Delays in business processes account for one of the biggest reasons that companies fail to consistently deliver on time, in my opinion. I’ve been to many businesses over the years where the inability to take the next step in a timely manner has been the primary cause for poor overall on time delivery performance.
If you’re looking for some ideas on how to improve your productivity and on time delivery performance for 2025 then how about this – we get all of our business processes flowing? The same approach works well for team meetings, which I know can be both a source of great value and great waste for many organisations.
Think recipes
When you follow a recipe in a cook book, the first things you see is a list of ingredients. If you’ve read my book The Reverse Fishbone, you’ll know exactly what I mean. But, what do you do? Do you wait until each step in the recipe to locate the ingredients? Or, do you gather all of the ingredients and then start the first step?
Hopefully you said that you gather all of the ingredients up front. Or, if you’re really showing off, you might have said “I have my kitchen arranged so efficiently that each ingredient is available at the point of cooking within twenty seconds”. You get the idea.
What about your meetings and steps in a process? Do you have a defined set of ingredients for each step? Does everyone know what they need to bring with them in order to experience smooth running?
What’s missing when you think about preparation like this? Can you draw up a list of changes and create an action plan to improve all of this?
Three weeks to three hours
Whilst thinking through what I could write for my final message on this website for 2024, I reflected on the journey for one of my first consulting clients. Their manufacturing delivery performance was struggling when I met this. This was primarily because the office side of their order fulfilment process was so clogged up with delays. It took them ages just to get their order ready to start manufacturing.
We quickly mapped the process, identified the ‘ingredients’ required for each stage and within a week their office process dropped from nearly three weeks to a record time of three hours (their average was around one day). As you could imagine, a streamlined front end led to production starting on time which helped them to improve their on time delivery performance. Long story short, their customers noticed and then awarded them more contracts as a result.
Flow, flow, flow
If any of the above resonates with you then I urge you to take up this challenge as an improvement theme for your business in 2025. The rewards are often huge for such a small change in approach.
Either way, I wish you all the best for the festive season and hope that your improvement projects in 2025 yield some incredible results.