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Introduction

My guest George Hodgson is passionate about achieving excellence within Supply Chains. He has worked with organisations such as the Royal Australian Air Force, Army, and the United Nations. George is the Vice President of the Supply Chain and Logistics Association of Australia. 

Summary - How Lean thinking creates a win-win

In government and supply chains, resources rarely increase, but capacity certainly does. This situation could be seen as a negative and potentially destroy a culture with overburden. But if you can rally that culture and help everyone understand the win-win. Rather than burn out, they can improve their process with Lean thinking: removing waste and increasing flow. Capacity naturally lifts, and stress reduces. People become more accustomed to looking for ways to see and implement improvements-a culture of continuous improvement results. Employees create more time to take pressure off and improve safety, and Leaders achieve results.

Quotes

07:52min 
So when you actually apply lean thinking or six sigma to a process, and people can actually see the benefit of doing that, they're just empowered. They go, "This is amazing". So, certainly empowerment of the people who are part of that process. You need to get buy-in from management. And they need to understand why you're going down this path and how it's actually going to add value. And then once you do that, I think the results speak for themselves.

12:14min 
People can actually start to question and go, Why do we do that? How does that add value? Let's take that away and see how that's going to improve. And the beauty of lean thinking, you know, you can do a Kaizen activity. You can do it instantaneously. You know, you start in the morning, by the afternoon you have a new process that you've implemented. Extremely powerful.

 Key Takeaways

1.    Connecting the wins between employees and leaders reduces work pressure, improves safe and quality of work produced.

Take away number one is about helping front line employees and leaders connect the wins. In government and many supply chain environments, there is a clear aligned win. Continuously improving to help front line employees reduce work pressure, improve safety and quality of work. Whenever people are overburdened in environments like these quality and safety outcomes are not good. Helping teams in resource-scarce environments develop skills in continuous improvement to eliminate waste and help themselves as well as customers is amazing. The leaders in these environments gain the benefit of less pressure as well as improved results.

2.    Training practically and coaching helps develop capability in continuous improvement. 

The second key takeaway train practically is a great approach. Giving people the training and then some ongoing coaching to help them develop capability in a few key continuous improvement approaches is quite simple. It does not take a lot of time and, when delivered practically helps people bridge the knowing-doing gap quickly and achieving results.

Brad is proud to support many Australian businesses. You can find him on LinkedIn here. If you’d like to speak to him about how he can help your business, call him on 0402 448 445, or email [email protected]. Our website is www.bradjeavons.com

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