Author: Adam Payne

The Process of Improvement for any Business

Posted on by Adam Payne

Standardise

In standardising a process you want to be able to see the Abnormal from Normal conditions. When the process is disrupted by an obstacle or issue, you can see it. The Standardise, Do, Check, Act cycle.

Stabilise

Now you can begin to systematically simplify, Combine, Eliminate the issues to Stabilise the process. Whether it’s achieving TAKT, a cycle time, changeover, order entry, bid-no bid process, etc. The Plan, Do, Check, Act cycle.

Standardise and Stabilise play off of one another. (and you must be applying the rigorous PDCA management process as a business, if you can’t do that or sustain it ultimately you will fail)

Optimise

The drive towards perfection should always be sort within our processes across all functions, departments, businesses. This is optimisation, in driving for continuous improvement. Once we have standardised and stabilised our processes internally we can also start to look externally within our supply chain and support the SDCA and PDCA within those businesses that are struggling, remember we want a way of understanding the Abnormal from Normal conditions, no reason we can’t apply that in measuring our supply chain and why not pass on the learning, we all benefit. (and I don’t mean how some OEM’s have applied this before, internally a mess but let’s concentrate and beat up the supplier, short termism!)

Optimise also goes hand in hand with Grow in my eyes, all of the improvements align to our Strategy, and our Strategy will have new business, innovation in our products, so optimise and utilise all of those resources to ensure future growth.

Grow

Apply the SDCA, PDCA into Sales and Marketing processes. Integrate the tools and techniques of Lean Manufacturing, Operational Excellence with the proven sales methods and drive sustainable increases in sales performance and profitability.

In improving the efficiency of our company’s sales processes, we enable the sales and Customer facing teams to reduce waste and duplication and free up much needed Customer contact time in the sales cycle creating greater customer value.

As the orders come in, we come back to our Standardise and Stabilise cycle and the cycle repeats.

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Leadership Alignment

Posted on by Adam Payne

Leadership teams still operate in silos. Commercial don’t talk to operations and vice versa, individual objectives are not aligned to the business needs, Quality stands alone. Your business may have a company vision but is this realised/disseminated throughout the organisation and most importantly of all, is your leadership team aligned to it.

Creating a clear company vision is key to your organisation’s success, but how do you make sure everyone on your leadership team agrees? Now this doesn’t mean that your team need to get on together but it does mean they are fully focussed and completely in agreement on what needs to be delivered.

Make sure everyone on your leadership team is on the same page with a crystal-clear vision for your organisation by AGREEING on the answers to these questions. REMEMBER AGREEING AS A TEAM!.

This walk-through helps your team clarify and agree on your company vision and priorities.

 

What are your Core Values?

What are the 3-5 characteristics that define who you are as a company, culture and leadership team?

 

What is your Focus?

What is it your business excels at? What is its core competence? What’s your purpose?

 

What is your 10 year Vision?

What is the goal you are all working towards? What does the finish line look like?

 

What is your Marketing Strategy?

Who is your ideal target market? What are your Unique Selling Points you need to tell to the world? What is your proven process for doing business with your customers? What’s your guarantee?

 

What is your 3 year Strategy

What is the Revenue, Profit and Measurable goals (remembering KPI’s drive behaviour so make sure you have the correct ones)? 3-5 bullet points on what your business will look like in 3 years.

 

What is your 1 year plan?

What IS the plan, what are the 3-7 most important things that must be done within the next 12 months? (Less is More)

 

Quarterly Milestones

What are the most important things your team must do in the next 90 days to ensure they hit the 1 year plan to put you on track to make your 3 year Strategy a Reality?

 

Implement a governance process to ensure execution.

Give time, Space and co-ordination of problem solving so that the organisational barriers are removed.

REMEMBER AGREEMENT AT EVERY QUESTION BEFORE YOU MOVE ON

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First Impressions Count in Customer Service

Posted on by Adam Payne

When it comes to Customer Service, my opinion is first impressions count.

Recently I visited a Training company, their offices are based on a retail park that has two/three main car dealerships. Upon leaving the offices I decided to look around one of the dealerships used car sales. I parked up, put my coat on and went for a walk round. I have always thought about owning a 4×4 style vehicle (don’t ask me why….). After a couple of minutes a Salesman came out and asked if I was OK. I introduced myself and asked about the car. I was expecting an introduction back and the normal handshake. NOTHING!

So intrigued by this I made up a deal that I had been offered by another dealership and could they match it (not a big difference, match a part exchange and match the price, £500 difference on a price). The salesman shook his head and said I will have to see the manager, would you come to the office. When we entered the office the Salesman went straight to the Sales Managers Office and started to relay the (made up) offer I had been given. Again I was expecting the Sales Manager to come out, formal introductions, would you like a coffee (customer coffee machine in the office) but again NOTHING!

So at this point I had given them the biggest hint I was interested, match a price offering (not beat it) and we’ll go from there. What they had done is not introduce themselves or their company, not asked me my name or details and not even shook my hand. The manager didn’t even look up to acknowledge his salesman yet alone me…IT THIS GOOD CUSTOMER SERVICE FOR A POTENTIAL CUSTOMER?????

The Salesman came from his managers office handed me a piece of A4 paper folded in half and said come back to us if you’re not happy with your other offer. I walked from the office in absolute amazement, no handshake, no names, no one had taken my details and no one had tried to source an alternative vehicle. I unfolded the piece of paper to find a poor quality black and white print of the wrong car??????

That first impression is critical to building rapport, working relationships, personal dialogue and ultimately how both parties will move forward together. I am quite a direct down to earth sort of guy (anyone that knows me will know this), I pride myself on being a good listener, to ascertain and understand and above all polite, courteous and respectful at all times.

Regardless that they may have seen through my made up deal (but I doubt that) they had done nothing to ensure my experience was great and I would keep them in my thoughts for a future purchase. Imagine how it could potentially affect their sales if I had named them in this article? And do you think I will ever go back?

Remember first impressions do count in Customer Service.

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Applying Lean Principles to the Back Office (Manufacturing or Service)

Posted on by Adam Payne

In today’s uncertain financial times it is becoming more and more imperative that businesses look at their activities and focus in on minimising unnecessary costs, reducing waste and improving inefficient procedures.

A large part of any business are the administration costs which represent a significant element of the total business overhead. These office processes are as targetable for process improvement as any traditional manufacturing or production operation.

Lean Office

If fact some sources state that over 60% of the costs of a product or service come from administrative processes. In general, the higher the number of human touches or decision points in a process, the greater the ROI in optimising that process and with an average employee spending 30 to 40 percent of his or her time looking for information they can’t find, these processes are swamped with waste. Most of the users to these processes will have developed workarounds over time, with this comes process slip and inefficiencies.

How do we then start to optimise these processes?

The answer is simply “Apply Lean Principles”.

By defining Value in the eyes of the customer (not the provider) we create a robust specification. We must then build repeatable processes (without waste) to deliver that specification.

My approach has always been Analyse, Design, Implement and Sustain.

Analyse the current situation: process mapping, data gathering, and business assessments.

Design the future state process/structure, design roles and responsibilities, design the implementation plan and communication plan.

Implement: Execute the plan with good leadership commitment and governance (Obeya Room Process, Operations Room, War Room)

Sustain: Conduct follow up reviews, post change assessments to ensure adherence, management reviews of KPI’s (key performance indicators)and implement a framework for continuous improvement.

Tangible Customer Benefits:

  • Sales Customer Facing Time Increased by 245%.
  • Process Efficiency Increased by 95%.
  • 38% of lost Sales back into the business.

Remember:

Reality is invariably different from perception,
Few things work the way we think they do!

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Beyond the Tools: 5 Leadership Strategies to Build a True Culture of Continuous Improvement

Posted on by Adam Payne

Let’s be honest for a second. You’ve probably rolled out Lean tools before. You bought the shadow boards, ran the 5S workshops, maybe even put tape on the floor. It looked good for a while. Then real life happened. A major customer expedited an order, a machine went down, and suddenly everyone was back to firefighting.

That’s the reality in a lot of established manufacturing and engineering businesses, especially those with 40 to 200 people. Performance is often held together by experience, effort, and a handful of heroic individuals. It isn’t always held together by a repeatable system. Lean tools like Kanban, SMED, or visual management are genuinely useful. They can create big improvements when they’re applied well. But they are not self-sustaining.

The truth is that most continuous improvement failures are not technical. They are human. People stop surfacing problems early because they do not want the grief. Supervisors fix things themselves instead of coaching their teams. Production meetings become data-readouts with no action. Incentives sometimes reward output at all costs, which means the real issues stay hidden.

A continuous improvement culture is not something you install like new software. It is built. It is built through daily leadership behaviours, shared routines, and the kind of consistency that eventually becomes “how we do things here.”

These five strategies are designed for directors who want actual results now, without creating a bloated Lean department or pausing production for a giant transformation programme. They are practical, people-focused, and realistic for the pressures manufacturing leaders face every day.

What Culture Really Means

We throw the word culture around a lot. Maybe too much. But on the shop floor, it has a very practical meaning.

A continuous improvement culture is a place where problems are visible, discussed without blame, and solved through small, steady experiments. Improvement is part of the work, not something squeezed into a Friday afternoon if time allows. Leaders coach thinking rather than just giving answers. Barriers get removed. Learning gets shared. And the gains hold because the routines hold.

That is the difference between tools and culture. Tools can create a quick uplift. You reorganise a cell, and productivity improves. You run a workshop, and people leave energised. But culture creates repeatable capability. Tools may give you a cleaner workspace this month. Culture makes sure it stays that way next month, and improves again the month after.

That matters because the businesses that win long term are not always the ones with the most impressive Lean launch. They are the ones that build the discipline to keep improving after the launch has faded.

Strategy 1: Lead With Problems First

This is a hard shift for many operational leaders. Most management teams are wired to lead with targets, output, and performance review. But if you want a true continuous improvement culture, you have to start leading with gaps, obstacles, and abnormalities.

Why? Because improvement cannot happen if people are hiding the truth. If leaders punish bad news, bad news disappears. It goes underground. That is expensive. Hidden scrap becomes rework. Hidden downtime becomes lost capacity. Hidden quality escapes become customer pain. Hidden staffing problems become overtime, burnout, and missed delivery.

The first step is to define what an abnormality actually is. That may sound basic, but it is rarely clear enough in practice. An abnormality is anything outside the standard. It can be a safety risk, a quality escape, a late delivery, a missing part, a prolonged changeover, a rework loop, or a machine stop that keeps repeating.

Then leaders have to change the questions they ask. Instead of “Why did you miss the target?” ask “What stopped us today?” Instead of “Who is responsible?” ask “What in the process allowed this to happen?” Instead of leading every conversation with the score, lead it with the obstacle.

Visual systems help here. Use an hour-by-hour board to compare plan versus actual. Display a downtime Pareto so the top causes are visible. Track first pass yield by product family. Keep a top-three constraints board live and current. These do not need to be complicated. In fact, the more straightforward they are, the better they work.

I once saw a bottleneck cell that always hit its numbers on paper. The metrics looked brilliant. But the team was quietly reworking parts after hours to make the figures look good. Once leadership started tracking first pass yield properly and discussing it without blame, the real constraint surfaced immediately. Nothing had changed technically. The behaviour changed because the problem became visible and safe to discuss.

That is the point. Directors do not need more tools. They need a daily management system that tells the truth early.

Strategy 2: Build Psychological Safety and Accountability

People must feel safe to speak up. But standards still need to be non-negotiable. That balance is where a lot of leadership teams get stuck.

On one side, some teams create a fear-driven culture where people stay quiet because they do not want grief. Problems get buried, learning stops, and the same issues keep coming back. On the other side, some teams swing too far the other way. No blame becomes no accountability. Standards slip, quality weakens, and nobody owns the outcome.

The answer is to separate people problems from process problems. Start every issue review by assuming a process weakness until proven otherwise. In most cases, that is where the truth lies. If the process made it easy for the issue to happen, the process is the problem that needs solving.

A consistent response helps. First, contain the issue and protect the customer. Second, investigate the process. Third, improve and standardise. Fourth, share the learning across the site so the same issue does not keep reappearing in a different department.

Keep the problem-solving method simple and disciplined. Use 5 Whys, but only with evidence. Use a Fishbone when an issue has multiple possible causes. Use an A3 for cross-functional problems that involve production, quality, maintenance, engineering, and supply chain all at once.

There are also some anti-patterns to watch for. If root cause is written as “operator error” every time, you have probably stopped too soon. That is not a root cause. It is usually a sign that the process, training, interface, or standard was weak. Avoid overcomplicated templates that make people dread problem-solving meetings. And do not confuse sorting the mess with fixing the cause. Containment matters, but containment is not prevention.

Imagine the wrong drawing revision gets used on the shop floor. A weak leader blames the operator for picking up the wrong paper. A stronger leader asks why the wrong revision was even available at point of use, why the document control system allowed it, and why the handover process did not catch it. That is the difference between blame and learning.

Psychological safety accelerates learning. Accountability ensures that learning becomes a standard.

Strategy 3: Install Daily Management Routines

If improvement only happens during formal workshops, it will never outpace daily firefighting. That is why a continuous improvement culture needs a heartbeat.

For most mid-sized manufacturing businesses, a daily management system is the most practical way to create that heartbeat. It gives the business a rhythm for surfacing issues, solving them quickly, and escalating the ones that cannot be fixed at the first level.

Start with tiered meetings. Keep them short. Tier 1 should happen at the line or cell level and last 10 to 15 minutes. The focus is simple: what happened yesterday, what is the plan today, what problems exist, and what support is needed. Tier 2 brings together area managers to handle resource conflicts, quality trends, and maintenance coordination. Tier 3 is the site-level review where systemic barriers, priorities, and cross-functional issues get resolved.

Then introduce leader standard work. This is where many businesses fall down. Leaders are often busy, reactive, and pulled in ten directions. If the improvement routines are not built into their week, they are the first thing to disappear when pressure rises. Schedule gemba walks. Review top abnormalities. Check whether actions are closing on time. Coach one improvement conversation a day or one per shift.

You also need clear escalation rules. What can the team solve in the moment? What needs same-day escalation? What becomes a formal improvement project? Without this clarity, issues just drift. They get discussed but not solved.

Good daily management feels calm. The meetings are short. The actions are clear. Problems do not linger for weeks waiting for the monthly operations meeting. People stop relying on memory and start relying on routine.

Think about the classic production-and-maintenance blame cycle. Production says maintenance is too slow. Maintenance says production keeps breaking things. Daily management breaks that loop because it puts both teams in the same rhythm. The data is reviewed together. The causes are examined together. And the ownership becomes shared.

When leaders show up consistently, continuous improvement stops being a poster on the wall and becomes the operating system.

Strategy 4: Develop People Through Coaching

In many technical SMEs, leadership promotion is based on technical brilliance. The best setter gets promoted. The most reliable engineer becomes the supervisor. The strongest problem solver becomes the manager. That is understandable, but it creates a trap.

Very often, the people who are best at solving problems are the ones who keep solving everything themselves. They become the hero in the middle of the system. The trouble is, hero culture does not scale. You cannot continuously improve an entire factory with a handful of experts constantly firefighting for everyone else.

A real kaizen culture needs leaders who teach problem-solving, not leaders who simply hand out answers. That is a different skill. It requires patience, discipline, and a willingness to let people think.

A coaching routine can help. Kata-style questions are a good place to start. Ask what the target condition is. Ask what the actual condition is. Ask what is stopping progress. Ask what experiment will be tried next. Ask what learning is expected. That kind of questioning builds capability over time.

The key is to keep improvement small and frequent. Do not wait for the perfect answer. Do not wait until the whole system is redesigned. Encourage the next step. Then the next one. Small experiments create momentum, and momentum creates confidence.

You also need to protect time for coaching. Put it in leader standard work. If coaching is optional, it will get squeezed out. Start with one pilot area if you need to. Measure the behaviours that show learning is happening: action closure, recurrence rates, problem-solving participation, and whether supervisors are coaching more than they are fixing.

There are some common mistakes here too. Leaders give answers too quickly because they want speed. That feels efficient, but it robs the team of learning. Others try to coach without removing barriers, which just creates frustration. You cannot ask a team to improve if they do not have the tools, time, data, or authority to act. And improvement should never be delegated away to the CI person or the engineer alone.

I once saw a supervisor who stopped fixing every tricky changeover himself. Instead, he coached the team to build a repeatable setup standard. Over time, changeovers stabilised, training became easier, and the team became more capable. That is what coaching does. It turns dependence into capability.

The culture shift happens when teams learn how to think, not when they are told what to do.

Strategy 5: Align Measures and Recognition

Whatever you measure, whatever you tolerate, and whatever you reward will override the values poster in reception every single time. Culture follows the scoreboard.

This is where many mid-sized companies accidentally undermine their own improvement efforts. If bonuses are tied only to output, people will hide downtime or ignore minor defects to hit the numbers. If the loudest praise goes to firefighting, then firefighting becomes the hero behaviour. If improvement work is invisible, it gets pushed down the list. Not because people do not care, but because the system tells them what matters.

You need leading indicators that reflect improvement behaviours, not just end results. Track the number of abnormalities raised. That number may rise at first, and that is a good sign. It means people are finally surfacing issues instead of hiding them. Track action closure rates so people see that problems are being dealt with. Track recurrence rates for the top issues. Look at skills matrix progress. Audit compliance on critical standards.

Recognition needs to be just as intentional. Celebrate prevention, not only recovery. Highlight cross-functional wins where production, maintenance, quality, and engineering worked together instead of operating in silos. Praise the team that removed a recurring issue permanently, not only the person who stayed late to patch over the symptoms.

You also need to make trade-offs visible. Under pressure, output and improvement will sometimes conflict. That is normal. What matters is that leaders show how decisions are made. If improvement is always the thing that gets dropped when the week gets busy, the whole culture will tell people that Lean is optional.

I once saw a site heavily praise a person who stayed late to rework a huge batch of faulty parts. He was the hero of the week. But the better leadership move would have been to praise the team that eliminated the rework loop, so nobody had to stay late at all. That is the real shift. Stop rewarding the cost of failure. Start rewarding the removal of the cause.

If the scoreboard rewards hiding problems and doing heroics, you will get more of both.

A Practical 90-Day Start

You may be thinking this all sounds right, but where do you actually begin without overwhelming the business? Keep it simple. Start small. Focus on one area first.

In the first 30 days, define your abnormalities clearly. Set up a basic visual board in one pilot area. Start a short Tier 1 daily meeting. Agree the no-blame, high-standard response to issues so people know what to expect.

Between days 31 and 60, add Tier 2 and Tier 3 escalation routines. Introduce leader standard work for supervisors and managers. Start the coaching habit. Aim for just two coached problems per week per leader. Keep it manageable enough that it actually sticks.

From days 61 to 90, begin aligning measures and recognition. Expand daily management into a second area. Run one cross-functional A3 on a recurring systemic issue. Use that learning to refine the approach before rolling it wider.

This kind of rollout does not require a restructure. It does not require a huge capital spend. And it does not require a Lean department full of specialists. It requires leadership discipline and consistent behaviour.

Culture Is Built Together

There is a reason culture change often fails when one enthusiastic manager goes on a training course and comes back full of ideas. The rest of the leadership team is still doing things the old way. The enthusiasm gets crushed by the existing system.

What actually sticks is shared practice. The same language. The same routines. The same response to problems. The same expectations across departments and shifts. That is why group learning works so well in manufacturing. It creates consistency in leadership behaviour, which is what culture really depends on.

This matters even more in multi-shift environments, where communication can be messy and misunderstandings build quickly. When day-shift and night-shift managers are trained together, they stop working against each other and start fighting the process issues together.

A continuous improvement culture is not the result of one champion. It is the result of many leaders behaving consistently.

The Next Step

Building a true culture of continuous improvement comes down to a few core things. You need problems-first visibility, so nothing stays hidden. You need psychological safety combined with strict accountability. You need daily management routines to keep the heartbeat going. You need coaching capability to turn firefighters into multipliers. And you need measures and recognition aligned to the behaviour you actually want.

Lean tools alone will never get you there. But these five leadership strategies absolutely can.

If you are ready to stop fighting the same fires every week, the next step is not a bigger toolkit. It is a more consistent leadership system. That is where continuous improvement stops being a project and starts becoming part of how the business performs. Please do check out our Lean Coaching Programme.

The Business Case for Lean Training: How to Justify the Investment and Calculate Your ROI

Posted on by Adam Payne

A lot of manufacturers say they want to improve productivity.

Fewer are willing to put a proper number on what that improvement is worth.

That’s usually where the conversation gets stuck. People talk about waste, downtime, scrap, and “the need for a better way of working”, and everybody nods along. Then the budget question comes up and the room gets a bit quieter. Fair enough. It’s one thing to agree Lean sounds sensible. It’s another thing entirely to justify spending money on it when there are machines to keep running, orders to hit, and fires to put out.

That’s why the business case matters.

Not as a sales exercise. Not as a bit of paperwork to keep finance happy. But because if you can’t connect Lean training to real operational pain, it will always feel like a nice idea rather than a sensible investment.

And to be honest, in a lot of manufacturing businesses, there is plenty of pain to connect it to.

Why Lean training has to earn its place

In established manufacturing firms, training is often treated as overhead. Necessary, maybe. Useful, occasionally. But not always urgent.

That’s understandable. If you’re running a business with 40 to 200 employees, there’s always something competing for budget. New equipment. Repairs. Recruitment. Software. Compliance. The list never really ends.

But Lean training isn’t just another course. When it’s done properly, it helps people solve the problems that are already costing money every single week. Recent manufacturing training guidance says the ROI case should be built around measurable benefits such as productivity, reduced downtime, faster onboarding and better use of labour and equipment. That’s the right way to think about it.

If the training helps a team reduce scrap, shorten changeovers, improve flow or stop firefighting, then it is not a cost in the usual sense. It is a way of buying back capacity.

That’s the real point.

You are not paying for a certificate. You are paying to improve how the business performs.

And if you frame it that way, the conversation changes.

What your Lean Green Belt offer actually costs

Our Lean Green Belt training is priced at £4,200 for up to 12 people, which brings the cost down to £350 per person.

That matters, because it gives directors something concrete to work with. The fee is no longer vague or awkward. It becomes a real investment with a clear unit cost, and that makes the ROI discussion much easier.

It also compares well with broader UK market pricing. Recent Green Belt courses have been listed at £2,450, £2,530, and an average of £2,860/person for face-to-face delivery in a 2025 UK survey. Our offer sits in a useful place because it is team based, on site, and built for manufacturers rather than generic classroom learners.

That last part matters more than people sometimes admit.

If a company sends one person away for training, the knowledge often stays with that person. If you train up to 12 people together in their own environment, the chance of practical follow through is much higher. The team hears the same language. They see the same problems. They can apply the tools to the same process. That improves the odds of actual change, which is really what the board wants anyway.

The cost of doing nothing

Before you talk about ROI, it helps to talk about the cost of standing still.

Manufacturing waste is rarely dramatic in the moment. That’s why it gets missed. It doesn’t arrive in one big ugly invoice. It leaks out through scrap, rework, machine stoppages, overtime, rushed orders, poor changeovers and too much time spent chasing the same issues again and again.

Downtime is a good example. Modern manufacturing sources keep pointing out that the true cost of downtime is often much higher than the lost production itself, because the full picture includes idle labour, restart scrap, emergency parts, overtime, logistics disruption and sometimes customer penalties. One 2024 industry white paper reported average downtime costs for manufacturers at £193 million annually across surveyed organisations, which is obviously not a number most SMEs will recognise directly, but it does show the scale of the issue.

Scrap is similar. The cost is not just the value of the material thrown away. It also includes the labour already spent, the machine time lost, the energy consumed, and the capacity that could have gone into saleable output. If you only count material, you undercount. Usually by quite a bit.

That is why Lean training is easier to justify than people think. Not because it is cheap. Because waste is expensive.

How to build the business case

A sensible Lean business case starts with one question.

What is waste costing us now?

That might sound obvious, but many companies skip this step. They buy training because it feels like the right thing to do, then struggle to prove the result. Better to start with the pain and work backwards.

Here’s a practical way to do it.

1. Identify the biggest cost leaks

Look at the recurring problems that show up in operations meetings. The usual suspects are:

  • Scrap and rework.
  • Unplanned downtime.
  • Changeovers that take too long.
  • Excess overtime.
  • Late orders caused by poor flow.
  • Material shortages and expediting.
  • Low output from bottlenecks.

You do not need perfect data to begin. You just need enough to make a conservative estimate. In fact, conservative is better. Directors trust numbers that feel a bit underplayed more than numbers that sound like consultant fantasy.

2. Put a value on each problem

This is where most business cases get stronger. Once you move from “we’ve got issues” to “this issue costs us this much per month”, the discussion becomes real.

For downtime, use a simple calculation based on the cost of lost production per hour. Then add the hidden costs if you can: labour standing idle, overtime needed later, restart scrap, and any customer impact.

For scrap, multiply the quantity of scrap by the full unit cost, not just the material cost. Include labour, energy, and machine time where possible.

For overtime, calculate how much of it is caused by waste rather than genuine demand spikes.

For changeovers, estimate lost productive time per week or month and translate that into value.

You do not have to be exact to be credible. You just have to be honest.

3. Compare savings to training cost

Once you know the annual cost of the problem, compare it with the investment in Lean Green Belt training.

In TCMUK’s case, that investment is £4,200 for up to 12 people.

So the question becomes simple. If the training reduces waste by enough to recover £4,200, how quickly does it pay back?

The answer, in most established manufacturers, is usually “faster than people expect”.

A very small reduction in recurring scrap or downtime can pay the fee back. If the team then keeps improving after the training, the value compounds. That is where Lean stops being a course and starts becoming a capability.

A simple ROI formula

You can keep the maths straightforward.

Use this formula:

If the training costs £4,200 and the annual benefit is £18,000, the net benefit is £13,800. The ROI is therefore 328.6 percent.

That is the kind of number that gets attention.

But ROI is not the only measure that matters. Payback period matters too. If the £4,200 is recovered in three months, that feels much easier to approve than a programme that takes two years to justify. Directors tend to like payback because it speaks their language.

And yes, some benefits are harder to pin down. Better morale. Less firefighting. More confident supervisors. Fewer repeated mistakes. Those things matter, even if they do not always appear neatly in finance reports. I think the best business cases mention them briefly but still keep the headline firmly on hard savings.

A worked example

Let’s say a manufacturer with around 80 employees is losing money in a few obvious ways.

  • Scrap and rework cost £600 a week.
  • Downtime and minor stoppages cost £700 a week.
  • Overtime caused by inefficiency costs £350 a week.

That gives a weekly waste cost of £1,650.

Over a year, that is £85,800.

Now let’s be cautious. Suppose Lean Green Belt training helps the team remove only 20 percent of that waste in the first year. That would be a saving of £17,160.

Against a training cost of £4,200, the net benefit is £12,960.

Using the ROI formula, that gives an ROI of 308.6 percent.

And that is with a fairly modest improvement assumption.

You could make the case even stronger if the training also improves changeover time, planning stability, or first pass yield. But even without stretching the numbers, the investment looks sensible.

That is the useful bit.

Not that the course magically transforms everything overnight. It usually doesn’t. But if it helps a team remove a small slice of recurring waste, the financial case becomes hard to ignore.

Why team-based training improves the return

One of the more overlooked advantages of your offer is that it trains up to 12 people together.

That is not just a pricing detail. It changes the economics.

When one person goes on a course, the business gets one person’s perspective. When a cross functional group goes through the training together, the business gets shared language, shared problem solving, and a much better chance of action afterwards. That is especially useful in manufacturing, where problems usually live across boundaries rather than inside one role.

A planner sees one version of the issue. A supervisor sees another. Maintenance sees another. Quality sees another. Lean training works better when those people can look at the same process and actually agree on what is happening.

There’s also a practical benefit here that people often forget. On site training means the examples are your examples. Not a made-up case study about a coffee shop or a bank or some other place that looks nothing like a production line. The learning lands faster when it happens in the real environment, with real problems in front of real people.

That is where the ROI begins to feel believable.

What directors really want to know

When you’re speaking to directors, they usually want four things.

  • Will this save money?
  • How quickly?
  • How much disruption will it cause?
  • Will the changes last?

Everything in the blog should quietly answer those questions.

The money question is handled by the scrap, downtime and overtime calculations. The speed question is handled by payback and ROI. The disruption question is handled by the on-site, team-based format. The sustainability question is handled by the fact that people are being trained together in the actual environment where the improvements need to stick.

That is why a good business case is not just numerical. It is credible. It feels grounded. It sounds like someone who understands manufacturing wrote it, not someone who copied a template from a training brochure.

How to present it internally

If the budget needs internal approval, the best approach is usually simple.

Start with the current cost of waste.

Then show the training investment.

Then show a conservative savings target.

Then show payback.

That’s it. No drama. No jargon overload.

You can also make the case stronger by linking the training to a live business challenge. Maybe scrap is too high on one product family. Maybe a key line keeps losing time on changeovers. Maybe supervisors need a better way to solve recurring problems. When the training is attached to a visible pain point, it stops looking optional.

And that matters because nobody really wants to approve training in the abstract. They want to approve a solution to a problem they can already feel.

Why Lean training is worth the spend

Lean training is easiest to justify when people stop thinking of it as a standalone event.

It is not the workshop itself that creates value.

It is what the workshop helps your people do next.

Better problem solving. Better use of data. Better flow. Less waste. Faster response. More confident managers. Fewer days spent firefighting the same issues over and over again.

That’s the real return.

A recent UK manufacturing case study from A.N. Wallis showed the kind of results that can come from structured continuous improvement work, including a 12 percent increase in OEE, a 30 percent reduction in changeover time, and over £100,000 of obsolete stock removed. That is not a promise of what every team will achieve, of course. But it does show what becomes possible when Lean thinking moves from theory into daily practice.

And that is really the goal here.

Not a training course that sits politely on a shelf.

A better run business.

Closing thought

If you are a manufacturing director looking at £4,200 for up to 12 people, the right question is not whether the spend is real. It is. The better question is whether the business can afford to keep absorbing the hidden cost of waste instead.

Once you look at scrap, downtime, overtime and lost capacity properly, the training fee starts to look modest. Maybe even conservative. Especially when the team is trained together on site and the learning can be applied straight away.

That is the business case in plain English.

Not perfection. Not theory. Just a practical investment in the people who are closest to the problems and best placed to solve them. Please do check out our Lean Coaching, Green Belt and Lean Awareness training.