because they have a common vision that they understand how to translate into results.

We’ve used the vinyl wall art industry as a case study, highlighting specifically www.ellemenopea.com. Each post developed in some detail each of the following steps in the marketing analytics cycle (the text next to the boxes is from the case study):

We proved that by communicating the corporate vision to all employees, and then linking that vision to measurable goals, and then executing the strategy and monitoring progress – again communicating to the organization – that Ellemenopea would be much more able to achieve what they wanted. By linking the high-level vision into daily operations, bottom-line improvements can be made.

As you do the same things in your organization, you can achieve similar results. However, we understand that the difficulty of the above process comes not in setting the vision or goals, but in measuring those and adjusting the strategy accordingly. Our next posts will dive deeper into how to become a company driven by analytics.

Ryan Nokes is the Chief Marketing Officer of Vault Analytics, a firm that uses marketing analytics to help companies develop and implement measurable marketing programs. Ryan specializes in working with small and medium-sized businesses, as well as new start-ups to improve their marketing strategies, build brand awareness, and increase their client base. Contact him for a free consultation on how to increase your marketing ROI.
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Data Usability for Continuous Improvement According to Hertzler Systems

Allan — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 18:27:33 +0000

Hertzler Systems has been a leader in Statistical Process Control, SPC Software and Six Sigma for over twenty years, and serves a diverse customer base in service, transactional and manufacturing environments; clients include BAE Systems, Crown Audio, IDEX Corporation, McCormick & Company, Inc., Hormel Foods Corporation, Titleist & Footjoy, IDEX Corporation, and TaylorMade-Adidas Golf Worldwide. The company’s software and services enable clients to connect, collect, and analyze data; building a data infrastructure for making data-driven decisions. These capabilities help clients to reduce costs, cycle time and errors, and increase profitability.

Hertzler Systems Inc., a leading provider of SPC, Operational Intelligence and Manufacturing Intelligence software, announced the launch of a company blog, “The Data Heads.” This blog provides insight into the role of data in empowering business transformation, with topics that range from using Key Process Indicator (KPI) dashboards in supporting organizational change, to applying Statistical Process Control (SPC) techniques to drive variation out of any process. The blog is published at www.hertzler.com/blog/dataheads/.

According to Evan Miller, co-founder of Hertzler Systems, “The other day I was showing a colleague the Data Cost / Value Matrix and describing the four aspects of data value. He made a comment that got me thinking. I was explaining the fourth aspect of data value: Data Visibility and Transparency when he said: “For my customers, transparency isn’t the key issue. The biggest issue is that they are drowning in data they can’t use. If you can make the data they already have more usable then you’re providing value.”

The more Miller thought about it, however, he realized that all four aspects of data value have to do with making data more usable.

Product Release and Control is the minimal, entry level approach to making data more usable. Data for product release and control validates that our products are acceptable for shipment. It may be accept/reject type data, and may be based on either measurements or some other kind of pass/fail criteria, and is based on the voice of the customer. Product release and control is necessary, but not sufficient.

Process Control makes data more usable because we’re relying on statistical theory to help us understand when we should react and when we should leave things alone. Process Control empowers us to react immediately to instability and unexpected variation.

Using data for Continuous Process Improvement makes the data even more usable. Miller asserts, “When you can close the loop on processes and drive continuous improvement, you get significant returns on your efforts. Closing the loop means being able to find hidden sources of variation and correlation between key input and key output variables.”

The last aspect – Data Visibility & Transparency – adds value because when data is readily visible across all levels in an organization, it changes the way people work.

About Hertzler Systems Inc.

Hertzler Systems provides seamless, accurate data acquisition solutions that drive business transformation. The company provides the leading real-time data acquisition and analytics SPC software, the GainSeeker Suite. This system is best used by lean and progressive companies, connecting with devices and other information systems, collecting data and alarming key personnel when problems arise; this technology allows organizations to analyze data for root cause problems, converting data into knowledge.

Hertzler Systems Inc.

www.hertzler.com

Adrienne DePew

Communications Manager

info@hertzler.com

800.958.2709

Professional Marketing Firm for the Manufacturing Community and Manufacturing Journalist to most manufacturing magazines
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Continuous Improvement Requires Data Usability According To Hertzler Systems

Allan — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 18:36:44 +0000

The more Miller thought about it, however, he realized that all four aspects of data value have to do with making data more usable.

The last aspect – Data Visibility & Transparency – adds value because when data is readily visible across all levels in an organization, it changes the way people work.

About Hertzler Systems Inc.

Hertzler Systems Inc.

www.hertzler.com

Adrienne DePew

Communications Manager

info@hertzler.com

800.958.2709

Professional Marketing Firm for the Manufacturing Community and Manufacturing Journalist to most manufacturing magazines
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Datacraft Solutions Finds Practice Continuous Improvement Lean Answers

Allan — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 21:08:04 +0000

According to Stephen Parker, CEO of Datacraft Solutions, “The Datacraft Solutions team believes in Continuous Improvement (CI), not only in manufacturing operations and supply chain management, but also in the Lean tools offered to our customers. CI in inventory and supply-chain management means the continuing pursuit of higher inventory turns, less stockouts and improved on time delivery in a challenging and ever-changing business landscape. This, in turn, requires fine tuning of the Kanban card-sets to reflect Sales and Operations Plans (S&OP), forecasts and a combination of other demand management factors.”

Kaizen (Japanese for “improvement”) is a philosophy that focuses on continuous improvement throughout all aspects of life. When applied to the workplace, Kaizen activities continually improve all functions of a business, from manufacturing to management and from the CEO to the assembly line workers. By improving standardized activities and processes, Kaizen aims to eliminate waste, Lean manufacturing.

Kaizen is a daily activity, the purpose of which goes beyond simple productivity improvement. It is also a process that, when done correctly, humanizes the workplace, eliminates overly hard work (“muri”), and teaches people how to perform experiments on their work using the scientific method and how to learn to spot and eliminate waste in business processes.

To be most effective kaizen must operate with three principles in place:

The challenge is to do this in a simple process with minimal administrative overhead, and quickly. Working with Lean Thought Leaders and after five years of advanced research and development, we have created the industry’s first card releveling tool: Intelligent Card Leveling (ICL). Intelligent Card Leveling will be deployed this year in the third quarter.

Datacraft Solutions (www.datacraftsolutions.com) delivers a revolutionary digital kanban process of automation solutions to lean manufacturers through a secure Internet gateway, eliminating the need to install and maintain a complex IT infrastructure. The company has experienced significant growth in the past two years by eliminating complicated, expensive, time-intensive software implementations as well as extensive training regimens and the need for internal support. Datacraft Solutions’ replenishment supply chain digital kanban system (Signum) allows customers to access and utilize powerful lean benefits immediately for a low, predictable monthly fee. Services are scalable so manufacturers can design an appropriate digital kanban solution.

Datacraft Solutions

www.datacraftsolutions.com

Sonja Foust

sfoust@datacraftsolutions.net

800-819-5326

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