NC State of Business

I mean, really? Don’t we have flu season every year?

It appears one difference between seasonal flu and H1N1 is that while many adults have at least some resistance to seasonal flu, this “new” strain of virus leaves many of us at risk. With that in mind, if H1N1 is brought into a workplace there is every reason to believe that many more employees will get sick than with seasonal flu. Uh oh.

How would your business be affected if 30-40% of your workforce were absent for one week while recovering from the flu? Unfortunately for NC businesses, the most recent CDC surveillance reports show our state as having “widespread” H1N1 influenza activity and it is expected to continue rising.

The best time to think through the impact an H1N1 outbreak might have on your operations is now -- before it happens! Does your business continuity plan address significant absenteeism? If yours doesn’t have a page or two devoted to managing pandemic flu, consider these questions:

• Are there things you could do today to assist employees with preventing infection?

• If schools and day cares closed, how would your workforce be affected?

• If the virus spread throughout your workforce how could operations be maintained?

• What can you do to mitigate adverse impact up and down the supply chain?

Check out more information on how your business can prepare for pandemic flu at www.flu.gov.

Readers may be surprised to learn that I'm a big NASCAR fan. That's why I love the work we do with Performance Instruction and Training out of Mooresville, using pit crew exercises to demonstrate lean manufacturing principles. But that's another story.

I always find it amusing that our "born in North Carolina" stock car racing -- which, if you didn't know, got started by moonshiners trying to outrun the law during the Prohibition era -- now draws crowds across the country. This past weekend Mark Martin won in New Hampshire; this weekend they race in Dover, Delaware.

One unmistakable thing about the "stock" cars they race on Sundays is that they're not "stock" any more: they're as customized as any made-to-order piece of machinery can be, because they've been optimized for performance and for driver protection. And that's okay: a NASCAR race car has a much different job to do than the typical family sedan, which in turn has a much different job than a transfer truck.

But think about that car, and about your business. Is your business optimized for performance and protection? Those are about the best things you can emphasize in terms of what will make your business succeed and what will keep it going over the long haul. Your business should be optimized for performance in terms of providing the best goods and services at the lowest cost and the least waste. It should be optimized for protection in terms of worker safety, environmental responsibility, and sustainability -- you might not think of those as being vital to your company's survival, but they can be: they keep you in compliance with government regulations and provide the best working environment for your people, so you can stay in business for a long time.

What would it take for you to optimize your business the way NASCAR teams optimize their vehicles? And how can we help?

In this dynamic changing economy, it might seem like the days of strategic planning are over and not relevant. Business survival is paramount today and taking the time to plan might rank low on your priority list.

I counter that having a strategic plan is more relevant now than ever. A strategic plan for your company is a roadmap on how you best can keep your efforts focused on a chosen strategy over the next year or more. (I will concede that a long term strategic plan could lose some its relevance towards the end of its tenure).

To be successful in today’s business climate, most companies have to be innovative and quick to respond. A strategic plan will help you do a better job in this business gymnastics environment. It will help you do a better job by focusing the energy, resources, and time of everyone in your business.

If you are serious about business growth, then a concerted focus of your efforts can build a competitive advantage for you. A strategic plan will accelerate your business agility to go from plan to action.

If you’ve been involved in lean implementation efforts in your manufacturing plant, healthcare facility, or office, then chances are good that you have used a technique called Value Stream Mapping (VSM). When you map your value stream, you go to where the process is occurring and identify both value-added and non-value-added activities taking place in the product flow or business process flow. The goal is to identify and eliminate waste in your process. But have you ever thought about how your product development cycle also has waste and non-value-added steps? Applying lean principles to product can development can enable you to reduce the cost and/or time to market for your new products, while increasing the effectiveness of your technical resources. Many of the tools used in lean manufacturing (such as VSM, “going to gemba”, visual controls, and dashboards) also work well in the development world.

If you would like to learn more about applying Lean concepts to product development, consider attending the Quick-Start Lean Product Development workshop in Concord on Friday, October 23. The course instructor, Ron Mascitelli, president of Technology Perspectives, is a recognized leader in the development of advanced product development methods.

We all know what walls are, what they look like, and why they exist. That is generally true for walls we can literally see, but it is not necessarily true for those walls we can not see. Walls we can't see; what does that mean?
Well, let's take a moment to both explain and reflect on this concept. In lean discussions, we often use the term "silos" to indicate the presence of walls or barriers to the elimination of waste and improvement of flow in our processes. The fix to these silos often lies in moving the culture of an organization toward a true lean enviornment.
How do we manage the true and effective removal of these barriers to continuous improvement, generate more flow of improvement ideas, and thereby grow a truly lean culture. The first step, right after getting top management committment is the education of the team. People need to know and understand the what's, the why's, and the how's to Lean Tranformation. The level of true understanding at all levels takes time. The light comes on at different rates for different individuals.
Some of the specifics necessary to break down the barriers are as follows:

* Teach and attain a clear understanding of the concept of true value add for the customer at all levels of the organization.
* Make sure everyone understands the true "goal", and that winning teams perform as a cooridinated unit, not as individuals.
* Speak with data, and make the primary focus on improving the process, not on blaming people.
* As managers, understand that coaching and team building is a critical need and a priority of their position. Do not be afraid or reluctant to change the team as required.
* "Listen" to both your associates and your customer. Emphasize the concept of internal as well as external customers.
* Pursue improvement continuously, never get totally satisfied or confortable with the current state.
* Communicate results to all levels, and make sure performance metrics are fair, understandable, pertinent to the goal, and tie to true bottomline performance.

In conclusion, in our world today with businesses that are as diverse as they could possibily be, there is a common thread that runs thru most. They all have "WALLS", which they themselves often recognize. The challenge for all is really how to bring these barriers to Continuous Improvement down. The success of the Transformation is dependent on the results of that effort.