manufacturing productivity UK

The 30 Days After Lean Training: A Plan So It Doesn’t Fade

Posted on by Adam Payne

You know the feeling. Two days of training, a room that smelled faintly of flipchart pens, and by the end of it everyone was genuinely up for it. Someone from the shop floor who barely speaks in meetings suddenly had three ideas about the goods in bay. The trainer was good. The examples landed. You drove home thinking, right, this time it’s actually going to happen.

Then Monday happened. A machine went down, a customer moved a delivery date forward by a fortnight, and somebody left. By week three the workbook was in a drawer. By week six, if you’re honest, the only visible evidence of the training was a line in the accounts.

That’s not a failure of your team. It’s not even really a failure of the training. It’s what happens by default when nothing changes about the thirty days that follow. And it’s fixable, but only if you decide what those thirty days look like before you book the course, not after the energy has already drained out of the room.

So here’s the whole thing. The actual framework. Three projects in week one, a fifteen-minute huddle every day, a board on the wall that anyone can see, and a review on day thirty that you run in front of the team rather than in your office with a spreadsheet. That’s it. Four moving parts.

I’ll be upfront about something. Most training providers keep this bit slightly vague, because the follow-on coaching is where the money sits. I think that’s a bit backwards. If you can run this yourself, run it yourself. You’ll get more out of the training you’ve already paid for, and you’ll know exactly what you’re buying if you do decide to bring someone in later.

Why lean training fades, and why it isn’t your team’s fault

Start with the uncomfortable bit. Research on the forgetting curve suggests that without reinforcement, people lose roughly half of what they learned within an hour, about 70% within a day, and up to 90% within a week. That’s not a slight on anyone. That’s just how memory works when information isn’t used.

It gets worse when you look at application rather than recall. The Association for Talent Development puts the proportion of retained knowledge that actually gets applied on the job at somewhere around 10 to 20%. Stack those two numbers together and you can see why a two-day course, on its own, changes almost nothing. Not because the content was weak. Because a course is an event, and what you’re trying to change is a routine.

You’ll have seen the statistic that seventy, or eighty, or ninety percent of lean transformations fail. Those figures do circulate widely, with claims that around 70% of continuous improvement implementations fail and that 66 to 90% fail to sustain their improvements. To be honest, when you chase those numbers back through the citations, they get a bit thin, and I’d be wary of anyone who quotes them at you with too much confidence. What’s much better evidenced is the reason things stall. Transformations tend to unravel not because the tools were wrong but because leadership attention didn’t persist past the initial rollout, with momentum commonly lost within six to twelve months.

Read that again, because it’s the whole point. The thing that kills it isn’t resistance. It’s drift. Nobody says, “we’re stopping this.” It just stops being mentioned, and then one day you realise it’s been four months.

And the cost of that drift has gone up. UK employer training spend has fallen to around £1,700 per employee, down from £1,960 two years earlier and nearly 30% lower than 2011 in real terms. The average employee now gets 5.7 days of training a year, the lowest figure on record. You’re getting fewer shots at this than manufacturers did a decade ago. Which makes wasting one feel considerably more expensive than it used to.

Week one: three projects, and nothing else

The single most common mistake is enthusiasm. Everyone comes out of the training with eleven ideas and tries to start nine of them. Within a fortnight none of them are finished, which teaches the team something quite damaging: that this stuff gets started and never lands.

So week one, you pick three. Three is deliberate. It’s enough that the improvement isn’t one person’s pet project, and few enough that you can hold all three in your head while you’re also, you know, running a factory.

Pick them against four rules.

One: it has to be finishable inside thirty days. Not “substantially progressed.” Finished. If it needs capital approval, a new supplier or another site’s cooperation, it’s a good project but it’s the wrong project for this month.

Two: it has to be visible from where people actually work. Changeover time on a specific machine. The layout of one bench. How parts get from inspection to dispatch. If nobody can see the change by walking past it, it won’t reinforce anything.

Three: it needs one named owner. Not a team, not a department, one person with a name. Shared ownership sounds collaborative and behaves like nobody owning it.

Four: it needs a number. Minutes, metres walked, scrap pieces, days of stock, whatever fits. Pick the number before you start and write down what it is today. You’d be amazed how many improvement projects can’t prove anything afterwards because nobody recorded the starting point.

Write all three on one sheet of paper. Project, owner, measure, the number today, the number you’re aiming at, the date. Then stop. Don’t add a fourth because someone had a good idea on Wednesday. Put it on the ideas list for next month.

I’ve watched this go wrong the same way more than once. A firm comes out of training genuinely fired up and decides the first project will be “reorganise the whole production layout.” Which is, to be fair, probably the right thing to do eventually. But it needs a shutdown weekend, a forklift and about eleven conversations with people who weren’t in the training. Six weeks later nothing has moved, and the quiet conclusion in the canteen is that lean is a thing managers talk about. Meanwhile the boring project nobody chose, the one where you move the consumables trolley four metres and save an operator a hundred and twenty steps a shift, would have been done by Thursday and would have convinced more people than the layout ever could.

Small and finished beats big and pending. Every time, in that first month.

The daily fifteen minute huddle

This is the engine. If you only do one thing from this post, do this one.

Same time every day. Same place, which is on the floor in front of the board, not in an office. Standing up. Fifteen minutes with a timer, and when the timer goes you stop, even mid-sentence, because the reliability is more valuable than the extra five minutes of discussion.

The pattern that’s used across lean daily management systems is a short huddle of roughly ten to fifteen minutes, led by staff rather than managers, held directly in front of the visual board so the numbers get discussed and updated in the moment. That last detail matters more than it sounds. A huddle away from the board becomes a meeting. A huddle at the board stays a conversation about the work.

Keep the agenda to four things. What happened yesterday against the number. What’s in the way today. One update on each of the three projects, even if the update is “nothing moved.” And who is doing what, by when.

That’s it. No round the room updates. No “while we’re all here.” The moment it becomes a general meeting it grows to forty minutes and then people start finding reasons to miss it, and then it’s dead. I’ve seen a good huddle killed inside three weeks by exactly that, and the odd thing is nobody notices it happening, because each individual extra topic seemed reasonable at the time.

A few things worth deciding up front. Who runs it when the usual person is off, because they will be off. Whether it happens if you’re not there, and the answer should be yes, emphatically yes, otherwise it’s your meeting rather than the team’s. And what happens when a problem comes up that the group can’t solve. You need a simple escalation route, even if that route is just “it goes on the board with my name on it and I’ll come back tomorrow.”

Come back tomorrow, by the way. Actually come back. The fastest way to teach a team that raising problems is pointless is to ask them to raise problems and then not close the loop.

The board on the wall

Physical. On the floor. Where the work happens, not in a meeting room and definitely not only in a spreadsheet on your laptop.

I know digital boards are neater. I know the reporting is better. But in the first thirty days you’re not trying to build a reporting system, you’re trying to build a habit, and a whiteboard that fifteen people walk past forty times a day does something a dashboard cannot. Established guidance on visual boards makes the same points: keep it simple at the start, site it somewhere a stand-up huddle can physically happen and get team members to update items rather than doing it all yourself.

Keep it to three to five measures. Not twelve. Tracking a dozen or more metrics dilutes attention, and three to five well-chosen indicators hold focus far better. Whatever you pick, it should be something the team can influence today. Group order intake is interesting but nobody on the floor can move it this morning.

On the board: the three projects with owner and status, the measures with today’s number written by hand, a column for problems raised and who’s on them, and a space for ideas that aren’t being worked on yet. That last column is quietly important. It gives you somewhere to put the fourth good idea without derailing the three you committed to, and it stops people feeling ignored.

Handwritten, always. There’s something about a number written up in marker pen by the person who owns it that a printed sheet never quite achieves. Also, printouts get out of date and stay on the wall for weeks, which trains everyone to ignore the board.

Two failure modes to watch. The first is the beautiful board, laminated and perfect, that nobody dares write on. The second is the board in the wrong place, round a corner, past a fire door, somewhere you have to make a deliberate trip to see. If it takes a decision to look at the board, people will stop making that decision by about week two.

Day thirty: the review you run in front of the team

Put the date in the diary on day one. Tell everyone the date on day one too. That’s not a formality, it’s most of the mechanism.

Thirty days in, you stand in front of the board with the team, for about half an hour, and you go through five things. What you said you’d do. What actually happened, with the numbers. What you learned, including from whatever didn’t work. What you’re keeping permanently. And what the next three projects are.

Run it publicly. In front of everyone, not as a management summary that gets emailed round afterwards. A commitment made in front of the people doing the work behaves completely differently to one made in a leadership meeting, and the recognition lands differently too. When the operator who owned the changeover project stands up and says the number went from fifty-two minutes to thirty-one, that’s worth more to the next thirty days than anything you could say on their behalf.

Talk about the one that failed. Properly, not defensively. Usually one of the three won’t have landed, and how you handle that is the real test. If a missed project produces a telling off, you’ve just taught everyone to pick easy projects forever. If it produces a genuine conversation about what got in the way, you’ve taught them that the system is about learning, which is the whole idea.

If your trainer offers a follow up session, this is the day to use it. Not week one, when everyone still remembers everything. Day thirty, when you’ve hit real obstacles and have actual questions.

Then, on day thirty-one, you pick the next three and carry on. The huddle doesn’t stop. The board doesn’t come down. That’s the bit people get wrong: they treat day thirty as the finish line, when it’s closer to halfway. The UCL research on habit formation found it takes an average of 66 days for a new behaviour to feel automatic, with a range running from 18 days to as much as 254 depending on the behaviour. Thirty days gets you to the point where it stops feeling like an imposition. It doesn’t get you to the point where it survives you going on holiday.

One more thing from that research, and it’s genuinely reassuring. Missing a single day had no measurable effect on habit formation. So if the huddle doesn’t happen on the Tuesday everything went wrong, that’s fine. You haven’t broken it. Just don’t miss twice.

Bringing it together

None of this is complicated, which is sort of the problem with it. Three projects, one board, fifteen minutes a day, a review on day thirty in front of the people who did the work. There’s no clever methodology hiding in there and no software to buy. It’s just a decision about what happens in the four weeks after the training, made while you still have the energy to make it.

The reason it works isn’t that it’s clever. It’s that it replaces attention, which fades, with structure, which doesn’t. Improvement efforts overwhelmingly stall because leadership focus moves on rather than because the tools were wrong, and a fifteen minute huddle is basically a mechanism for making focus happen without anyone having to remember to focus.

It also costs nothing, which matters at the moment. With manufacturing forecast to grow under 1% this year and energy and employment costs still squeezing margins, the improvement you can make with a whiteboard and a quarter of an hour a day is a very different proposition to the one that needs capital.

So don’t try to do everything in this post. Pick the date of your day thirty review and tell someone. That’s genuinely the first move. The three projects and the board can be sorted in an afternoon once there’s a date that makes them necessary.

And yes, this is the part that most providers would rather sell you than publish. I’d rather you had it. If you run it yourself and it works, brilliant, that’s the training doing its job. If you get three weeks in and the huddle has turned into a status meeting, or the projects have stalled because they were too big, that’s when a bit of outside help earns its money, and at least you’ll know precisely what you’re asking for.

If you’d like someone to sit in on your first week and your day thirty review and help you choose three projects that will actually finish, get in touch and we’ll talk it through.

The 8 Wastes Costing Your Factory Money Right Now: A Field Guide for UK Manufacturers

Posted on by Adam Payne

Here’s a slightly uncomfortable thought. A good chunk of the money your factory loses this month won’t show up on any invoice.

There’s no bill for the hour a machine sat idle waiting for a first off check. No line on the P&L for the pallet of brackets nobody actually ordered. Nobody sends you a statement for the forty minutes your best setter spent hunting for a torque wrench that “lives” in a drawer it’s never in.

But you pay for all of it. Every single week.

And right now, I think that matters more than it has in a long time. UK manufacturers are paying the highest energy prices in the G7. Nearly nine in ten expect employment costs to keep climbing this year. A Make UK survey back in May found that almost every firm (98%) expects a real hit to profitability, and close to four in ten have already pushed investment back. You can’t do much about the price of gas. You don’t set the National Living Wage. What you can do is stop paying for things your customer never asked for.

That’s really all lean manufacturing is, once you strip away the Japanese vocabulary and the consultant slide decks. It’s a way of looking at your process and asking, for every step, “would the customer pay for this?” If the answer’s no, it’s waste. Taiichi Ohno, the engineer behind the Toyota Production System, grouped that waste into seven types. An eighth, unused talent, was added later as lean spread beyond Japan. Most people remember all eight with one handy word, DOWNTIME: Defects, Overproduction, Waiting, Non utilised talent, Transportation, Inventory, Motion and Extra processing.

I’ll be honest about something. The first time I sat down with a small fabrication business and mentioned lean, the owner laughed. “We’re twelve people in a unit in Walsall,” he said. “That’s for Toyota.” Fair enough, I thought. But by lunchtime we’d found a rack of finished parts that had been sitting there so long the job card had faded. He stopped laughing after that. Not because I’d said anything clever. He just saw it.

So this isn’t a theory piece. It’s a field guide. For each of the eight wastes you’ll get a plain description, a real example from the kind of factory you probably run, and something you can actually do about it. I’ve grouped them into four families, because that’s roughly how you’ll spot them on a normal walk round the floor.

The wastes hiding in your schedule: overproduction, inventory and waiting

These three are close cousins. In my experience, if you find one of them, the other two are usually standing just behind it.

1. Overproduction

Overproduction means making more than the customer needs or making it before they need it. Lean people often call it the worst waste of the lot, and I think they’re right, because it quietly creates most of the others. Extra parts need storing, moving, counting and, sometimes, scrapping.

Field example. A sheet metal shop gets an order for 40 brackets. The press brake is already set up and the materials on the bench, so the supervisor runs 200. “Saves a changeover next time,” he says. Sounds sensible. Except the customer changes the hole spacing four months later, and 160 brackets go in the skip. That’s material, energy, labour and machine time, all paid for twice. Once to make them, and once to throw them away.

What to do about it. Make to the order, not to the machine. If long changeovers are the reason you batch big, that’s the real problem to work on. A simple rule helps: nothing gets made without a customer order or an agreed stock level behind it. Write the rule down. Stick it on the press.

2. Inventory

Inventory is overproduction’s slower, sneakier sibling. Raw material, work in progress, finished goods, it’s all cash sitting on your floor. The usual rule of thumb is that holding stock costs somewhere between 20% and 30% of its value every year, once you add up space, insurance, handling, damage and the cost of the money tied up in it. Some careful benchmarking puts the real figure nearer 10% for well-run firms. Even at the low end, that’s not nothing.

Field example. A food producer I worked with bought a year’s worth of printed film to get a better unit price. Good deal on paper. Then the retailer changed the label design. Most of that film sat in storage… well, it did, until it went to landfill. And for eight months it took up space that could’ve held product.

What to do about it. Walk your stores and ask one question of every pallet: “when will this actually be used?” If nobody knows, that’s your answer. Set sensible maximum levels for your top twenty items and check them monthly. And be a little wary of bulk discounts. A 10% saving can be wiped out by one design change.

3. Waiting

Waiting is any time people, machines or materials are stood still because of something else. It’s the most visible waste on the floor, and oddly the one we get most used to.

The big, dramatic version is unplanned downtime. Research for Fluke found 68% of UK manufacturers had suffered it in the previous year. The headline cost figures in that study come from large plants, but an earlier Oneserve survey put the average UK manufacturer’s loss at around 49 hours a year, roughly 3% of working days. In a small factory, that’s more than a week of output. Just gone.

But honestly? The waiting I see most in smaller firms isn’t the big breakdown. It’s the little stuff.

Field example. A CNC operator finishes setting a job, then waits for the quality engineer to sign off the first part. The engineer’s in a meeting. Forty minutes later the spindle finally turns. That happens two or three times a day, across several machines. Nobody’s done anything wrong, exactly. The process just has a queue built into it.

What to do about it. Track waiting for one week. A tally sheet taped to each machine is plenty: what were you waiting for, and for how long? You’ll probably find two or three causes cover most of it. Train setters to do first off checks against a clear standard. Have the next job’s material and tooling ready before the current one finishes. And get basic preventative maintenance right before you even think about buying clever sensors.

The wastes on the move: transportation and motion

People mix these two up all the time, and to be fair, the line is a bit blurry. Here’s how I think of it. Transportation is moving the product. Motion is moving the person.

4. Transportation

Every time a part goes on a forklift, a trolley or a pallet truck, you’re paying for it. Fuel or charging, labour, the truck itself, and the risk of a dropped crate. And the customer gets nothing for any of it. A part that’s travelled 500 metres isn’t worth a penny more than one that’s travelled five.

Field example. A plastics moulder grew the way lots of UK firms grow, one unit at a time. Moulding ended up in one building, assembly in the next, and packing in a third across the yard. When someone finally traced a single product’s journey with a trundle wheel, it covered just over 400 metres before it was boxed. Outside. In the rain, for half the year. Every crate got handled six times.

The funny thing is, nobody had really noticed. It had just become “how we do it here.”

What to do about it. Draw a spaghetti diagram. Honestly, it’s that simple. Take a plan of your site, pick one product, and draw a line for every move it makes. The tangle tells you everything. You won’t always be able to shuffle buildings around, but you can often move a packing bench, put two linked processes side by side, or finally get rid of that “temporary” storage area halfway across the factory that’s been there since 2019.

5. Motion

Motion is the wasted movement of people. Walking, reaching, bending, searching. It’s tiny in any single moment, which is exactly why it slips past. And it costs you in other ways too: sore backs, tired operators, and more mistakes late in the shift.

Field example. An electronics assembler shares a toolbox with two colleagues at the end of a long bench. When we tallied it over a morning, she was walking to it around sixty times a shift. Call it twenty seconds a trip. That’s twenty minutes a day, per person, just fetching things. Across three people and a working year, you’re well past 200 hours. That’s roughly six weeks of somebody’s time. For a toolbox.

What to do about it. This is where 5S earns its keep: Sort, Set in order, Shine, Standardise, Sustain. Don’t let the name put you off. In practice it just means everyone has what they need, where they need it, and nothing they don’t. Shadow boards, point of use storage, parts presented at a sensible height. I’ve seen a £60 set of duplicate screwdrivers pay for itself inside a fortnight. Not glamorous. Works, though.

The wastes built into the work: defects and extra processing

These two tend to feel like “just part of the job.” Which is precisely why they’re so expensive.

6. Defects

A defect is anything that has to be scrapped, reworked, sorted, checked again or sent back. The obvious cost is the material. The real cost is everything wrapped around it.

The American Society for Quality reckons quality related costs run at 15% to 20% of sales revenue for many manufacturers, and as high as 40% at the worst performers. Maybe you read that and think, “not us, surely.” Maybe you’re right. But the same organisation found that only 31% of firms feel they fully understand what poor quality costs them. Most of it hides in labour, overtime and goodwill, not in a neat column marked “scrap.”

Field example. A joinery firm making bespoke staircases had a habit of fixing problems at the fitting stage. A tread slightly out, a baluster hole drilled off centre, and the fitter would just sort it on site. No scrap recorded, so no problem. Except when they finally added it up, the fitters were spending roughly a day a week on rework, plus extra van trips, plus the odd unhappy customer who noticed. It was costing them more than their whole marketing budget. Nobody had ever written it down as a defect, so in a strange way it didn’t exist.

What to do about it. Start counting. Every reject, every bit of rework, every return, logged with a reason. A whiteboard by the door will do. After a month, sort the reasons. You’ll almost always find a handful of causes behind most of the trouble. Then ask “why?” five times about the biggest one, and fix the cause rather than the symptom. Mistake proofing (a simple jig, a locating pin, a go/no go gauge) often costs pennies compared with the problem it solves.

7. Extra processing

Extra processing is doing more work than the customer actually values. Tighter tolerances than the drawing asks for. A finish on a face nobody will ever see. Paperwork that gets filled in, filed and never read again. It’s the sneakiest waste, I think, because it usually comes from good intentions. People want to do a proper job, and that’s a good thing. Mostly.

Field example. A precision engineering firm was hand deburring and polishing an internal face on a bracket. About six minutes a part. When someone finally rang the customer, it turned out that face sat against a rubber mount and was never seen again. Six minutes, across a few thousand parts a year, for nothing at all. Same story with inspection: one critical dimension was being measured by the operator, again by QC, and again at dispatch. Three checks. One good one would’ve done.

What to do about it. Go back to the drawing, literally, and back to the customer. Ask what really matters to them. Then look at each step and ask, “if we stopped doing this tomorrow, would anyone notice?” Be a bit careful, though. Some extra steps exist for a perfectly good reason that somebody forgot to write down. So check before you cut. But do check.

The waste nobody counts: unused talent

8. Non utilised talent

This is the eighth waste, the one that got added later. And if I’m honest, it’s the one I’d put first.

You already pay for the knowledge in your building. Every operator, setter, storeman and driver knows things about your process that you don’t. Things that never make it onto a drawing or into the ERP system. When that knowledge goes unused, it’s waste, just as surely as a skip full of scrap. Arguably more so, because you can’t easily buy it back.

And right now you really can’t. UK manufacturing is short of skilled people, wages keep rising, and around 60% of manufacturers say skills are the main thing holding back their move into automation. So the talent you’ve already got on the payroll is, quite literally, your scarcest resource.

Field example. A setter at a pressings company had worked out, entirely on his own, a way to cut a changeover from about ninety minutes to under forty. Staging the next tool on a trolley beforehand, swapping a few bolts for quick release clamps, that sort of thing. He’d been doing it on his own shifts for over a year. Nobody else knew, because nobody had ever asked him. When the owner finally found out, she said something I’ve heard a few times now: “Why didn’t he just tell us?” I think the honest answer is that he didn’t think anyone wanted to know.

Remember the shop earlier, running 200 brackets to save a changeover? Shorter changeovers make that temptation disappear. The wastes connect like that, which is sort of the point.

What to do about it. Ask. Properly, and regularly. A ten minute huddle at the start of the shift with one question: “what got in your way yesterday?” Write the answers on a board. Fix one small thing every week and tell people you did it. That last bit matters more than you’d think. Ideas dry up fast when they vanish into a suggestion box nobody empties.

Where to start: your first waste walk

So, eight wastes. You might be feeling slightly overwhelmed right now, or maybe a bit defensive. Both are normal. No factory is free of waste. Toyota still finds plenty in theirs after seventy years of looking.

The trick is not to try to fix everything at once. Start with a waste walk instead. Lean folk call it “going to the gemba,” which just means going to the place where the work actually happens. Here’s a version that fits into a busy week:

  1. Pick one area. One cell, one line, one product. Not the whole site.
  2. Give it one hour. Take a clipboard, a phone for photos and, ideally, the person who works there every day.
  3. Stand still and watch. Resist the urge to fix things on the spot. Just look, and keep asking, “does this step add value the customer would pay for?”
  4. Use DOWNTIME as your checklist. Go through all eight letters and note what you see under each one.
  5. Put a rough cost on the top three. Minutes, metres, pounds. It doesn’t need to be precise. It needs to be honest.
  6. Fix one thing within a week. Then walk the same area again a month later and see what’s changed.

One more thing, and it’s a bit of a soapbox moment, so bear with me. Lots of UK firms are spending serious money on digital tools at the moment. The Kaizen Institute points out that 76% of UK manufacturers are investing in digital, AI and automation, yet our productivity still trails the G7 average by roughly 10%. I’m not against technology. Not at all. But if you automate a process full of waste, you just get the same waste, faster, with a nicer dashboard. Fix the basics first. Then buy the kit.

It’s worth knowing, too, that the government’s DRIVE35 scale up fund now lists lean manufacturing as a named technology track alongside digital transformation. That tells you which way the thinking’s heading.

Bringing it together

Let’s step back for a second. The eight wastes aren’t exotic. Overproduction, inventory and waiting hide in your schedule. Transportation and motion are busy moving around your floor. Defects and extra processing are baked into the work itself. And unused talent is sitting in your canteen every morning with a mug of tea, waiting to be asked.

None of this needs a consultant, a software licence or a black belt to spot. It needs you to look at your own factory as if you’d never seen it before. That’s harder than it sounds, I’ll admit. When you’ve walked past the same rack of parts for three years, it stops looking like waste and starts looking like furniture.

Here’s why I think it matters so much right now. You can’t make energy cheaper. You can’t stop employment costs going up. You can’t make customers pay faster or order more. But every hour of waiting you remove, every pallet of stock you don’t need, every rework job you prevent, drops straight through to your bottom line. It’s margin you win back without selling a single extra part. In a year when Make UK is forecasting barely any growth for the sector, that’s not a small thing.

So don’t try to tackle all eight this month. Pick the one that made you wince a little while you were reading. The example that sounded a bit too familiar. Walk that area this week, put a rough number on it, and fix one thing.

Then do it again next month.

That’s it, really. Lean isn’t a project with a finish line. It’s a habit. And the factories that build that habit, quietly and a bit at a time, tend to be the ones still standing (and still growing) when the next cost squeeze comes round. Which, let’s be honest, it will.

If one or two of these wastes felt a bit too close to home while you were reading, that’s honestly a good sign. It means you can already see them. The harder part is building the habit across your whole team, so it isn’t just you spotting waste on the odd afternoon when you’ve got a spare hour. That’s exactly what our Lean Training is for. It’s practical, shop floor training built for UK small and medium manufacturers, not a slide deck about Toyota. Your team learns to spot the eight wastes, run their own waste walks and fix problems at the source, using your products and your processes as the examples. You can find out more and book a place on our Lean Training.