white collar | Project Success

Lean Management white collar

When it comes to Lean Management in general, there is a lot of mis-information and mal-practice out there in the world. After all, Lean Management and operational excellence sound good at face value. If it’s been well defined, it will look like “Quality, Delivery, and Cost” – improving quality and tasks being first-time-right, improving delivery times and getting things to customers (and team-mates) faster, and reducing cost. But most companies and leaders don’t even get that far.

Add to this another challenge – that being a manager often involves many parts of a business, not just manufacturing.

These are areas in your business that need Lean Management too – like technology, software or website development, customer service, sales, administration, human resources, quality assurance, projects, training, change programs, communications and much more. They can all benefit from the right approach and start to improve on those Lean Management measures of “Quality, Delivery and Cost”. But it just can’t be done using the old Lean Manufacturing way.

So buyer beware – Lean is traditionally a manufacturing methodology, and few (if any) leaders have gotten it right when applying it to the other important parts of a business – parts that are considered “white collar”.

Every company, even if they are primarily in manufacturing, has these white collar areas to be managed and apply true Lean Management to. Sales have to be made, scheduling has to be done, items have to be handed between departments, customers have to be served.

So how do we adjust this decades-old approach to a white collar world to achieve real success? Simple – we strip the principles of Lean and operational excellence back to their core, to the outcome they are trying to achieve, and take the parts that give us a meaningful result as leaders and applying true Lean Management.

Five Steps to Lean Management for White Collar Work

Before we define Lean Management for white collar work, traditional manufacturing Lean is based on a handful of solid principles, most commonly shown like this:

Continue reading Lean Management For White Collar Work – DO NOT Be Fooled By Well Meaning Consultants →

The Philippines is a beautiful place, with beautiful, friendly people. It has clear waters that are just made for sailing, peppered with idyllic islands to visit. Perfect for a holiday? You bet.

For better or worse, it is also a place with comparatively cheap labour and an English speaking population, which has resulted in many companies off-shoring their call centres or service departments there. I say for better or for worse, because of the following story:

Dodo mobile and Internet, in Australia, was one of these very companies. They used the Philippines for their call centre staff, and instead of making things simpler, they received a fine in 2008 from the ACMA for breaching the Privacy act. So I was not looking forward to calling them, even when I found out I was paying too much for my internet service. I thought that perhaps it would just be easier to keep paying the $10 extra a month and be done with it.

But then something wonderful happened. It started with a visit to their website.

On their “Contact Us” page, there was something I’d never seen before. It was the current call wait time – displayed plainly for all to see – right next to the number to call. It also showed the historical average. Both times were lower than the average call centre, at around 1 minute.

Visual Managment_Dodo_Sales Centre

I thought – “Oh my God. This is Visual Management!” In a call centre, on a website! And it’s actually information that is extremely useful to me! Based on the wait time displayed, I called the number. They picked up in less than a minute. This alone would have been worth the price of admission, but the Lean experience didn’t stop there.

The staff member was friendly, polite, and did exactly what I needed. But it was what they did next that nearly made me the happiest man on the planet. The staff member asked if she had met my requirements for the call – I said “yes”, and she then reminded me to stay on the line so I could rate her service. When she hung up, I was automatically put through – this is perfect one piece flow – no additional steps required. The message that played asked me to rate a “Five” if she had completed my requirement for the call, and a “Four or below” if she had not.

And I thought “Oh my God” again. This is Jidoka. It’s the principle of “Stop and Notify” if something is wrong. If I selected a four or below, they said, it would put me through immediately to a senior staff member to get more information about why the call was bad. In other words – they would stop immediately, swarm around the problem using their senior staff and try and get an immediate fix. While I didn’t get to see it as I rated her a hearty “five”, I imagine that they log the reasons for their “Four or belows”, so they can fix those for the future as well. They would have to – their service certainly reflects it.

It was absolutely brilliant. And it was obviously paying dividends – the staff were very good at their job, and were keenly aware that their process was good, fast and effective, but also that they would be rated every single time. In Lean, we fix our Process, and we build up our people.

But here is the kicker – the payoff isn’t just happy customers. The payoff is financial, pure and simple. Happy customers mean sales, and more sales create a booming business.

M2 Group, who owns Dodo, has a share price that has almost doubled in the last year. Not many companies can say that. And yes, at the time of writing, I happen to own some 🙂

Yours in change,

David McLachlan

Disclaimer: At the time of writing, David McLachlan owns shares in M2 Group.

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