Archives: Process
Controlling contractors
When you’re buying services from a contractor, you want to minimise your risk at the lowest possible cost. If you’re the contractor, you want to minimise your risk while maximising your revenue. This adversarial tension is the core reality of most contracts. What to do?
Maintaining production
Nobody likes maintenance, except those who make a living from it. Car servicing and repairs not only cost you money—while your wheels are in the garage, your mobility and convenience take a hit, too. There’s just one thing worse than maintaining your assets. Not maintaining them.
Projecting projects
Think of your life as a project. You’re born, get educated, go to work, typically start a family and want to make a difference before you hop the twig. But what difference can you make with your remarkably fleeting biblical allotment of three score and ten years? What motives sit beneath the activities you manifest
mediumThe Rising Tide of Productivity
‘Productivity isn’t everything,’ wrote economist Paul Krugman, ‘but, in the long run, it is almost everything. A country’s ability to improve its standard of living over time depends almost entirely on its ability to raise its output per worker.’ Productivity is simply a ratio of outputs to inputs. We would all like to learn how
Asset Constraint Management Capabilities
In my article Competing by Managing Asset Bottlenecks, I unpacked our value statement: ‘We help ambitious executives in industrial environments systemically improve production’. This article looks at four levers that fulfil this promise to make Asset Constraint Management yield its full potential. First, let’s see why it’s so essential to get the most from your
Five essential steps to your goal
No one likes spending money on maintenance. Take your car in for a service and you’re not only left with no transport, you have to pay for the privilege to boot. In fact, there’s only one thing worse than planned maintenance. An unplanned breakdown. I recently had the chance to talk at one of the
