Author: Adam Payne

3 Signs You’re Managing a Group of Individuals (Not a Team)

Posted on by Adam Payne

Have you ever sat in a team meeting and had the strange feeling that you’re not actually in a team at all? You look around the room, or at the faces on the screen, and you see a collection of talented, hardworking people. They’re all employed by the same company, they all report to you, but the connection just isn’t there. It feels more like a loose collection of freelancers who happen to share a building and a Wi-Fi password.

Let’s be honest, it’s a common feeling. We use the word ‘team’ so often it’s almost lost its meaning. The people on the shop floor are a team. The sales department is a team. The folks in accounts, they’re a team too. But are they really? Or are they just a group of individuals who have been assigned to the same department?

The distinction is more than just semantics. In the world of manufacturing, where every second of downtime, every rejected batch, and every missed deadline hits the bottom line, the difference is everything. A group of individuals can get a job done, sure. But a true team, a cohesive unit that trusts each other and moves with a shared purpose, can achieve phenomenal things. They solve problems faster, they innovate, they hold each other to a higher standard, and critically, they make the workplace a place people actually want to be. Their morale is higher, and your staff turnover is lower.

We’ve spent years working with businesses just like yours, from precision engineering firms to large scale food production plants, and we’ve seen this play out time and time again. The difference between a high performing operation and one that’s constantly firefighting often comes down to the health of its teams. That’s why we built our entire workshop around what we call the five pillars of team health. Things like having a genuine Shared Purpose, fostering Psychological Safety, and ensuring absolute Clarity in decisions.

So, how do you know which side of the line you’re on? How can you tell if your ‘team’ is just a group in disguise? It’s not always obvious, but there are telltale signs. Today, I want to walk you through three of the most common ones I see out in the field. Think of this as a quick health check for your team.

Sign 1: The Invisible Walls of Siloed Work

You know what we’re talking about. It’s the classic ‘us and them’ mentality. The office versus the shop floor. Engineering versus production. Day shift versus night shift. Sales versus, well, pretty much everyone else. This is siloed work in its purest form. It’s when individuals or subgroups operate within their own little bubbles, guarding their information and focusing only on their specific tasks, with little to no thought for how their work impacts anyone else down the line.

We remember visiting a factory a while back that made bespoke metal components. The sales team were brilliant at their jobs. They were hitting their targets, bringing in huge orders. The problem? They were promising clients ridiculously tight turnaround times without ever stepping onto the production floor to see what the actual capacity was. The production team, in turn, saw the sales team as clueless suits who just threw impossible jobs over the wall. They wouldn’t proactively share updates on machine maintenance or supply chain delays because, in their minds, “sales wouldn’t understand anyway.”

The result was chaos. Constant emergencies, stressed out operators, furious customers, and a blame game that was frankly exhausting to watch. Each group was doing their job, but they weren’t working together. They were a group of individuals, not a team.

So why does this happen? To be honest, it’s often a natural side effect of growth. As you add more people and create departments, specialisation is necessary. But without a strong, unifying force, that specialisation curdles into isolation. The root cause is almost always a lack of a clear, compelling, and constantly communicated Shared Purpose. When the sales team’s primary goal is just ‘hit the sales target’ and the production team’s goal is just ‘minimise defects’, their objectives can actually end up in direct conflict. A true shared purpose, something like ‘To be the UK’s most reliable supplier of high-quality components’, forces them to work together. The sales team can’t sell reliability if the production team can’t deliver it.

Symptoms to watch for:

  • Fragmented Communication: Important information is shared via long, confusing email chains instead of quick conversations. You hear “I sent them an email” used as a defence, not as a form of collaboration.
  • Knowledge Hoarding: People become gatekeepers of information. An experienced engineer might not share a clever workaround they’ve discovered because that knowledge gives them a sense of job security or power.
  • Duplicated Effort: You find out that two different people or departments were working on solving the same problem, completely unaware of each other’s efforts. It’s a colossal waste of time and resources.

The consequences are severe. Productivity plummets due to rework and inefficiency. Morale takes a nosedive because nobody feels like they’re on the same side. Innovation dies, because new ideas can’t survive the journey across departmental walls.

Quick Diagnostic Questions:

  • Does my sales team truly understand the current pressures and constraints on the production floor?
  • When a problem arises, is the first instinct to pick up the phone and talk to the relevant person, or to write a formal email to cover one’s back?
  • Can every single person in your team articulate the company’s number one priority for this quarter in the same way?

If the answers to these make you a bit uncomfortable, you might have some invisible walls that need knocking down. It starts with establishing and over communicating that shared purpose.

Sign 2: The Toxic Air of a Blame Culture

Picture this. A batch of products has failed a quality control check. You call a meeting to figure out what went wrong. What’s the mood in the room? Is it a collective, curious, “Okay, let’s break this down and see what we can learn?” Or is it a tense, defensive affair where everyone is subtly, or not so subtly, trying to prove it wasn’t their fault?

If it’s the latter, you’re dealing with a blame culture. This is perhaps the most destructive sign that your team is just a group of individuals looking out for themselves. In a blame culture, mistakes are not seen as learning opportunities; they are seen as indictments of competence. Finger pointing becomes a survival skill. People spend more energy on deflecting blame than on finding solutions.

This behaviour is a direct result of a lack of Psychological Safety. That’s a term that gets thrown around a lot, but it’s actually very simple. It’s the shared belief that it is safe to take interpersonal risks. It’s the feeling that you can speak up, ask a ‘stupid’ question, admit a mistake, or challenge an idea without fear of being punished, humiliated, or shamed.

When that safety is absent, people don’t raise their hands to say, “I think I might have mis calibrated that machine,” or “I was feeling rushed and I skipped a step.” Why would they? Admitting a mistake feels like painting a target on your own back. Instead, you get a lot of, “Well, the raw materials we’ve been getting lately haven’t been up to scratch,” or “The night shift must have left the settings like that.”

The operational impact is terrifying, especially in manufacturing. Small issues that could be fixed easily if caught early are hidden or ignored until they become massive, expensive problems. A machine that’s making a funny noise, a process that seems inefficient, a safety concern… all of it gets swept under the carpet because nobody wants to be the messenger who gets shot. Communication grinds to a halt. People only tell you what they think you want to hear.

And the emotional impact? It’s draining. It creates an atmosphere of anxiety and mistrust. People stop helping each other because helping someone could mean becoming associated with their mistakes. Your best people, the ones who are proactive and want to solve problems, will be the first to leave. They’ll go somewhere they can actually make a difference without constantly watching their back.

Recognising and Addressing Blame Culture:

  • Listen to the language: Pay attention to how people talk about problems. Is it “we have an issue” or “they made a mistake”? Do people use phrases like “to be clear, my part of the process was fine”?
  • Watch your own reactions: How do you, as a manager, react when someone brings you bad news or admits a mistake? If you show even a hint of frustration or jump to conclusions, you are reinforcing the idea that it’s not safe to be honest. Your first words should always be something like, “Okay, thank you for telling me. Let’s figure this out together.”
  • Reframe mistakes as data: Actively separate the person from the problem. Run post mortems on issues that are genuinely blameless. Focus entirely on the process. What can we learn? What can we change in the system to make sure this doesn’t happen again?

Building psychological safety is the only antidote to a blame culture. It’s the foundation of trust, and without trust, you don’t have a team. You just have a room full of people waiting for someone else to mess up.

Sign 3: The Whiplash of Inconsistent Decision Making

The third sign is a bit more subtle, but just as damaging. It’s when the team feels like they’re constantly changing direction, with decisions being made in an erratic or unclear way. One week, the absolute top priority is reducing waste. The next, it’s all about hitting a specific production number, even if it means waste goes up. One manager approves a certain type of overtime; another rejects the exact same request a week later.

This inconsistency creates a kind of strategic whiplash. It’s confusing, it’s frustrating, and it kills momentum stone dead. Teams thrive on clarity and predictability. They need to understand the rules of the game and trust that those rules aren’t going to change without warning. When decisions feel random or contradictory, it erodes trust in leadership and makes it impossible for the team to align their efforts.

What are the root causes? It’s rarely because managers are deliberately trying to be confusing. More often, it stems from a lack of Clarity and Alignment at a fundamental level.

  • Unclear Roles: Who is actually responsible for making which decisions? When it’s not clearly defined, you either get decision paralysis where no one wants to make a call, or you get multiple people making conflicting decisions. Who has the final say on shipping a product that’s borderline on quality? The shift supervisor? The quality manager? You? If the team doesn’t know, the answer will change depending on who is on shift.
  • No Decision Framework: Decisions are made based on gut feeling, or who shouted the loudest in the meeting. There’s no consistent process for evaluating options, weighing trade offs, or communicating the final decision and the ‘why’ behind it.
  • Fluctuating Priorities: This is a big one. Of course, business priorities have to shift sometimes. But when they seem to change every week based on the latest crisis, the team stops taking any of them seriously. They adopt a ‘this too shall pass’ mentality and stop investing their energy in new initiatives, because they assume the goalposts will just move again.

You can spot this pattern in your meetings. Do you find yourself re-litigating the same decisions over and over again? Do people leave a meeting with different interpretations of what was actually decided? Does the team often execute a plan, only to be told later that it wasn’t what leadership wanted? These are all symptoms of inconsistent decision making.

The effect is that your team becomes passive. They stop taking initiative because they’re afraid of doing the ‘wrong’ thing. They wait to be told exactly what to do, which slows everything down and kills any sense of ownership or engagement.

To fix this, you need to bring clarity. Define who owns which decisions (a simple RACI chart can work wonders). Establish a basic framework for how key decisions are made. And most importantly, when you set a priority, stick with it long enough for it to gain traction. Make sure everyone, from the newest apprentice to the most senior operator, understands not just what they’re doing, but why they’re doing it.

From a Group to a Team

So there you have it. Siloed work, a blame culture, and inconsistent decision making. If you’re nodding along and recognising some of these signs in your own workplace, don’t panic. The first step is always awareness. Seeing these things for what they are, symptoms of a weak team foundation, is a huge part of the battle.

These three signs are not isolated issues. They are deeply interconnected. A lack of Shared Purpose leads to silos. Those silos, combined with a lack of Psychological Safety, create the perfect breeding ground for a Blame Culture. And all of this is made worse by a lack of Clarity, which results in inconsistent decisions that leave everyone feeling confused and disengaged.

The good news is, none of this is permanent. You can absolutely transform a disconnected group of individuals into a high performing, resilient, and engaged team. It’s not about finding a magic bullet or doing a one off ‘team building’ day. It’s about intentionally building the foundations, the pillars of genuine team health. It’s about creating an environment where people want to collaborate, feel safe to be honest, and are clear on the direction of travel.

If you’re ready to stop firefighting the symptoms and start building a truly healthy team from the ground up, we can help. Our High Performing Teams Training is designed specifically for the challenges of the manufacturing sector. We go deep into the five pillars of team health and give you practical, no nonsense tools to build a culture of trust, clarity, and shared purpose.

Take a look at what we offer. It might just be the most important decision you make for your team, and your business, this year. – Click Here

Measuring What Matters—A Simple Introduction to OEE

Posted on by Adam Payne

Ever have one of those days on the factory floor? The kind where everything feels like it’s moving, the lights are on, the noise is right, but at the end of the shift, the numbers just don’t add up. You’ve produced less than you’d planned, and you’re not entirely sure why. Was it that little stoppage on Line 2? Did the changeover on the CNC machine take longer than usual? Or was there a bad batch that had to be scrapped? It feels like you’re playing whack-a-mole with problems, fixing one thing just as another pops up.

To be honest, that’s the reality for a lot of manufacturers. We’re swimming in data yet starved for wisdom. We have spreadsheets, dashboards, and daily reports, but they often create more noise than clarity. The challenge isn’t a lack of information; it’s the lack of a simple, actionable metric that tells you the real story of what’s happening with your equipment.

This is where Overall Equipment Effectiveness, or OEE, comes in. It’s not some overly complex system that requires a team of consultants to implement. Think of it as a powerful lens—a single, elegant percentage that cuts through the noise and shows you exactly where you are losing productivity. It’s a tool that helps you stop guessing and start making targeted, impactful improvements. If you’re ready to understand your production floor in a way you never have before, let’s talk about OEE.

What is OEE?

Let’s get straight to it. Overall Equipment Effectiveness is a metric that measures how well a manufacturing operation is utilised. In simple terms, it tells you what percentage of your planned production time is truly productive. A perfect OEE score of 100% means you are manufacturing only good parts, as fast as possible, with no stop time.

Of course, nobody gets 100%. That’s not the point. The point of OEE is to give you a comprehensive picture of your machine’s health and performance.

Why does this one metric matter so much? Because in manufacturing, problems are rarely isolated. A machine that runs slow might also be producing more defects. A machine that breaks down frequently isn’t running at all, let alone at speed. Before OEE, teams would often argue about the “real” problem. The maintenance team might blame operators for running the machine too hard, while the production team blames maintenance for lengthy repairs. Quality might point fingers at both. Sound familiar?

OEE ends these debates. It combines the three most critical factors of production into a single number. It rolls up Availability (is the machine running?), Performance (is it running as fast as it should?), and Quality (is it making good parts?) into one clear score. By doing this, it forces everyone to look at the same picture. It simplifies the complexity of the factory floor into a universal language that everyone from the operator to the managing director can understand. It’s not about blame; it’s about a shared understanding of reality. And from that shared reality, real improvement can begin.

Breaking Down the OEE Components

OEE’s power comes from its three core components. Understanding each one individually is the key to understanding your overall score and, more importantly, knowing where to focus your improvement efforts.

Availability: Are We Running?

Availability answers the simple question: When we were scheduled to be running, were we actually running? It accounts for any time the machine should be producing but isn’t. This is what we call downtime.

Downtime comes in two main flavours. There’s planned downtime, which is part of the normal schedule—things like planned maintenance, team briefings, or scheduled tea breaks. These are necessary and are usually excluded from the OEE calculation because you never intended to produce during that time.

Then there’s the killer: unplanned downtime. This is the stuff that wrecks your day and your production targets. It’s the unexpected breakdown, the tool change that takes twice as long as it should, the material shortage that leaves a machine sitting idle. I remember standing by a packaging machine once, watching it sit silent for forty minutes because we’d run out of the right size of cardboard boxes. That’s lost availability. Every minute of unplanned downtime is a minute of potential production you will never get back.

To improve availability, you need to ruthlessly track and attack these unplanned stops. Are your changeovers slow? Time them, analyse them, and create a standard process. Are you suffering from frequent breakdowns? It might be time to look at a preventative maintenance schedule. Is it material starvation? That’s a signal to look upstream at your supply chain or internal logistics.

Performance: Are We Running Fast Enough?

So, the machine is running. Great. But is it running as fast as it’s capable of? That’s what the Performance component measures. It accounts for any factors that cause the machine to run at less than its maximum possible speed, which we often call the ideal cycle time.

Performance losses can be a bit trickier to spot than a full-on breakdown. They are often the “death by a thousand cuts” of manufacturing. This includes things like minor stops, where the machine halts for a few seconds to clear a jam or an operator makes a small adjustment. One or two of these don’t seem like a big deal, but when they happen hundreds of times a day, the lost time is staggering. I once worked with a bottling line where a sensor would occasionally misread a bottle cap, pausing the line for two seconds. It happened so often the operators just accepted it as “how the machine runs.” Once we started tracking it, we realised it was costing us nearly an hour of production every single day.

Performance loss also includes reduced speed, where the machine is intentionally run slower than its designed rate. Maybe it’s because the raw material isn’t quite right, or because operators are trying to prevent jams and defects. Whatever the reason, you’re not getting the full throughput the asset is capable of. Identifying these speed losses is the first step to understanding why they are happening and how you can get back to your ideal run rate.

Quality: Are We Making Good Parts?

Finally, we get to Quality. You can be running all day (great Availability) at top speed (great Performance), but if half of what you’re producing has to be thrown in the skip, what was the point? The Quality component measures the proportion of good parts you produce compared to the total number of parts you started.

This is often tracked as First Pass Yield, which is a fancy way of saying “parts that were made right the first time without needing any rework.” Every part that is scrapped, rejected, or sent for rework represents a massive waste. You’ve already spent the money on the raw materials, the machine time, the energy, and the labour. Creating a defective part isn’t just a loss of that unit; it’s a loss of all the resources that went into it.

The impact of poor quality goes beyond the factory walls. It affects customer satisfaction, brand reputation, and can lead to costly returns. Improving quality often involves looking at your process control. Are your machine settings correct? Are your operators properly trained? Is the quality of your raw material consistent? By tracking your quality rate as part of OEE, you shine a bright light on the true cost of defects and create a powerful incentive to get it right the first time, every time.

How Is OEE Calculated?

Now for the math bit. Don’t worry, it’s refreshingly simple. The formula is:

OEE = Availability x Performance x Quality

Each component is expressed as a percentage, and you multiply them together to get your final OEE score. Let’s walk through a quick, practical example.

Imagine you have a machine scheduled to run for an 8-hour shift, which is 480 minutes.

  1. Calculate Availability:
  1. Planned production time is 480 mins – 60 mins of planned downtime = 420 minutes.
  2. Unplanned downtime is 60 minutes, leaving 360 minutes of actual run time.
  3. Availability = (Actual Run Time / Planned Production Time) = 360 / 420 = 85.7%
  1. Calculate Performance:
  1. Ideal run rate is 100 parts per hour. In 360 minutes, it should produce 600 parts.
  2. It produced 540 parts due to minor stops and slow running.
  3. Performance = (Total Parts Produced / Potential Parts in Run Time) = 540 / 600 = 90%
  1. Calculate Quality:
  1. Out of 540 parts, 27 were defective, leaving 513 good parts.
  2. Quality = (Good Parts / Total Parts Produced) = 513 / 540 = 95%
  1. Calculate Overall OEE:
  1. OEE = 85.7% x 90% x 95% = 73.3%

A score of 73.3% means you only made good products for about 73 minutes out of every 100 planned minutes. The calculation immediately shows where to focus—here, Availability is the biggest issue.

Why OEE Drives Improvement

OEE isn’t just a report card; it’s a diagnostic tool. It uncovers the hidden factory, the untapped potential within your current assets.

When you see a low OEE score, ask “Which component is hurting us the most?” The data points the way.

  • If Availability is low, focus on reducing downtime through better maintenance or faster changeovers.
  • If Performance is the issue, investigate minor stops or slow cycles.
  • If Quality is dragging you down, launch a quality improvement initiative to reduce defects.

I’ve seen this work time and time again. At one food processing plant, management thought slow speeds were the problem. But OEE data revealed Availability was the real issue due to long, disorganised changeovers. Instead of buying new machines, they streamlined the process, cutting changeover time in half and boosting OEE by 15 points.

Getting Started With OEE

Start small. You don’t need expensive software on day one. Use a clipboard, stopwatch, and calculator.

  1. Pick One Machine: Choose your bottleneck machine—the one that governs your line’s pace.
  2. Collect Data Simply: Work with operators to log downtime events and count parts.
  3. Be Honest and Consistent: Record real numbers, not ideal ones.
  4. Calculate and Communicate: Share results with the team, post charts, and ask for ideas.

Once you have a baseline, prioritise the biggest losses. Start small improvement projects, celebrate wins, and move to the next issue. This is continuous improvement.

Measure What Matters

In a busy manufacturing environment, it’s easy to get lost in the daily chaos. It’s easy to feel like you’re working incredibly hard just to stand still. OEE provides a compass. It simplifies the incredible complexity of your operations into one, meaningful number that tells you where you are and points you in the direction you need to go.

By focusing on Availability, Performance, and Quality, you stop chasing symptoms and start addressing the root causes of lost productivity. You empower your teams with data, not opinions, and create a shared language for improvement. It’s about making smarter decisions, focusing your efforts, and unlocking the potential that’s already sitting on your factory floor.

So, don’t wait for the perfect system or for someone to give you a grand strategy. Pick a machine. Grab a clipboard. Start measuring what truly matters. You might be surprised by what you find. The journey of improvement is ongoing, and each step forward is a step towards greater efficiency and productivity. Embrace the process and let OEE guide you to a more effective and streamlined operation. With time, you’ll see how small changes can lead to big results, transforming your factory floor into a hub of efficiency and success. The power of OEE lies in its simplicity, but its impact can be profound, helping you unlock the hidden potential of your operations and achieve sustainable growth. By focusing on the data and working collaboratively, you can turn challenges into opportunities and create a culture of continuous improvement that drives long-term success.

If you and your team are serious about learning the tools to make this happen, then taking a structured course like our Lean Coaching for Manufacturers is the perfect next step to guide you on that journey.

A Beginner’s Guide to 5S: How To Transform Your Workshop Into a Productivity Powerhouse

Posted on by Adam Payne

It’s Tuesday morning, you’re in the middle of a critical job, and you need that specific 13mm socket. You know, the one that’s supposed to be in the shared toolbox. You go to the drawer, and it’s a jumble of spanners, Allen keys from a job two years ago, and about five different tape measures, none of which work properly. The socket isn’t there.

You ask Dave. Dave shrugs. You ask Sarah. She thinks she saw it near the cutting machine last week. Ten minutes of your life you’ll never get back are spent just searching for a simple tool. Ten minutes of machine downtime. Ten minutes of mounting frustration. It’s not just annoying, is it? It’s inefficient, it’s costly, and to be frank, it’s a bit demoralising.

What if I told you there’s a systematic way to make that scenario a distant memory? A method born in the hyper-efficient world of Japanese manufacturing that can transform your workspace from a chaotic treasure hunt into a smooth, productive, and safer environment. It’s called 5S.

Now, before you roll your eyes at another bit of management jargon, hear me out. 5S isn’t about making your factory floor look pretty for a visit from head office. It’s a foundational principle of Lean manufacturing, a powerful system for eliminating waste. It’s about creating a workplace where everything has a place, problems can’t hide, and your team can focus on what they do best: adding value. In this guide, we’re going to walk through the five simple, actionable steps of 5S that you can start using today to reclaim your time, boost safety, and maybe even find that missing socket.

So, What Exactly is This 5S Thing?

At its heart, 5S is a five-step methodology for creating and maintaining an organised, clean, and high-performance workplace. The name comes from five Japanese words, each starting with ‘S’. Don’t worry, you don’t need to learn Japanese, but understanding the original terms helps grasp the philosophy behind them.

Here they are:

  • Seiri (Sort): Separate the necessary from the unnecessary.
  • Seiton (Set in Order): A place for everything, and everything in its place.
  • Seiso (Shine): Clean the workspace and keep it clean.
  • Seiketsu (Standardise): Create rules and habits to maintain the first three S’s.
  • Shitsuke (Sustain): Make it a part of your culture. Keep the discipline.

It’s easy to look at that list and think, “Oh, so it’s just a fancy way of saying ‘have a big tidy up’.” And you’d be partly right, but you’d also be missing the most important part. 5S isn’t a one-off spring clean. It’s a continuous improvement system. The cleaning in ‘Shine’ is also a form of inspection. The organisation in ‘Set in Order’ is designed to make work flow smoother and faster. The discipline in ‘Sustain’ builds a culture of ownership and pride.

And this isn’t just for giant car plants in Japan. The principles of 5S apply everywhere. I’ve seen them work wonders in massive CNC machine shops, small fabrication workshops, sprawling warehouses, and even in company offices to manage server rooms and digital files. Anywhere there’s a process, there’s an opportunity to improve it with 5S. It’s the bedrock upon which all other Lean improvements are built. You can’t build a stable house on messy foundations, right? Same principle.

Your Step-by-Step Guide to Making 5S Happen

Alright, let’s get down to brass tacks. How do you actually do this? Here’s a practical breakdown of each step, with tips I’ve picked up from seeing it done right, and sometimes, done wrong.

Step 1: Sort (Seiri) – The Great Clear Out

The goal here is simple: get rid of everything you don’t need in the work area. Every broken tool, obsolete jig, out-of-date manual, and pile of ‘just in case’ materials is a physical and mental obstacle. It clutters the space, makes it harder to find what you actually need, and can even be a safety hazard.

How to do it:

  • The Red Tag Method: Get a bunch of red tags and have your team go through their work area. Anything they are unsure about, broken, obsolete, or simply not needed for the current jobs gets a red tag. On the tag, they write what it is, why it’s being tagged, and the date.
  • Create a Holding Area: Move all the red-tagged items to a designated ‘quarantine’ zone. This gets the clutter out of the way immediately, giving you a quick win, but doesn’t force irreversible decisions on the spot.
  • Involve the Team: The people doing the work know what’s needed and what’s not. Don’t have a manager come in and start chucking things out. Let the operators and engineers lead the sorting. They’ll have more ownership of the final result.

Set a deadline, maybe a week or two, for people to review the items in the holding area. If someone can make a good case for keeping something, great. If an item is unclaimed and unused by the deadline, it’s time for it to go. Sell it, scrap it, recycle it. Just get it out.

The result? Suddenly you can see the floor. Your workbenches are clear. You’ll be surprised how much space you reclaim and how much easier it is to move around and find things.

Step 2: Set in Order (Seiton) – A Place for Everything

Now that you’re only left with the necessary items, it’s time to give them a proper home. The goal of Seiton is to arrange tools, parts, and information in a way that makes them easy to find, easy to use, and easy to put away. The mantra here is: “a place for everything, and everything in its place.”

How to do it:

  • Think About Workflow: Don’t just arrange things neatly; arrange them logically. Tools used most frequently should be closest to hand. Items used together should be stored together. Think about the sequence of a job and place things in that order.
  • Make it Visual: Use shadow boards, floor marking tape, and colour coding to make organisation intuitive. Shadow boards show where tools belong, while colour coding can differentiate items by type or function.
  • Label Everything: Shelves, drawers, bins, cabinets—everything should be clearly labelled. No one should ever have to guess what’s inside something.

I was once in a factory that made hydraulic components. The assembly cell had a shared toolkit, and operators would waste, on average, four minutes per assembly searching for the right C spanner. They implemented Seiton. They created a custom foam insert for the toolbox drawer with a cutout for every single tool. The search time dropped to practically zero. Four minutes saved per assembly, multiple times a day, across a whole team. The savings were huge, and the team was so much happier. That’s the power of setting things in order.

Step 3: Shine (Seiso) – More Than Just a Mop and Bucket

This step is most often misunderstood. Seiso isn’t about hiring a cleaner. It’s about integrating cleaning into the daily work of the team. More importantly, it’s about using the act of cleaning as a method of inspection.

When you’re wiping down a machine, you’re not just making it look nice. You’re in a perfect position to spot a small oil leak, a frayed wire, a loose bolt, or a hairline crack in a safety guard. Finding these small problems early prevents them from becoming big, expensive, and dangerous problems later.

How to do it:

  • Integrate, Don’t Delegate: Make cleaning part of the daily routine. A simple “5-minute shine” at the end of every shift can make a world of difference.
  • Assign Zones: Break the work area into small, manageable zones and assign ownership for each zone to a specific person or team.
  • Create Checklists: Develop simple daily or weekly cleaning checklists. For example: Wipe down control panel, check fluid levels, sweep floor around machine, check for leaks.

A quick win here is immediate. The first time an operator says, “While I was cleaning the press, I noticed this hydraulic fitting was weeping a little,” you’ve just paid for the entire Shine program. You’ve prevented a potential machine failure, a costly repair, and a dangerous slip hazard, all with a cloth and a bit of attention to detail.

Step 4: Standardise (Seiketsu) – Making it the New Normal

You’ve sorted, set in order, and shined. The place looks great. But how do you keep it that way? How do you stop it from slowly sliding back into chaos? That’s where Seiketsu comes in. The goal is to create a set of standards and procedures that lock in your improvements from the first three steps.

How to do it:

  • Visual Standards are Key: Take photos of what the work area should look like in its ideal state and post them in the area. This provides a clear, unambiguous reference.
  • Simple Checklists and SOPs: Create simple, one-page Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for 5S activities. This could be the daily cleaning checklist, a schedule for who is responsible for what, or a procedure for how new tools are introduced into the area.
  • Integrate into Daily Work: The standards shouldn’t feel like an extra task. They should be part of the way work is done.

This step reduces variation between shifts and people, makes training new starters much easier, and ensures that the gains you’ve made are not lost the moment everyone gets busy.

Step 5: Sustain (Shitsuke) – Building the Habit

This is often the hardest step. Shitsuke is about discipline and building a culture where 5S is second nature. It’s about turning the new standards into ingrained habits. This requires leadership commitment and continuous effort.

How to do it:

  • Leadership Walkabouts: Managers need to walk the floor, not to find fault, but to show they care. They should praise good examples of 5S, ask questions, and offer support.
  • Regular Audits: Conduct regular, friendly 5S audits. Use a simple scoring system and display the results on a team board. This creates visibility and a bit of healthy competition.
  • Recognition and Communication: Celebrate successes. When a team achieves a high audit score or makes a great improvement, recognise them in a team meeting or on a company notice board.

Sustain is an ongoing process. It never truly ends. It’s about fostering an environment of continuous improvement where everyone feels responsible for maintaining a safe, clean, and organised workplace.

Beyond the Steps: Making It Stick

Implementing the five steps is one thing; embedding 5S as the foundation of your operational culture is another. 5S isn’t an isolated project. It’s the launchpad for a broader Lean journey and a culture of Kaizen, or continuous improvement. When your workplace is organised and visual, problems have nowhere to hide. You start to see other forms of waste, like unnecessary motion, waiting time, or defects, much more clearly.

To keep the momentum going long term, you need consistent engagement from leadership, ongoing training, and a simple way to track your progress. Regular audits provide a structured way to assess how well each area is sustaining the 5S principles and offer a framework for constructive feedback. A good audit isn’t a test; it’s a health check.

The Results You Can Genuinely Expect

So, what’s the payoff for all this effort? It’s significant and it touches every part of your operation.

  • Improved Safety: A clean, uncluttered workspace has fewer trip hazards. Properly stored tools and chemicals reduce risks. The ‘Shine’ stage uncovers equipment faults before they cause an accident. In a warehouse I worked with, they reduced minor incidents like trips and slips by over 60% in the first year after a thorough 5S implementation.
  • Increased Productivity: Less time spent searching for tools means more time spent adding value. A clear workflow reduces unnecessary motion. Standardised processes mean less confusion and rework. That assembly cell I mentioned earlier? They increased their overall output by 12% without buying any new equipment, purely through 5S.
  • Better Quality: When the workplace is organised and standardised, it’s easier to do the job right the first time. Mistakes are less likely when the correct tools and information are readily available.
  • Higher Morale: Nobody enjoys working in a messy, chaotic, and frustrating environment. A clean and organised workplace shows that the company respects its employees and the work they do. It empowers them to take ownership and pride in their area, which is a massive, if often unmeasured, benefit.

Start Small, Start Today

Transforming an entire factory floor feels like a monumental task. But you don’t have to boil the ocean.

The beauty of 5S is that you can start small. Pick one area. Just one. It could be a single workbench, one assembly cell, or one storage rack. Get the team from that area together, give them this guide, and empower them to make a change this week.

Run through the five steps. Sort out the clutter. Give everything a home. Clean and inspect the area. Create a simple visual standard. And agree on how you’ll keep it that way. The visible improvement will be immediate, and that success will create the energy and enthusiasm to tackle the next area, and the next.

An organised, safe, and efficient workplace isn’t some far-off dream. It’s the result of small, consistent, disciplined actions, repeated every day. It’s within your reach, and it starts with the first S. So go on, find an area and get started. You’ll be amazed at the difference it makes.

If you’re ready to take the next step and build a true culture of continuous improvement, our Lean Training courses can provide your team with the skills and mindset to transform your entire operation. Get in touch to learn more.

The Great Manufacturing Illusion: Is 95% of Your Work Adding Zero Value?

Posted on by Adam Payne

I’ve walked onto more shop floors than I can count. From gleaming, high tech aerospace facilities to gritty, old school fabrication shops in the heart of the Midlands. And you know what? There’s a sound, a feeling, that’s almost universal. It’s the sound of busyness. The hum of machines, the clatter of tools, the squeak of pallet trucks, the constant footfall of people moving with purpose.

It feels good, doesn’t it? That hive of activity. It feels like money is being made, like orders are being fulfilled. You see your team working hard, sweating, moving fast. You think to yourself, “Great, everyone is flat out. We’re at maximum capacity.”

But are you?

To be honest, after years of doing this, I’ve learned that the loudest, most chaotic environments are often the least productive. The places where people seem the most rushed are frequently the ones haemorrhaging the most time and money. It’s a hard pill to swallow, but we in the manufacturing world have become experts at mistaking motion for progress. We celebrate the ‘busy bee’ without ever stopping to ask a simple, powerful question: is the work they’re doing actually adding any value?

This is where the core insight of Lean Manufacturing changes the game. It’s not about making people work harder or faster. It’s about making them work smarter by ruthlessly distinguishing between what the customer actually cares about, which is value added work, and everything else, which is non value added work. Getting your head around this one distinction is, I think, the first and most critical step toward real, sustainable improvement.

What Does ‘Busy’ Really Look Like on the Shop Floor?

Let’s get tangible. Picture one of your operators, let’s call him Dave. Dave is a great employee. He’s never standing still. He’s always on the move. But what is he actually doing all day?

If we were to follow Dave with a video camera for an hour, we might see something like this. He finishes a task at his workstation, then walks 50 feet across the floor to the parts store to get the next component. He gets there, but the part he needs isn’t in its designated spot. He spends five minutes hunting for it, finally finding it on the wrong shelf. He walks back to his station. Then he realises he needs a specific torque wrench, which isn’t at his station because someone else borrowed it. He spends another few minutes tracking it down. Then there’s the paperwork. He has to fill out a quality check form, get it signed off by a supervisor who is currently in a meeting, and then file a copy.

At the end of the hour, Dave is knackered. He feels like he’s run a marathon. If you asked him if he had a productive hour, he’d say, “Absolutely, I haven’t stopped!” And he’d be telling the truth. He has been incredibly busy.

But how much of that time was spent actually changing the product? How much of it was spent doing something a customer would happily pay for? Almost none. The walking, the searching, the waiting, the duplicating of paperwork. These activities feel like work. They consume energy and time. They fill the day. But they don’t move the needle one inch closer to a finished, shippable product. This is the illusion of productivity. It’s the frantic, exhausting, and ultimately wasteful state of being busy.

So, What Is Value-Added Work, Really?

This brings us to the most important definition in the world of operational excellence. Value-Added work is any action that physically transforms the raw material or component into something the customer wants and is willing to pay for.

It’s that simple.

It has to meet three very strict criteria:

  1. The customer must be willing to pay for it. Would your customer happily write a cheque for the time spent walking to the tool crib? Of course not. But they will absolutely pay for the time spent welding a perfect seam on their product.
  2. It must physically change the thing. The action has to transform the product in some way. Bending metal, drilling a hole, assembling two parts, painting a surface, packaging the final item. These are all transformative acts. Searching for a tool doesn’t change the product. Neither does waiting for a signature.
  3. It must be done right the first time. Rework is the enemy of value. If you have to spend time fixing a mistake, that is, by definition, not adding value. The initial value was supposed to be added during the first attempt.

In a typical manufacturing setting, value-added work is the welding, the machining, the assembly, the testing that confirms quality, the final packaging. It’s the magic. It’s the bit where your expertise and equipment turn basic materials into something of higher worth. And here’s the scary part, in many traditional, un-optimised manufacturing environments, if you were to honestly time it, true value-added activities might account for less than 5% of the total lead time. Think about that. For a product that takes 20 days to go from order to dispatch, you might only be physically working on it, changing it, for a single day. The other 19 days are just… waste.

The Hidden Killer: Unpacking Non Value-Added Work

If value added work is the hero of our story, then non value-added work is the villain. It’s all the other stuff. It’s the 95% of activity that adds cost and time but no value to the final product. Lean thinking categorises these activities into the famous seven (or sometimes eight) wastes. You might have heard of them, but it’s worth seeing them through this busy versus productive lens.

  • Transport: Moving parts and materials around the factory. Every time you move something, you risk damaging it, you lose it, and you add zero value. Dave walking to the parts store is a classic example. Why wasn’t the part at the point of use?
  • Inventory: Excess raw materials, work in progress (WIP), or finished goods. It ties up cash, takes up space, and hides other problems like poor quality or unreliable suppliers. That huge pile of WIP between process A and process B? It’s just waiting. And waiting is a waste.
  • Motion: This is about the people. Unnecessary movement by your team, like bending, reaching, or walking. Dave searching for his torque wrench is pure waste of motion. An organised workstation, where every tool has its place, eliminates this.
  • Waiting: This one is painfully obvious. Operators waiting for a machine to finish, for parts to arrive, for instructions, or for a supervisor’s signature. It is the most frustrating waste for any motivated employee. They want to work, but the system is forcing them to be idle.
  • Overproduction: Making more of something than is needed right now. This is often called the worst waste because it causes all the others. You make too much, so you need to store it (Inventory), move it (Transport), and it might become obsolete.
  • Overprocessing: Doing more work on a product than the customer requires. Polishing a surface that will never be seen, engineering a component to a tolerance ten times tighter than necessary, filling out a five page form when a single checkbox would do. It’s work, yes. But it’s pointless work.
  • Defects: Creating a faulty product that needs to be repaired, reworked, or scrapped. This is a double whammy. You wasted time making it wrong, and now you have to waste more time fixing it.

Now, it’s important to add a little nuance here. There is a third category that some people talk about: Necessary Non Value-Added Work. These are tasks that don’t meet the strict value-added criteria, but you absolutely have to do them. Think about mandatory safety checks, certain regulatory paperwork, or essential financial reporting. The customer isn’t paying for the safety check on the forklift, but you can’t run your business without it. The goal with these tasks isn’t to eliminate them completely, but to minimise them, streamline them, and make them as efficient as humanly possible.

The real target, the low hanging fruit for improvement, is the pure waste. The walking, the searching, the waiting. That’s where you can transform busyness into real, honest to goodness productivity.

A Practical Checklist: How to Spot the Difference in Your Own Facility

Alright, theory is great, but how do you start seeing your own operations through this new lens? It takes practice, but you can start today by asking a few simple questions as you walk around the shop floor. When you see an activity happening, ask yourself:

  1. Would a customer happily pay for this specific action? (Be brutally honest).
  2. Is this action physically changing the product for the better?
  3. Is it being done correctly for the first time?

If the answer to any of these is ‘no’, you have likely found a form of waste. You have found busyness masquerading as productivity.

Let’s look at a quick example.

Busy Brian: Brian operates a CNC machine. His area is cluttered. At the start of a job, he spends ten minutes searching for the right collet and the setup sheet. He loads the material, runs the program, and then walks over to chat with a colleague while the long cycle runs. Once the part is done, he inspects it and finds a small burr. He spends another five minutes with a file, deburring the part by hand. He’s been active all that time. He’s been busy.

Productive Paula: Paula operates the same machine. Her workstation is a model of 5S organisation. Every tool is in a shadow board, and the setup sheet is in a holder on the machine. Her setup takes two minutes. While the machine runs its cycle, she performs a quality check on the previous part and gets the raw material ready for the next one. The program finishes, and the part comes out perfectly, no deburring needed, because a previous improvement activity fixed the root cause of the burrs.

Who is more productive? It’s not even a contest. Paula might look less frantic, her station might be quieter, but her output of good quality parts per hour will be significantly higher. She has eliminated the non value added work, leaving only the productive, value creating tasks.

The Secret Weapon: Making Waste Visible with Process Mapping

How do you find all this hidden waste? It’s happening all over the place, all the time. The single most powerful tool for this is to simply draw a map of your process. In Lean terms, this is often called Value Stream Mapping.

Don’t let the fancy name put you off. At its heart, it’s just about getting a big piece of paper, grabbing a few colleagues, and physically walking the path of a product. You start where the order comes in, and you end where it’s dispatched to the customer. You draw a box for every single process step. Welding, drilling, assembly, inspection.

Then, and this is the crucial part, you map the stuff that happens between the boxes. You draw in the transport links, the waiting areas, the piles of inventory. You time everything. How long does the welding take? (Value Added). How long does the part then wait for the next step? (Non Value Added).

When you’re done, you’ll have a visual representation of your entire process. It’s often a sobering moment. You might see that a product with 30 minutes of actual value added work takes three weeks to get through the factory. The ‘before’ map often looks like a chaotic spaghetti diagram, with arrows going everywhere.

The beauty of this map is that it makes the waste impossible to ignore. You can literally see the delays and the unnecessary movement. It becomes the blueprint for your improvement plan. Your team can gather around it and say, “Why does it wait for three days here?” or “Look how far we have to walk between these two steps, that’s crazy!” The ‘after’ map, the future state you design, will look cleaner, straighter, and faster. It’s a map that shifts you from a state of busy to a state of flow.

Your First Steps to Shifting from Busy to Productive

This isn’t an overnight transformation. It’s a journey of a thousand small steps. But you can start right now.

  1. Map a Single Process. Don’t try to boil the ocean. Pick one product family or one manufacturing cell. Get the team involved and map it out, warts and all.
  2. Conduct a Waste Walk. Grab a clipboard and a stopwatch. Go and stand in one area for an hour. Simply observe and make a note of every instance of the seven wastes you see. You will be astonished at what you find.
  3. Ask Your Team. The people doing the job know where the frustrations are. They know what wastes their time. Hold a short, informal meeting. Ask one simple question: “What stops you from having a great day at work?” Their answers will almost certainly be a list of non value added activities.

From Motion to Progress

Let’s be clear. The difference between busy and productive is not subtle. It’s the difference between running on a hamster wheel and running a race. One is exhausting and gets you nowhere; the other is focused, intentional, and moves you toward a finish line.

By learning to see the waste in your processes, you do more than just improve efficiency. You make your employees’ jobs less frustrating. You improve quality because you have fewer chances for things to go wrong. You free up cash that was tied up in inventory. You increase your capacity without buying a single new machine. You build a stronger, more resilient, and more competitive business.

This is the foundation of Lean thinking. It’s a powerful shift in perspective that allows you to achieve more with the resources you already have. If you’re ready to stop being just ‘busy’ and start being truly productive, this is the path. And if you and your team are serious about learning the tools to make this happen, then taking a structured course like our Lean Greenbelt training is the perfect next step to guide you on that journey.

The Secret Engine of Strategy: Why Coaching Your Leaders is the Only Part That Truly Matters

Posted on by Adam Payne

You’ve probably got a strategy document somewhere. Maybe it’s a beautifully designed PowerPoint deck, or a detailed plan sitting in a shared drive, the result of weeks of offsite meetings and intense debate. It’s full of smart goals, clear objectives, and ambitious targets. Everyone nodded along in the kick-off meeting. There was a real buzz in the air.

And then… what happened?

For a lot of businesses, especially in the demanding world of UK manufacturing, that initial energy just sort of… dissipates. The day-to-day reality of production targets, supply chain headaches, and machine maintenance takes over. The grand strategy gets relegated to a line item in a monthly management meeting, a nagging feeling that you’re not quite on track, but you’re too busy putting out fires to figure out why.

I’ve seen this play out more times than I can count. And I can tell you the reason your strategy might be stalling has almost nothing to do with how good the plan is. It’s not about the software you use or potentially the framework you follow. It’s about people. More specifically, it’s about the capability of the leaders on the ground, your supervisors, team leaders, and department managers, to turn that plan into reality. This is about why coaching those leaders isn’t just a nice to have, it’s the absolute linchpin of successful strategy deployment.

The Seductive Trap of Tools and Processes

When we want to improve something in manufacturing, our instinct is to reach for a tool or a process. It’s in our DNA. We think in terms of systems. Got a quality problem? Implement a Six Sigma project. Need to improve efficiency? Let’s go all in on Lean principles and value stream mapping. Falling behind the competition? It must be time for a full-scale digital transformation, complete with new ERP systems and shiny dashboards.

These are all powerful tools. I’m a big believer in them. But they are, at the end of the day, just tools. And a tool is only as good as the person using it.

Think about it. You can hand a team the most sophisticated process map in the world, but if their line manager can’t explain why it matters or can’t handle the pushback and questions that inevitably come with change, that map is just a laminated piece of paper. You can install a state of the art data analytics platform, but if your production supervisor doesn’t have the confidence to use that data to have a tough conversation about performance, the investment is wasted.

This is where so many strategies under deliver. They focus entirely on the ‘what’ (the new process, the target) and the ‘how’ (the steps to follow) but completely neglect the ‘who’. The people tasked with implementing the change are often given the playbook but no actual training on how to lead the team through the game. They are expected to just get it. This lack of focus on leadership capability creates a huge gap. A gap between the boardroom’s intention and the shop floor’s reality. It’s a gap filled with confusion, disengagement, and a quiet, creeping return to the old way of doing things. Because the old way, for all its faults, is comfortable. It doesn’t require a leader to be a great communicator or a resilient coach. It just requires them to keep things ticking over.

So, What Actually Makes a Leader Effective When It Counts?

If it’s not about just understanding the process, what is it? What separates a manager who can execute a strategy from one who just presides over its slow decline?

It boils down to a handful of core human competencies. Not technical skills, but leadership behaviours.

First, there’s clear communication. This isn’t about sending a well written email. It’s the ability to stand in front of your team, look them in the eye, and translate a high-level business objective like “Increase operational efficiency by 15%” into something that makes sense for them. It means explaining what it means for their daily work, why it’s important for the company’s future (and their job security), and being able to answer the tough, cynical questions that come up.

Next is team motivation. A great leader in strategy deployment is a master of buy in. They don’t just issue directives. They connect the work to a bigger purpose. They understand that people aren’t motivated by spreadsheets; they’re motivated by feeling that their contribution matters, that they are part of a team that’s succeeding, and that their efforts are recognised.

Then comes real accountability. This is a big one, and it’s so often misunderstood. Accountability isn’t about blame. It’s not about shouting when a target is missed. True accountability is about creating a culture where everyone feels a sense of ownership. An effective leader builds a system where it’s safe to talk about what’s going wrong, to analyse failures without fear, and to collectively agree on how to get back on track. It’s a supportive, not a punitive, process.

And of course, there’s adaptive problem solving. No strategy survives first contact with reality. A key supplier will be late. A critical machine will break down. A new regulation will come into force. A leader who can execute strategy doesn’t panic or get derailed. They see these moments not as roadblocks, but as problems to be solved. They empower their team to find solutions, make decisions, and adapt the plan without having to run up the chain of command for every little thing.

The leader’s unique role is to be the translator and the shock absorber. They take the pressure and complexity from above and turn it into clear, manageable, and motivating actions for their team. Without that, the strategy remains an abstract concept, completely disconnected from the daily grind.

Coaching: The Bridge Between Knowing and Doing

Okay, so we know what good leadership looks like. But you can’t just send your managers on a two day “leadership skills” course and expect them to come back transformed. I’ve seen companies spend thousands on generic training, only to see everyone revert to their old behaviours within a month.

Why? Because leadership isn’t a theoretical subject you can learn from a textbook. It’s a practice. It’s a set of behaviours that need to be developed, honed, and supported over time. And that is where coaching comes in.

Coaching is not training. Training is about transferring knowledge. Coaching is about changing behaviour. It’s an active, ongoing process. It involves tailored, one on one guidance, structured feedback, and a real focus on helping leaders overcome their specific, real-world challenges.

A good coach doesn’t give the answers. They ask the right questions. Instead of saying, “Here’s what you should have done,” a coach asks, “That was a difficult conversation. How did you feel it went? What would you do differently next time? What support do you need to handle that situation better?”

This approach builds self-awareness and problem-solving muscles. It helps a technically brilliant but perhaps poor communicator learn how to connect with their team. It helps a conflict avoidant supervisor learn how to have firm but fair conversations about performance. It’s deeply personal and intensely practical.

The research on this is pretty conclusive. You’ve probably heard of Google’s famous Project Oxygen, where they crunched years of data to figure out what made their best managers so effective. The number one behaviour? Being a good coach. They found that teams led by managers who were effective coaches weren’t just happier; they were more innovative, more productive, and more likely to stay with the company. If it’s true for a global tech giant, you can be sure it’s true for a busy manufacturing firm in the UK.

The Ripple Effect: Real Stories and Tangible Impact

When you start consistently coaching your leaders, something remarkable happens. The impact isn’t just on the individual leader. It ripples out across their teams and, eventually, across the entire organisation.

I remember working with a mid-sized engineering firm in the Midlands. Their strategy was solid: diversify their product line to enter a new market. But the execution was a mess. The production floor was chaotic, blame was rampant, and the new product line was plagued with delays and quality issues. The supervisors were skilled engineers, but they were terrible leaders. They managed by shouting.

We didn’t change their strategy. We didn’t bring in a new system. We just started coaching the supervisors. We worked with them every week, helping them plan their team communications, role playing difficult conversations, and guiding them on how to empower their teams to solve problems instead of just escalating them.

The change was slow at first, then all at once. The supervisors started holding short, effective daily meetings instead of just walking the floor and pointing out mistakes. They started asking their teams for ideas on how to solve production bottlenecks. They started celebrating small wins.

Within six months, the entire atmosphere on the shop floor had changed. Engagement went up, yes, but more tangible things happened. Staff turnover in that department dropped by nearly a third. The defect rate on the new product line was cut in half. The supervisors weren’t just managers anymore; they were leaders who took genuine ownership of the strategy. They made it theirs.

This is the culture shift that coaching creates. When leaders are trusted and effective, they build psychological safety. That’s a term that means people feel safe enough to speak up, to admit a mistake, to challenge the status quo, or to suggest a new idea without fear of being humiliated. In a manufacturing environment, that is gold dust. It’s the difference between an operator quietly ignoring a potential safety issue and one who feels empowered to stop the line and get it fixed. It’s the difference between a team that just does what it’s told and a team that actively looks for ways to improve.

Why Making This a Priority is Non-Negotiable

At this point, you might be thinking this all sounds good, but it also sounds like a lot of time and effort. And you’re right, it is. But the alternative is far more costly.

The alternative is a failed strategy.

Think of all the resources you invest in creating your strategic plan: the time from your senior team, the money spent on market research, the investment in new equipment or technology. Without capable leaders to execute that plan, all of it is at risk. It’s like building a high-performance racing car and then handing the keys to someone who has never driven before. The car is perfect, but it’s going straight into a wall.

Coaching your leaders is the single most powerful lever you have to close the strategy execution gap. It’s the transmission that connects the power of your strategic engine to the wheels on the ground. It amplifies the value of every other investment you make. A well coached leader will get more out of your Lean programme. They will ensure your new digital tools are actually used effectively. They will build the resilient, accountable teams that can weather any storm.

Without strong, coached leaders, your strategy is just a wish. It’s a document in a drawer. With them, it becomes a living, breathing reality, embedded in the daily actions and decisions of every single person in your organisation.

From Good Intentions to Outstanding Execution

So, to bring it all back. The success of your next big plan won’t be determined in the boardroom. It will be determined on the factory floor, in the warehouse, and in the quality lab. It will live or die based on the strength, confidence, and capability of the leaders you have in those crucial positions.

The tools, the processes, the playbooks… they are all important. But they are secondary. Strategy deployment succeeds or fails on the strength of its leaders. Investing in a new system without investing in the people who will run it is a recipe for disappointment. But when you commit to building your leaders’ capabilities through dedicated, practical coaching, you are not just investing in them. You are investing in the certainty of your own success.

Ready to close your strategy execution gap? If you’re tired of seeing great plans fall short, it’s time to focus on the one thing that will make all the difference. Discover how our Strategy Deployment Programme embeds leadership coaching and capability building at its heart to ensure your next plan delivers real results.

Contact us now to book a consultation and move from good intentions to outstanding execution.

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From Vanity Metrics to Victory: How to Build KPIs That Actually Drive Results

Posted on by Adam Payne

Right then. Let’s talk about numbers.

The end of quarter report lands on your desk. Turnover is up. Total units shipped are at a record high. The website has seen a surge in traffic. On the surface, it’s all good news. You lean back in your chair, take a sip of tea, and feel that brief, warm glow of success. We’ve all been there. It feels great.

But then, a nagging feeling creeps in. Why, if turnover is up, are the margins feeling tighter than ever? If you’re shipping more units, why is the operations manager looking permanently stressed and talking about increased rework? And what did all that website traffic actually do?

This, my friend, is the siren song of vanity metrics. They are the numbers that look impressive in a PowerPoint presentation but don’t actually tell you much about the health of your business. They make you feel good, but they don’t help you make good decisions. They are the business equivalent of counting calories without ever looking at the nutritional information.

The truth is, in the world of manufacturing, where every penny and every second counts, focusing on the wrong numbers can be more than just a distraction. It can actively hide serious problems until it’s too late. It can lead you to invest in the wrong areas, reward the wrong behaviours, and ultimately, steer the entire ship in the wrong direction.

But how do you cut through the noise? How do you move from tracking what’s easy to measure to measuring what truly matters? Over the years, I’ve found it comes down to asking the right questions. So, we’re going to walk through a simple, three question framework designed to help you identify the Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, that will actually drive your manufacturing business forward.

Why Vanity Metrics Are a Dangerous Distraction

Before we get to the solution, we need to properly understand the problem. What exactly is the difference between a vanity metric and a real, hardworking KPI?

A vanity metric is a surface level number. It’s often big, impressive, and easy to track. Think total revenue, number of employees, or social media followers. It tells you that something happened, but it gives you zero context as to why or whether it was a good thing.

A Key Performance Indicator, on the other hand, is directly tied to a strategic business objective. It’s actionable. When a KPI moves up or down, you know whether you’re getting closer to or further from a specific goal, and it often suggests what action you need to take.

Let’s look at some common examples in a manufacturing setting.

Vanity Metric: Total Units Produced.
This number looks fantastic on a chart that goes up and to the right. The board loves it. But what does it really tell you? Nothing about quality. Nothing about efficiency. You could be producing thousands of units with a 20% defect rate that requires costly rework, or you could be running machines into the ground with no preventative maintenance, setting yourself up for a catastrophic failure next month.

A Better KPI: First Pass Yield (FPY).
This measures the percentage of products that are manufactured to specification, without any rework, the first time through the process. A high FPY tells you your processes are stable, your quality is high, and your efficiency is strong. If FPY drops, you know you have a problem on the line that needs immediate investigation. It’s a number that prompts action.

Vanity Metric: Website Traffic.
Your marketing team reports a 50% increase in visitors to your website. Great. But who were they? Were they potential customers in the UK looking for a new component supplier, or were they students from another continent doing research for a project? Did any of them download a spec sheet, request a quote, or call your sales team? Without that context, the number is meaningless.

A Better KPI: Qualified Lead Velocity Rate.
This measures the month over month growth in the number of genuine, qualified leads your marketing and sales teams are generating. It tells you if your pipeline is growing. It’s a direct indicator of future sales potential. It’s a number that the sales director can actually use to forecast and plan.

The danger of vanity metrics is that they create a false sense of security. When the big numbers look good, it’s easy to ignore the underlying issues. It’s like the doctor telling you your weight is stable without checking your blood pressure. You might look fine on the outside, but inside, problems could be brewing. Chasing these metrics encourages teams to focus on activities that boost the number, not activities that improve the business.

Understanding the Power of Leading vs. Lagging KPIs

Okay, so we agree we need to move beyond vanity. The next crucial step is to understand that not all true KPIs are created equal. They generally fall into two categories: lagging and leading. Getting the balance right between these two is probably the single most important part of building a useful dashboard.

Lagging indicators are the ones we’re all most familiar with. They measure outcomes. They are backward looking, telling you the result of things that have already happened. Think of them as the final score of a football match.

  • Monthly Net Profit
  • Customer Churn Rate
  • On Time In Full (OTIF) Delivery Percentage
  • Total Scrap Value

These are all incredibly important. They tell you if you won or lost the game. They validate your strategy and tell you if your past efforts paid off. The problem is, by the time you measure them, the game is over. You can’t go back and change the outcome. If your OTIF for last month was a dismal 75%, you can’t do anything to fix it. The deliveries are already late.

Leading indicators, on the other hand, are predictive. They measure the inputs and behaviours that will likely lead to a future result. They are the things you can influence right now to change the final score. In our football analogy, this would be things like shots on goal, pass completion percentage, or time of possession.

  • Sales Pipeline Velocity (how quickly deals are moving through stages)
  • Percentage of Preventative Maintenance Tasks Completed on Time
  • Average Supplier Quality Score
  • Number of Employee Suggestions Implemented

These are the levers you can pull. If you see that your team is falling behind on preventative maintenance, you can intervene immediately. You can allocate more resources or adjust schedules to get back on track and prevent the future machine downtime that would wreck your lagging KPIs. If your sales pipeline is looking thin, you know you need to ramp up marketing or prospecting efforts now to avoid a bad sales quarter in three months.

To be honest, most businesses I’ve worked with are drowning in lagging indicators. They spend hours every month poring over reports that tell them what went wrong last month. Proactive, successful businesses, however, are obsessed with their leading indicators. They use them as an early warning system, allowing them to solve problems before they become catastrophes.

The 3 Questions to Find the KPIs That Truly Matter

So, how do we get there? How do we build a dashboard that gives us this balanced, forward looking view? It starts by ignoring the giant list of 100 possible metrics you could track and instead asking three simple, powerful questions.

Question 1: What are your core strategic objectives?

This sounds obvious, but it’s the step most often missed. You cannot choose a Key Performance Indicator if you don’t first know what performance you’re trying to indicate. Before you measure anything, you have to be brutally clear about what you are trying to achieve as a business.

And I don’t mean vague goals like “be the best” or “grow the company.” I mean specific, written down objectives. For example:

  • Objective A: Increase overall profitability by 5% in the next fiscal year.
  • Objective B: Reduce customer reported defects by 15% within six months.
  • Objective C: Successfully launch the new X-series product line and achieve £1M in sales in its first year.

Your KPIs must flow directly from these objectives. If a metric doesn’t help you track your progress towards one of these goals, then why are you tracking it? It’s just noise. This first question forces you to connect every number on your dashboard to a genuine business priority. It’s the ultimate filter.

Question 2: Which KPIs directly measure progress toward these objectives?

Once you have a clear objective, you can start brainstorming metrics that measure it. The key here is to choose KPIs that are actionable, relevant, and, of course, measurable. You need to avoid the temptation to pick a metric just because it “looks good” or is easy to get the data for.

Let’s take Objective B: Reduce customer reported defects by 15%.

  • A poor KPI choice would be “Total Units Shipped.” As we discussed, this doesn’t tell you anything about quality.
  • A good lagging KPI would be “Customer Defect Rate” or “Number of Warranty Claims.” This directly measures the outcome you want to influence. It tells you if you’re succeeding.
  • A good leading KPI would be “First Pass Yield,” “In Process Inspection Failure Rate,” or “Percentage of Staff with Up to Date Quality Training.” These are the activities that prevent defects from ever reaching the customer. If these numbers are heading in the right direction, your lagging indicator is almost certain to follow.

The litmus test for a good KPI is this: if this number changes, will it trigger a specific action or decision? If your In Process Inspection Failure Rate spikes, does that trigger a review of the machine setup or the raw material batch? If the answer is yes, you’ve got a winner. If the answer is no, it’s probably a vanity metric in disguise.

Question 3: Are you balancing leading and lagging KPIs?

This final question is your sense check. Look at the KPIs you’ve chosen for each objective. Do you have a healthy mix of both rearview mirror metrics and forward looking predictors?

  • Lagging KPIs are for validation. They confirm whether your strategy worked. They are perfect for reporting to the board and for celebrating successes.
  • Leading KPIs are for management. They are the numbers your operational teams should be looking at daily or weekly to make real time adjustments.

A dashboard with only lagging indicators is like driving a car using only the rearview mirror. You know exactly where you’ve been, but you have no idea what’s coming. A dashboard with only leading indicators can feel a bit abstract; you’re tracking a lot of activity, but you’re not sure if it’s producing the right results.

The magic happens when you pair them. You track Preventative Maintenance Compliance (leading) to influence Machine Uptime (leading), which in turn drives On Time Delivery (lagging) and ultimately, Customer Satisfaction (lagging). Each step in the chain predicts the next, giving you a complete and powerful view of your operations.

Best Practices for Making Your KPIs Work

Identifying the right KPIs is half the battle. The other half is embedding them into the culture of your business so they actually get used.

First, set realistic but challenging targets. A target of “100% On Time Delivery” might be demoralising if you’re currently at 80%. A better approach might be to target 85% this quarter, and 90% the next. The goals should stretch your teams, not break them.

Second, review them regularly. KPIs aren’t meant to be carved in stone. Your business priorities will change. Hold monthly or quarterly KPI review meetings. Ask what the numbers are telling you. Are the targets still right? Are we still measuring the most important things? Be prepared to kill off KPIs that are no longer serving you.

Third, communicate and foster ownership. The person on the shop floor needs to understand why their machine’s OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) matters. Show them how it connects to the company’s goal of improving profitability. Give teams ownership of the KPIs they can influence. When people feel responsible for a number, they will move heaven and earth to improve it.

Finally, and most importantly, use KPIs as triggers for action, not just as a report card. A dashboard should be the start of a conversation, not the end of one. When a KPI turns red, it shouldn’t be about blame. It should be a signal for the team to swarm the problem, understand the root cause, and implement a solution.

Practical Examples for Your Manufacturing Business

Let’s bring this to life with some concrete examples across different functions.

Operations:

  • Leading: Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), Schedule Adherence, First Pass Yield.
  • Lagging: On Time In Full (OTIF), Cost Per Unit, Scrap Rate.

Sales:

  • Leading: Quote to Win Ratio, Sales Pipeline Value, Average Time to Close a Deal.
  • Lagging: Total Revenue, Average Order Value, Customer Acquisition Cost.

Marketing (for Manufacturers):

  • Leading: Number of Qualified Leads from Website/Trade Shows, Spec Sheet Download Rate.
  • Lagging: Marketing Spend per Acquired Customer, Customer Lifetime Value.

Finance:

  • Leading: Days Sales Outstanding (DSO), Inventory Turns.
  • Lagging: Gross Profit Margin, EBITDA, Return on Capital Employed (ROCE).

Notice how for each area, there’s a mix of predictive activities and final outcomes. That’s the balance you’re aiming for.

Bringing It All Together

Look, it’s easy to get lost in a sea of data. It’s tempting to track dozens of metrics because the software makes it possible. But more data doesn’t mean more clarity. Often, it just means more noise.

Chasing vanity metrics feels productive, but it’s a trap. It leads to busy work, not effective work. It masks underlying problems and can lull you into a dangerous sense of complacency.

The power lies in simplicity and focus. By using this three question framework, you can cut through the clutter and build a small, powerful set of KPIs that are tightly aligned with your real business goals.

  1. What are our core strategic objectives?
  2. Which KPIs directly measure our progress?
  3. Are we balancing leading and lagging indicators?

Start small. Pick one critical business objective and apply these questions to it. Build out a mini dashboard with just three or four carefully chosen leading and lagging KPIs. Use them, talk about them, and see what a difference it makes.

So I invite you to do just that. Go back to your desk, pull up your current management report or dashboard, and for each number you see, ask yourself those three questions. Does it pass the test? Or is it just there to make you feel good? The answers might just change the way you run your business. To see how these principles can be applied directly to your organisation, I’d encourage you to explore the Goal Deployment Programme at https://tcmuklimited.co.uk/goal-deployment-programme/. It’s designed to help manufacturers like you make this transition from theory to reality.

From Friction to Flawless Execution: Unifying Your Teams with the X Matrix

Posted on by Adam Payne

Have you ever seen it? The classic standoff. The sales director, beaming, walks back into the office having just landed a massive, company-changing order. High fives all around. Then they walk over to the production manager to share the good news, and the beaming smile is met with a stone-cold stare. The production manager’s first question isn’t “How much revenue is that?” but “When do they need it by? Do you have any idea what this does to our current schedule?”

In a flash, the celebration is over. It’s not one team winning; it’s two departments bracing for a fight.

This, right here, is the quiet killer in so many manufacturing businesses. We call them departmental silos. They’re the invisible walls that spring up between sales, production, engineering, finance, and quality control. Everyone is working hard, everyone is trying to hit their numbers, but they’re not working together. It leads to friction, wasted effort, missed deadlines, and a general feeling of us versus them. To be honest, it’s exhausting for everyone involved.

The problem isn’t usually the people. It’s the system. Or rather, the lack of one. The root of the issue is that each department is playing its own game with its own scoreboard. What if, instead, everyone in the company could see the same game plan, understood their specific role in it, and shared the same scoreboard? That’s what we’re going to talk about. We’ll explore how creating visible, shared objectives, using a powerful but practical framework like the X Matrix, can dismantle those silos and turn competing teams into a single, unstoppable execution force.

The Real Cost of Departmental Silos

Let’s be real for a moment. What do silos actually look like on a Tuesday afternoon in a busy manufacturing plant? It’s not just a theoretical concept; it’s a series of small, frustrating moments that add up to a big problem.

It’s the engineering team spending months perfecting a new product design, only to find out from production that it’s a nightmare to manufacture efficiently, requiring costly new tooling that wasn’t budgeted for.

It’s the finance department chasing the sales team for forecasts, while the sales team is chasing production for lead times, and production is blaming procurement for material delays. It’s a circular firing squad of emails and excuses.

I remember visiting a factory a few years back where the quality team had implemented a new, rigorous inspection process. They were proud of it, and their metrics for ‘defects caught’ went through the roof. The problem? It created a massive bottleneck at the end of the production line. On-time delivery numbers plummeted, and the production team was furious. The quality team hit their goal, but the company, as a whole, failed the customer. Both teams were doing their jobs as they understood them, but they were working at cross purposes.

This isn’t just inefficient; it’s corrosive to your company culture. It breeds a “not my job” mentality. People stop thinking about what’s best for the business and start thinking about how to protect their own patch. Morale takes a nosedive because nobody enjoys coming to work feeling like they’re in a constant battle with their own colleagues. Good people, the ones who want to collaborate and solve problems, eventually get fed up and leave.

So where does this all come from? It’s rarely intentional. It’s the natural result of a few common things:

  1. Isolated Goals: Sales is bonused on revenue. Production is measured on cost per unit and efficiency. Finance is focused on cash flow. When these goals aren’t explicitly linked, they will inevitably conflict.
  2. Unclear Company Vision: If the leadership hasn’t clearly and repeatedly communicated the top 3 to 5 priorities for the entire year, departments are left to invent their own. And they will, based on what seems most important from their limited perspective.
  3. Limited Communication: There’s no regular, structured forum for different team leaders to get together, review progress against a shared plan, and solve cross-functional problems. The weekly production meeting doesn’t count if sales and engineering aren’t there.

Silos aren’t a sign of bad people. They’re a sign of a disconnected strategy. The cost isn’t just in lost efficiency; it’s in lost potential, lost morale, and ultimately, lost customers.

The Case for Shared Objectives

So, what’s the alternative to this siloed chaos? It’s deceptively simple in concept: get everyone aiming at the same target. Think of your business as a rowing team. If the person in the front is rowing towards the left bank, and the person in the back is rowing towards the right, you’re just going to spin in circles and get very tired. The only way to move forward, fast, is for everyone to row in the same direction, in perfect sync.

Shared objectives are your common direction. They create a clear line of sight from the highest-level strategic goals of the company right down to the daily tasks of an individual on the shop floor.

This is where so many businesses stumble. The owner or managing director has a brilliant three-year plan in their head—maybe it’s to expand into a new market, increase profitability by 20%, or become the number one supplier in a specific niche. But that vision stays in the boardroom. It never gets translated into meaningful, tangible goals for the people who actually make, sell, and ship the product.

A truly aligned organisation makes that connection explicit. The process looks something like this:

  • Company Strategic Goal: Increase market share in the North of England by 15% in three years.
  • Annual Company Objective: Launch Product X, which is tailored for the northern market, and secure 10 flagship clients this year.
  • Sales Department KPI: Secure £500,000 in sales for Product X from the target region.
  • Production Department KPI: Achieve a 98% on-time, in-full delivery rate for Product X and maintain a specific cost per unit.
  • Engineering Department KPI: Finalise the Product X design and support production to resolve any manufacturing issues within 24 hours.

Do you see the difference? Suddenly, the goals aren’t in conflict. For the company to win, Sales, Production, and Engineering all have to succeed, and their success is now visibly interconnected. The sales team knows that promising unrealistic delivery dates will hurt production’s ability to hit their target, which ultimately hurts everyone. Production understands that keeping costs down on Product X helps sales be more competitive, which helps everyone.

When objectives are shared and visible, the conversation changes. It shifts from “That’s your problem” to “How can we solve this together?” It clarifies priorities. When a new request comes in, you can ask a simple question: “Does this help us achieve our shared objective of launching Product X successfully?” If the answer is no, it becomes much easier to say no, or to at least question its urgency. It gives your teams a framework for making smart decisions without needing constant supervision.

X Matrix: A Practical Tool for Breaking Down Silos

Okay, so the idea of shared goals is great. But how do you actually manage it without creating a mountain of spreadsheets and confusing documents? This is where a tool like the Hoshin Kanri X Matrix comes in.

Now, don’t let the name intimidate you. It sounds complex, but at its heart, the X Matrix is just a powerful one-page plan that shows the connections between your long-term vision, your annual goals, your key projects, and the metrics you use to measure success. It’s a visual map that everyone in the business can understand.

Imagine a large square divided into four quadrants, with a space in the middle:

  • South Quadrant (Bottom): Long-Term Objectives. This is your “True North.” Where do you want the business to be in 3 to 5 years? These are the big, strategic ambitions. For example: “Become the UK’s most trusted supplier of high tolerance components” or “Achieve carbon-neutral operations.”
  • West Quadrant (Left): Annual Objectives. What do we need to accomplish this year to make progress towards our long-term vision? These are more specific and time-bound. Things like: “Reduce overall waste by 10%,” “Increase on-time delivery from 92% to 97%,” or “Launch our new e-commerce platform.”
  • North Quadrant (Top): Top Improvement Priorities. These are the key projects or initiatives you will execute this year to achieve your annual objectives. Think of them as the “how.” For example: “Implement 5S across the factory floor,” “Renegotiate contracts with top 3 suppliers,” or “Train sales team on new CRM software.”
  • East Quadrant (Right): Metrics to Measure. How will you know if you are winning? These are the key performance indicators (KPIs) that track your progress. Things like “Customer satisfaction score,” “Scrap rate,” “Sales conversion rate,” or “Employee turnover.”
  • Far East (Far Right): Ownership. This is crucial. For every top priority and every key metric, you assign a name. Who is responsible for driving this forward? Accountability becomes crystal clear.

The real power of the X Matrix is in the corners and the centre. This is where you use dots or check marks to show the relationships. You can see exactly which Top Priorities (North) support which Annual Objectives (West). You can see which Annual Objectives link to which Long-Term Goals (South). You can see which Metrics (East) are measuring the success of your priorities.

It forces the critical conversations that break down silos. When you build the matrix as a leadership team, the sales director can see that the “Implement 5S” project isn’t just a tidy-up exercise for production; it’s a critical enabler for reducing lead times, which directly impacts the “Increase on-time delivery” objective that the sales team cares so much about. Everything is connected, and for the first time, everyone can see those connections on a single sheet of paper.

Building Cross-Functional Collaboration

Having a beautiful X Matrix on the wall is a great start, but it’s just a tool. It’s like having a detailed map but never actually starting the journey. The tool only works if you build the right behaviours and rhythms of communication around it. This is about bringing the plan to life.

Here are a few essential enablers for making this work in the real world:

  1. Regular Cross-Team Reviews: The plan is not static. You need a regular heartbeat of accountability. This often takes the form of a monthly or quarterly business review. The key is that this isn’t a series of separate departmental updates. It’s one meeting where leaders from every department review the same plan—the X Matrix. You go through the key metrics. Are they green, amber, or red? If a metric is red, the conversation isn’t about whose fault it is. It’s about which cross-functional priorities are behind schedule and what help is needed to get them back on track.
  2. Transparent Communication Channels: Everyone should be able to see the score. Modern manufacturers use simple digital dashboards—they can be built in Excel, Google Sheets, or more advanced tools like Power BI. These dashboards display the key metrics from the X Matrix in real time, or close to it. When the on-time delivery metric is visible on a screen on the shop floor and on the sales director’s laptop, it becomes a shared reality. There’s no hiding from the data.
  3. Collaborative Training: Don’t just train your teams in their functional skills. Invest in training that brings different departments together. A workshop on Lean principles or problem-solving that includes people from sales, finance, and production can be revolutionary. They start to understand each other’s challenges and learn a common language for improvement. They build personal relationships that make it much easier to pick up the phone and solve a problem later on.
  4. Leadership That Models the Way: This might be the most important piece of the puzzle. If the department heads and senior leaders are seen to be collaborating, challenging each other respectfully, and focusing on the shared objectives, the rest of the organisation will follow. But if they leave the strategy meeting and go back to protecting their own turf, the entire effort will fail. Leaders must consistently use the X Matrix to frame their decisions and communications. They must walk the talk, every single day.

Real World Impact: From Friction to Flow

Let me tell you about a fictional but very typical company: Midlands Precision Engineering. They were a 50-person firm, good at what they did, but stuck. Growth had stalled. Their biggest problem was internal friction. Sales would promise custom jobs with short lead times to win business, which would throw the production schedule into chaos. Production would then cut corners to catch up, leading to quality escapes. The quality team would then clamp down, slowing everything down again. It was a vicious cycle.

They decided to try a new approach. The leadership team spent two days building their first X Matrix. For the first time, they had a heated but productive debate about what truly mattered for the business over the next three years. They agreed on three long-term goals: being the number one choice for quality, achieving 99% on-time delivery, and growing the business by 50%.

From there, they defined their annual objectives and the key projects to get there. One of the top priorities was to create a formal “Sales, Inventory, and Operations Planning” (SIOP) process. This project was co-owned by the heads of Sales and Operations.

What happened? The monthly SIOP meeting became the place where they made promises together. Sales brought their forecast. Production brought their capacity plan. They looked at the data together and agreed on a plan for the next three months. Sales now understood the real constraints of the factory, and production got a much earlier view of demand, allowing them to plan materials and labour more effectively.

Within a year, their on-time delivery had jumped from 85% to 97%. Quality issues dropped because the frantic, last-minute rush jobs became the exception, not the rule. And because they were now a more reliable supplier, they started winning more profitable, long-term contracts. Morale improved dramatically because people were no longer fighting fires; they were working together towards a clear, common goal. The X Matrix didn’t magically solve their problems, but it gave them the map and the compass they needed to solve them together.

Your Next Move

We’ve covered a lot of ground, but the core message is simple. Departmental silos are the default setting in most growing businesses, but they don’t have to be your reality. The antidote is to make your strategy visible, make your objectives shared, and make your teams interconnected. You stop managing departments and start leading a single, unified business.

Frameworks like the X Matrix provide a practical, proven way to do this. They move your strategic plan from a document gathering dust on a shelf to a living, breathing tool that guides daily decisions and fosters genuine collaboration. It’s not about adding more management layers or bureaucracy. It’s about creating clarity, alignment, and accountability. It’s about getting all your best people rowing in the same direction.

If this sounds like the kind of clarity and alignment you’ve been looking for to unlock your business’s true potential, then it might be time to take the next step. To see how these principles can be applied directly to your organisation, I’d encourage you to explore the Goal Deployment Programme at https://tcmuklimited.co.uk/goal-deployment-programme/. It’s designed to help manufacturers like you make this transition from theory to reality.

Transform Your Business

Stop Rewarding the Chaos: How to Transform Your Reactive Teams into Strategic Powerhouses

Posted on by Adam Payne

You walk the factory floor. It’s humming. People are moving, machines are running, the air is thick with the familiar smell of industry and hard work. Everyone looks incredibly busy. Your production supervisor is dashing between lines; phone pressed to his ear. The quality team is clustered around a monitor, pointing intently at a chart. An engineer is frantically typing on a laptop perched on a tool cabinet. On the surface, it’s a picture of intense activity. It feels like things are getting done.


But then you look at the board. Last week’s production targets were missed, again. That nagging bottleneck in assembly is still causing delays. And the customer complaint you thought was resolved two weeks ago has just reappeared in your inbox. The activity is there, but the results aren’t following. It’s a frustratingly common scenario; one I’ve seen play out in countless manufacturing businesses across the UK.


This leads to the core, and frankly, critical question we need to ask ourselves as leaders: are our teams genuinely productive, or are they just busy? There’s a world of difference between the two and mistaking one for the other is a costly error. Busyness is motion. Productivity is forward motion. It’s about focusing our finite resources, our people’s time and energy, on the high-value, strategic work that actually moves the needle. Let’s get into what that really means.

The Great Illusion: Defining Busy vs. Productive Teams

At first glance, busy and productive teams can look remarkably similar. Both involve effort, time, and people doing things. The real difference lies not in the volume of activity, but in its direction and purpose. It’s the difference between rearranging deck chairs and actually steering the ship toward new horizons.


A “busy” team is often in a state of constant reaction. Their days are a whirlwind of firefighting. A machine goes down, so everyone scrambles. An urgent order comes in from a key client, so the carefully planned schedule is thrown out the window. Their calendars are packed with back-to-back meetings, many of which end without clear actions or decisions. They answer hundreds of emails, they multitask furiously, and they often work long hours. To be honest, they feel like they’re working incredibly hard, and they are. The problem is that their effort is scattered. It’s like throwing a hundred darts at a board hoping one will hit the bullseye, instead of taking careful aim. This kind of environment is exhausting and, over time, demoralising. People burn out from the constant churn without the satisfaction of seeing meaningful progress.


Now, picture a truly “productive” team. The atmosphere might even seem a bit calmer, more deliberate. There’s a focused hum, not a frantic buzz. This team operates with a shared understanding of their key objectives. They know what the three most important goals are for the quarter, and they can tell you how their work today contributes to one of them. Their meetings are shorter, more focused, and always end with a clear ‘who does what by when’. They aren’t just completing tasks on a list; they are solving problems and creating value. They have time for preventative maintenance because they’ve solved the root causes of the most frequent breakdowns. They aren’t just reacting to quality issues; they are proactively improving processes to prevent them from happening in the first place.


Why does this distinction matter so much? Because in manufacturing, margins are tight, and competition is fierce. We can’t afford to waste our most valuable asset, our people’s time. A busy team might keep the lights on day to day, but they won’t drive innovation. They won’t improve OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) in a sustainable way. They won’t reduce waste or improve your Right First Time metrics. A productive team, on the other hand, is your engine for growth and resilience. They are the ones who will find a way to shave five seconds off a cycle time, who will redesign a workflow to eliminate a common error, who will build the kind of operational excellence that becomes a true competitive advantage. As a leader, your primary job is to create an environment where productivity can flourish, and busyness is recognised for what it is: a thief of potential.

The Warning Lights: Signs Your Team Is Only Busy

It can be hard to spot the difference from the corner office. The reports might show ‘hours worked’ and ‘tasks completed’, but those metrics often hide the truth. You need to look for the qualitative signs, the patterns of behaviour that act as warning lights on your operational dashboard. If you see these, it’s a strong signal that your team is stuck in the busyness trap.

First, look at your meeting culture. Are your team members constantly in meetings? I once worked with a company where the production manager spent over 70% of his week in scheduled meetings. He was talking about production, not enabling it. Busy teams have endless meetings with vague agendas. They are often used for information sharing that could have been an email, or for discussions that go in circles because the right people aren’t in the room, or no one has the authority to make a decision. A productive team’s meetings are for problem solving and decision making, period. They are jealously guarded, well prepared, and action-oriented.

Second, watch for rampant multitasking. We’ve somehow convinced ourselves that juggling five things at once is a sign of a high performer. It’s not. It’s a recipe for mistakes and shallow work. If you see your people constantly switching between analysing data, answering emails, taking calls, and dealing with interruptions on the line, they aren’t being efficient. They are context switching, and every switch comes with a cognitive cost. This is especially dangerous in a manufacturing setting, where a moment of distraction can lead to a quality defect or, far worse, a safety incident. A productive team is given the space to focus on one critical task at a time. They finish what they start.

Third, listen for the language of stress and the absence of accomplishment. Do your people talk about how swamped and overwhelmed they are? Is “I’m slammed” the standard answer to “How are you?” That’s a sign of busyness. It’s a culture where the badge of honour is how full your plate is, not what you’ve achieved. In contrast, productive teams talk about progress. They talk about what they’ve finished, what they’ve solved, and what they’ve learned. You’ll hear a sense of forward momentum and pride in their voices, even when they’re working hard. They might be tired at the end of the day, but it’s the satisfying exhaustion that comes from achieving something meaningful, not the draining fatigue of running in place.

Finally, look at the results on major goals. This is the ultimate acid test. If everyone is working flat out, but your key strategic projects are stalled and your big KPIs aren’t improving month on month, you have a busyness problem. The activity is not aligned with the objectives. It’s focused on the urgent, not the important.

A Compass for True Impact: Framework for Assessment

So, how do you move from simply suspecting a busyness problem to diagnosing it properly? You need a framework, a simple compass to help you and your team navigate away from low-value activity towards high-impact work. You don’t need a complex system. You just need to ask the right questions consistently.

A great starting point I’ve used successfully is a simplified version of the GRPI model, which stands for Goals, Roles, Processes, and Interpersonal Relationships. It’s just a straightforward way to check for clarity and alignment.

  • Goals: The first and most important question is: does everyone on the team have absolute clarity on our most important goals? Not the 20 things on your strategic plan, but the 2 or 3 that will make the biggest difference this quarter. For a production team, this might be ‘Reduce scrap on Line 3 by 15%’ or ‘Achieve a 98% on-time delivery rate’. These goals must be specific, measurable, and constantly communicated. If you ask five different team members what the top priority is and you get five different answers, you have a goal clarity problem, and that’s a breeding ground for busyness.
  • Roles: Once the goal is clear, are the roles for achieving it equally clear? Who is responsible for what? Who needs to be consulted? Who has the final say? In a busy environment, roles are muddy. People duplicate effort, or worse, things fall through the cracks because everyone assumes someone else is handling it. A productive team has crystal clear roles. The operator knows their role is to run the machine to standard and flag deviations immediately. The engineer knows their role is to analyse those deviations and implement a permanent fix.
  • Processes: How are we going to work together to achieve the goal? What are the steps? What does our daily stand-up look like? How do we escalate a problem? Busy teams often have convoluted or non-existent processes. They reinvent the wheel every time. Productive teams have simple, robust processes that everyone understands and follows. This isn’t about mindless bureaucracy; it’s about creating smooth pathways for work to flow, removing friction and decision fatigue.

Beyond this simple check, you need to align all work with high-value outcomes. Encourage your team to constantly ask “why?” Why are we having this meeting? Why are we generating this report? Does this activity directly contribute to reducing scrap or improving delivery times? If the answer is no, or is a bit of a stretch, you should challenge whether it needs to be done at all. This requires a shift from celebrating task completion (we answered 100 emails!) to celebrating outcome achievement (we reduced customer complaints by 20%!).

Of course, you need to measure this. Use your quantitative KPIs, your OEE, your scrap rates, your lead times. But don’t stop there. Pair them with qualitative feedback. Talk to your people. Are they frustrated? Do they feel they can get their work done? Do they have the tools and support they need? Numbers tell you what is happening; your people tell you why.

Finally, make this a regular habit. Audit your team’s activities against your priorities at least once a month. It’s like a stocktake for time and energy. Where is our effort really going? Is it aligned with our goals? This regular check-in is what keeps the team on course and prevents the slow, insidious creep of busyness from taking over again.

Practical Steps to Shift from Busy to Productive

Knowing the difference is one thing. Making the shift is another. It requires deliberate, consistent leadership. Here are some practical steps you can take, starting tomorrow.

First, lead the charge on ruthless prioritisation. As a leader, you are the chief protector of your team’s focus. You have to be the one to say “no” or “not now” to requests that don’t align with your key goals. Work with your team to identify and eliminate low-value tasks. Is there a report that no one really reads? Stop producing it. Is there a meeting that consistently under-delivers? Cancel it. This isn’t about being lazy; it’s about being strategic. Every “no” to a low-value task is a “yes” to having more time for what truly matters.

Next, foster an environment of psychological safety. Your people must feel safe to speak up, to challenge the status quo, to admit a mistake, or to point out a problem without fear of blame. In a manufacturing environment, this means the operator on the floor feels empowered to stop the line if they see a potential quality issue, knowing they’ll be thanked for their vigilance, not chastised for the downtime. When people are afraid to speak up, small problems fester until they become big, time-consuming crises, and that is a recipe for firefighting and busyness.

Implement better feedback loops. The annual performance review is not a feedback loop; it’s an autopsy. You need real-time, or near real-time, information flow. Daily huddles or stand-up meetings around a visual management board are perfect for this. What did we achieve yesterday? What is our priority for today? What is getting in our way? This simple 15-minute meeting aligns the team, exposes problems quickly, and keeps everyone focused on the immediate next steps towards the larger goal.

Also, think about how you reward and recognise people. Are you celebrating the heroes who stay late to fix a crisis? Or are you celebrating the team that improved a process, so the crisis never happens in the first place? If you only reward firefighting, you will get more fires. Start explicitly recognising and rewarding proactive problem solving, simplification, and collaboration. Celebrate the quiet, consistent progress that marks a truly productive team.

Finally, empower your team to adjust their own workflows. The people doing the work are often the ones who know best how to improve it. Give them the autonomy and the tools to run small improvement experiments. This creates a culture of continuous improvement and ownership, where everyone is thinking like a problem solver, not just a task doer. This is the heart of shifting from a culture of reactive busyness to one of proactive productivity. It’s a transformation that pays dividends in improved morale, higher engagement, and most importantly, measurable, sustainable results.

Guarding Against the Busyness Trap

Let’s be clear. The pull towards busyness is constant and powerful. In a world of instant notifications and competing demands, it is the path of least resistance. It feels easier to respond to the next email than to carve out two hours of deep work to solve a recurring production issue. It feels more immediately satisfying to tick off ten small tasks than to make slow, steady progress on one big, complex project.

That is why your role as a leader is so vital. You must be the guardian of your team’s focus, the champion of clarity, and the architect of an environment where deep, meaningful work can happen. Mistaking activity for achievement is a silent killer of growth and innovation. It burns out your best people and leaves your organisation vulnerable, treading water while your more focused competitors swim ahead.

I encourage you to take a hard, honest look at your team this week. Use the framework we discussed. Ask the tough questions. Are your goals crystal clear to everyone on the shop floor? Are your meetings a springboard for action or a time sink? Is your team talking about how busy they are, or are they talking about what they’ve accomplished?

Making the shift from busy to productive is not a one-time fix; it’s a continuous commitment. It’s about building a culture of purpose, clarity, and discipline. The good news is that the tools and strategies to do this are well within your reach. For those ready to take a more structured approach to aligning your entire organisation, from top floor strategy to shop floor tactics, a system like Hoshin Kanri can be transformative. It provides a robust framework for ensuring that everyone is pulling in the same direction, focused on the critical few objectives that truly matter.

To learn more about how you can systematically align your strategic objectives with tactical projects on the ground, explore how our Goal Deployment Programme can help you build a truly productive organisation.

From Leadership to Line: The Modules That Build a Lean Culture

Posted on by Adam Payne

You’ve seen it, haven’t you? The frantic energy of a manufacturing floor that’s busy but not necessarily productive. The operators who know a better way to do things but have long given up trying to tell anyone. The managers who are buried in spreadsheets, chasing numbers that don’t seem to reflect the reality of the work. It’s a common story in UK manufacturing, this sense of running hard just to stand still.


This is where the idea of a Lean culture comes in. And I know, ‘Lean’ can feel like another one of those buzzwords that gets thrown around in boardrooms. But when you strip it back, a Lean culture is simply about creating an environment where every single person, from the CEO to the newest apprentice on the line, is actively engaged in making things better. It’s about a shared obsession with eliminating waste, solving problems, and delivering more value to the customer.


The real challenge, and where so many initiatives fall flat, is that you can’t just bolt it on. You can’t just train a few people in 5S, hang up some new charts, and call it a day. It has to be woven into the very fabric of your organisation. It requires a fundamental shift in mindset, starting at the very top and flowing all the way down to the person packing the final box.


So, how do you actually build that? It’s not about a single magic bullet. It’s about systematically putting in place the modules, the building blocks, that create a self sustaining system of continuous improvement. This is what we’re going to walk through today: the essential components that connect leadership’s vision to the powerful insights of your front line teams.

It All Starts at the Top: Leadership’s Unwavering Commitment

Let’s be brutally honest for a moment. If the leadership team isn’t genuinely, visibly, and consistently committed to this, you might as well not even start. I’ve seen it happen more times than I can count. A big announcement is made, a memo goes out, maybe there’s a budget for some training. And then… nothing. The directors go back to their offices, the managers go back to their old routines, and the message to the shop floor is loud and clear: this is just another flavour of the month.

True leadership commitment isn’t about signing cheques or approving projects. It’s about behaviour. It’s the managing director who puts on a pair of safety boots and walks the floor not on a planned tour, but just to observe and ask questions. And not questions like, “Why is this behind schedule?” but questions like, “What’s getting in your way today?” or “Is there anything that’s frustrating you about this process?”

This is about modelling the principles you want to see. If you’re talking about eliminating waste, leaders can’t be seen to be wasting people’s time in pointless meetings. If you’re talking about respect for people, leaders have to be the first ones to listen, truly listen, to the concerns of their team. Visibility is everything. When people see the boss taking the time to understand a problem at its source, it sends a powerful signal that this stuff actually matters.

And to be honest, leaders often need their own training for this. Their role in a Lean transformation is different. It’s less about having all the answers and directing traffic, and more about coaching, removing obstacles, and empowering their people. They need to learn how to ask probing questions that guide teams to their own solutions, rather than just prescribing a fix. It’s a shift from being the hero who solves the problem to being the leader who builds a team of problem solvers. Without this fundamental buy in and behavioural change at the highest level, everything else is built on sand.

The Human Engine: Empowering People and Breaking Down Walls

Once the leadership has set the tone, the real engine of any Lean culture is the people who do the actual work. Your front-line teams, your operators, your technicians, your warehouse staff. These are the people who live and breathe your processes every single day. They are the true experts. The person who has been operating the same machine for five years knows more about its quirks, its inefficiencies, and its potential than any engineer with a clipboard. Ignoring that expertise is, frankly, one of the biggest forms of waste in any business.

Empowering the front line isn’t just a nice phrase; it’s a deliberate strategy. It means giving them the authority and the tools to make improvements to their own work. It means trusting them. It means creating front line leaders, team leaders or cell leaders, who are not just supervisors but coaches and facilitators. Their job is to support their team, help them identify problems, and get them the resources they need to solve them.

But how do you tap into that wellspring of ideas? You have to create channels for communication that actually work. I’m sure we’ve all seen the dusty suggestion box in the corner of the canteen, a black hole from which no idea ever returns. That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about structured, regular, and responsive feedback loops.

Daily team huddles are a brilliant place to start. A quick, 10-minute stand up meeting at the start of a shift around a visual management board. What did we achieve yesterday? What’s the plan for today? What problems are we facing? It creates a rhythm of communication and immediate problem solving. If a problem is raised, it’s not left to fester for weeks. It’s acknowledged right there and then, and an action is assigned.

This brings us to a critical point: you have to act on the contributions you receive. Nothing kills engagement faster than people offering ideas and hearing nothing back. Even if an idea isn’t feasible, closing the loop is essential. A simple, “Thanks for the suggestion, we looked into it, but we can’t do it right now because of X, Y, and Z” builds immense trust. It shows you’re listening. And when you do implement an idea, celebrate it. Publicly recognise the person or team who came up with it. It encourages others to step forward.

This principle of communication extends beyond individual teams. One of the most powerful modules you can build is a cross functional Lean Task Force. Pull together a small group of people from different departments: an operator from production, someone from quality, an engineer, someone from maintenance, maybe even a person from purchasing or sales. Get them to walk a process together, from start to finish. The revelations are often staggering. The quality inspector finally understands why the operator is struggling with a certain part. The production team sees how a small change they make creates a huge headache for the packing department. These collaborations break down the invisible walls and the “us versus them” mentality that kills efficiency. They uncover the hidden wastes that exist in the handoffs between departments, wastes that no single department would ever see on its own.

Building the Toolbox: From Training to Tangible Tools

A committed leadership and an engaged workforce are the foundation, but they need the right tools and skills to build with. This is where practical, hands on training comes in. And please, this cannot be death by PowerPoint. Lean is about doing. The best training gets people out of their chairs and into a simulated or real environment where they can apply the concepts immediately.

Workshops on specific Lean tools are essential. Think of things like:

  • 5S and Visual Management: This is often the starting point, and for good reason. It’s about creating a clean, organised, and self-explanatory workspace. A place for everything, and everything in its place. When tools are easy to find, when problems are immediately visible (like a leak on a clean floor), and when standards are clear, it eliminates countless small frustrations and sources of waste. We’ll touch on this a bit more.
  • Value Stream Mapping (VSM): This is like creating a map of your entire process, from raw material to finished product. It’s a powerful way to make everyone see the whole picture, not just their little piece of it. It brutally highlights all the non-value added steps, the waiting times, the unnecessary movement, and the bottlenecks.
  • Problem Solving (PDCA, A3): You need to equip your people with a structured way to think about and solve problems. The Plan Do Check Act cycle is a simple but profound framework. It moves teams away from guesswork and firefighting towards a scientific method of defining a problem, testing a solution, measuring the result, and standardising what works.

The key is to start small. Don’t try to implement everything everywhere all at once. Pick a pilot area, a single production cell or value stream that has some challenges but also a willing team. Use it as your laboratory. Run the training, implement the tools, and work with that team to get a tangible win. This success story then becomes your internal case study. It builds momentum and creates a pull from other areas of the business who want to see the same results.

The role of a mentor or a ‘sensei’ can be invaluable here. Having an experienced guide, whether internal or external, who can coach the teams, ask the tough questions, and keep the focus on the core principles is often the difference between success and failure. This isn’t about having an expert who solves the problems for you; it’s about having a teacher who helps you learn to solve them for yourself. Capability building is the ultimate goal.

Making It Stick: Measurement and the Never-Ending Journey

So, you’ve got leadership on board, your teams are engaged, and you’re starting to use the tools. How do you ensure this isn’t just a temporary boost? How do you make it the new way of working? This is where measurement and a relentless focus on continuous improvement come in.

First, you need to be measuring the right things. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are crucial, but they need to be meaningful. Instead of just measuring overall output, start measuring things that reflect Lean principles. For example:

  • Lead Time: How long does it take from a customer order to delivery?
  • First Time Through (FTT): What percentage of products make it through the process without any rework or defects?
  • On Time In Full (OTIF): Are we delivering what the customer wants, when they want it?
  • Ideas Implemented: How many improvement ideas from the front line have we actually put into practice this month?

These KPIs should be visible to everyone, ideally on those team huddle boards. When people can see the direct impact of their improvement efforts on the numbers, it creates a powerful feedback loop that fuels more improvement.

This leads to the heart of a true Lean culture: the idea that you are never ‘done’. Continuous improvement, or Kaizen, is not a project with an end date. It’s a daily practice. It’s the constant, incremental refinement of processes. It’s the team on the assembly line figuring out how to shave two seconds off a task by repositioning a parts bin. It’s the maintenance team developing a new preventative check to stop a recurring machine fault.

These small, daily improvements, when compounded over time, lead to revolutionary results. The PDCA cycle becomes a habit. Teams are constantly running small experiments: “What if we tried doing it this way? Let’s test it for a week, check the results, and if it’s better, we’ll make it the new standard.” This is the engine that drives a Lean culture forward long after the initial consultants have gone home.

A System, Not a Shopping List

As we’ve walked through these modules, from the boardroom to the shop floor, I hope one thing has become clear. This isn’t a pick and mix menu. You can’t just implement a brilliant feedback system if your leadership isn’t listening. You can’t just run a 5S workshop and expect the culture to change if you don’t empower people to maintain the standards.

Each of these modules leans on the others. Leadership commitment creates the psychological safety for front line engagement. Engaged teams need feedback loops to be heard and cross functional collaboration to solve bigger problems. They all need the right tools and training to be effective, and they need clear measurements to see their progress and fuel the cycle of continuous improvement. It is a complete system.

Building a true Lean culture is a marathon, not a sprint. It takes patience, persistence, and a genuine belief in the potential of your people. The journey starts with a single, crucial step: a conversation among your leadership team about what kind of company you truly want to be. From there, by thoughtfully implementing these modules, you can build an organisation that doesn’t just survive, but thrives, by continuously getting better, every single day.

If you’re tired of chasing problems around the shop floor, maybe it’s time for something different. Our Lean Green Belt training could be that little nudge that actually makes a difference. If you’re even a bit curious click here and we’ll see where it goes.

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Break Free from Daily Chaos: The First Steps Towards Operational Excellence

Posted on by Adam Payne

If you walk onto most manufacturing floors in the UK, beneath the hum of machinery and the focused energy of the team, there’s often a current of something else: a low-grade, persistent chaos. It’s the missing tool, the urgent order that throws the schedule out, the pallet of raw materials that arrived late again. It’s the small, daily fires we’ve become expert at putting out. But what if we could prevent the fires from starting in the first place? That’s the shift we all would want.


In today’s world, especially in the UK with its unique set of pressures, operational excellence isn’t just a buzzword. It’s the bedrock of survival and success. It’s about moving from reactive chaos to proactive clarity, where processes are so smooth, predictable, and efficient that they give you a competitive edge. This isn’t about unattainable perfection; it’s a journey; a series of deliberate steps toward better processes, higher quality, and a more engaged team. And it starts with the first, simple step.

Understanding the Foundations: What Are We Actually Talking About?

Before rearranging the factory floor or buying new software, we need to understand what ‘operational excellence’ means. Ask ten managers, and you might get ten answers. For me, it boils down to one idea: consistently and reliably delivering value to your customers.


It’s not about heroic efforts to hit a quarterly target. It’s about building a system and culture where everyone is involved in making the business better every day. It’s the quiet, relentless pursuit of improvement.


So, what are the pillars holding this idea up?


First, there’s process improvement. This is the nuts and bolts of it all. It’s looking at how you do things, from the moment an order comes in, to the moment a finished product goes out, and asking: “Is there a better way?” Frameworks like Lean Manufacturing focus on eliminating waste, while Six Sigma reduces variation and defects. But you don’t need to be a black belt to start. It can be as simple as noticing that an operator walks twenty feet to get a spanner ten times an hour. Fixing that is process improvement.


I remember a place I worked at years ago. An assembly line was always behind schedule. Management’s solution was to throw more people at it, which created more confusion. I simply observed the process for a shift. I found that a critical component was stored on the other side of the workshop. The time spent walking back and forth added up to two hours per shift. By relocating a storage bin, I increased output by nearly 15%. That’s process improvement: noticing the obvious things we’ve become blind to.


Next are quality management systems (QMS). Yes, ISO 9001 audits and paperwork can feel bureaucratic, but at its heart, a good QMS is your company’s rulebook. It ensures consistency, preventing one shift from doing a task one way and another shift doing it differently. It’s your defence against defects, recalls, and unhappy customers. Think of it as the DNA of your operational reliability.


Finally, the big one: a culture of continuous improvement. In Japan, it’s Kaizen. It’s the belief that everything can be improved and that the people closest to the work are best positioned to figure out how. This requires a cultural shift for many traditional manufacturing businesses. It means moving away from a top-down, ‘I talk, you listen’ model to one where everyone feels able, and obligated, to flag problems and suggest solutions.


To get any of this off the ground, you need a clear vision. What does excellence look like for you? Is it reducing your defect rate from 3% to 0.5%? Cutting lead-time in half? Achieving 99% on-time delivery? Define it, write it down, and talk about it relentlessly. Your vision becomes the North Star guiding every decision, project, and conversation about improvement.

The Honest Reality Check: Finding Your Starting Point

You’re sold on the vision. You want that smooth, efficient, high-quality operation. The next step is a dose of cold, hard reality. You need to understand exactly where you are right now, warts and all. It can be painful, but it’s essential. You can’t draw a map to your destination if you don’t know your current location.

Start with a value stream mapping exercise: follow the flow of value through your processes, beginning to end. Gather your team in a room—the shop floor supervisors, the sales experts, the finance director—everyone who shapes or moves that value.

  • Current State Analysis: Where does value stall, bottleneck, or get lost? Are there outdated systems, communication gaps, or rework loops? Capture every handoff, every delay, every friction point. This is a no-blame exercise, it’s about identifying problems, not assigning fault.
  • Value-Adding Steps: Where is the magic happening? Skilled workers? Effective workflows? Pinpoint and preserve what drives quality and efficiency.
  • Non-Value-Adding Steps: Shine a light on waste. What slows you down, bloats your cycle times, or eats resources without adding impact?

This gives you a vivid, real-world picture of how value moves through your operation, and where it stalls. With this clarity, you’re ready to flow forward, reimagine, and reorganise for maximum efficiency.

Next, back it up with hard data. Gut feelings are great, but data tells the truth. Start with a few Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that matter. A good starting point in manufacturing is Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), which combines availability, performance, and quality. You might find a machine you thought was running flat out actually has an OEE of 50%, which is typical.


Other crucial metrics include scrap rates, on-time delivery percentages, and customer complaints. Establishing a baseline gives you a starting line. Every improvement can be measured against this baseline, proving its value.


But data is only half the story. The other half is in the minds of your people. You must engage your employees. They know what works, what doesn’t, and what drives them crazy. How do you get this information? Do ‘gemba walks,’ a Japanese term meaning ‘go to the real place.’ Walk the factory floor, watch processes, and talk to operators. Ask simple questions: “What’s the most frustrating part of your job? If you had a magic wand, what’s the one thing you’d change?”


Set up regular team huddles or suggestion boxes. Crucially, when people give feedback, act on it, or explain why you can’t. If suggestions disappear into a black hole, people will stop making them. But if they see their ideas lead to real change, you’ll unlock a flood of innovation.

Making the First Moves: From Ideas to Action

You have your vision and baseline. Now it’s time to get your hands dirty. Start small, aim for quick wins, and focus on changes with the biggest impact and least disruption.


A great place to begin is by streamlining workflows and reducing waste. This is the heart of Lean thinking. The “8 Wastes”—Defects, Overproduction, Waiting, Non-Utilised Talent, Transportation, Inventory, Motion, and Extra-Processing—are a great lens for viewing operations. Teach them to your team.


A brilliant first project is a 5S campaign: Sort, Set in Order, Shine, Standardise, Sustain.

  • Sort: Remove unnecessary items.
  • Set in Order: Find logical, ergonomic homes for everything.
  • Shine: Clean the area to make problems like leaks or loose bolts visible.
  • Standardise: Create rules to maintain the new state.
  • Sustain: Make it a habit.


A 5S project is visual, involves everyone, and delivers immediate results in efficiency and safety. It proves change is possible and builds excitement for what’s next.


Next, integrate quality management tools and feedback loops. When something goes wrong, do you just fix the immediate problem and move on? That’s firefighting. To achieve excellence, you need to become a detective. Use the ‘5 Whys’ to find root causes (I’ll add here it doesn’t take five, it’s normally way more than that). For example:

  1. Why did the machine stop?
    Because a fuse blew.
  2. Why did the fuse blow?
    Because the motor overloaded.
  3. Why did the motor overload?
    Because the bearing wasn’t turning smoothly.
  4. Why wasn’t the bearing turning smoothly?
    Because it wasn’t properly maintained (e.g., lubricated or replaced as needed).
  5. Why wasn’t it maintained properly?
    Because it wasn’t included in the maintenance schedule.
    Extending Beyond 5 Whys:
  6. Why wasn’t it included in the maintenance schedule?
    Because the organisation lacked a standardised process for auditing and updating maintenance schedules.
  7. Why does the organisation lack a standardised process?
    Because preventive maintenance policies have not been prioritised or formalised.

Instead of just replacing a fuse, you prioritise preventative maintenance and policies—a permanent solution. This is a feedback loop: using failures to strengthen processes.


Finally, empower your employees. Give them the training, tools, and authority to make decisions about their work. Trust a production cell to manage its own quality checks or let a team leader sequence jobs. This shift from director to coach can be scary for traditional managers, but it fosters pride and ownership, transforming results.


Don’t forget your supply chain. Even the most efficient factory is vulnerable if components don’t arrive on time. Build stronger relationships with key suppliers, explore dual sourcing, and improve forecasting. In the post-covid landscape, a resilient supply chain is not just an advantage, it’s a necessity.

The Journey, Not the Destination

The path from manufacturing chaos to operational excellence can feel daunting. But you don’t climb a mountain in one leap; you do it one step at a time. By understanding the foundations, conducting an honest assessment, and implementing targeted first steps like a 5S project or the 5 Whys, you build momentum. You prove to yourself and your team that change is possible, and beneficial.


Operational excellence isn’t a final destination. It’s a continuous journey of improvement; a mindset embedded in your culture. The benefits—enhanced efficiency, superior quality, higher productivity, and an engaged workforce—are real and compound over time. Start small, be consistent, and position your operation for the sustained success it deserves in an increasingly competitive world.


To truly embed operational excellence, consider the broader implications of your efforts. This journey is not just about internal processes but also about how you interact with the external environment. Engage with industry forums and networks to share best practices and learn from others. This external engagement can provide fresh perspectives and innovative ideas that you might not have considered. Additionally, consider the role of technology in your journey. The digital transformation of manufacturing, often referred to as Industry 5.0, offers tools and technologies that can significantly enhance your operational capabilities. From IoT devices that provide real-time data on machine performance to advanced analytics that offer insights into process improvements, technology can be a powerful ally in your quest for excellence.


Also, sustainability should be a key consideration in your operational strategy. As global awareness of environmental issues grows, manufacturers are increasingly expected to operate sustainably. This means not only reducing waste and energy consumption but also considering the entire lifecycle of your products. In integrating sustainable practices into your operations, you not only contribute to a healthier planet but also appeal to a growing segment of environmentally conscious consumers.


Finally, remember that the journey towards operational excellence is as much about people as it is about processes. Invest in your workforce through training and development programs that equip them with the skills needed to thrive in a rapidly changing industry. Foster a culture of collaboration and innovation where employees feel valued and empowered to contribute their ideas. By creating an environment where people are motivated to excel, you lay the foundation for sustained success.


To further solidify your journey, consider the importance of leadership in driving change. Leaders must not only endorse the vision but also embody it, setting an example for the entire organisation. They should be visible champions of the change, actively participating in initiatives and encouraging open communication. This leadership commitment is crucial in maintaining momentum and ensuring that operational excellence becomes ingrained in the company culture.


Additionally, consider the role of innovation in achieving operational excellence. Encourage your teams to think creatively and explore new ideas that could lead to breakthroughs in efficiency and quality. Innovation should not be confined to a specific department but should permeate every level of the organisation.


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