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If there is ever a need to improve our shopfloor team engagement, it’s now!  Why? In my conversations with Supply Chain leaders every week, I’ve heard the following to be what’s holding back businesses right now: Shortage of skilled labour. In fact, finding labour in general is tough now.Teams are constantly running with less people […]

Have you heard the joke regarding our affinity towards numbers? “There are three types of people in the world. Those who can count and those who can’t”. People either love Excel or loathe it. When we improve productivity and performance, we expect the numbers to tell us that profitability is increasing. One of the most

We are generally good at coaching, mentoring, and advising others. We tend to be kind, generous and forgiving. However, when it comes to critiquing ourselves, a lot of us tend to be quite the opposite. We are less forgiving, unkind, and pretty tough on ourselves. Some of us often tend to take a long time

How many business improvement initiatives have you started, only to find yourself in one of the following scenarios a few team meetings later: •    drifted away from the original issue. •    bitten off too much and struggling wrap up. •    unable to demonstrate if you have actually made a difference (improvement) or

A few years ago, as I was speaking with the production scheduler of a manufacturing client, something caught my attention – printed production paperwork on her desk with varying numbers of “URGENT” stamps on them. Some had one URGENT stamp, some had two and a few had even three! She explained that the number of

I was travelling last week and had a restaurant/pub meal with colleagues one evening. As I was picking up my meal, a set of pre-packed sauces in little containers caught my attention. “Well done!” I thought. They had planned to be a step ahead to meet those last-minute customer requests, for their favourite sauce, with

My younger son loves to play cricket. Recently the (main) summer season ended but my son enrolled for a winter season tournament – he just can’t get enough of it! I was helping the team to scout for a cricket ground which is a challenge in winter. Councils convert them to soccer and footy fields

As a business grows, things get complicated and complex. Many businesses find the bottom-line margin going down, as the top-line goes up, due to a lack of systems, structures and processes. James Clear (NY best-selling author) states elegantly, in his book Atomic Habits, that ‘You do not rise to the level of your goals. You

Australian manufacturing is at its lowest point ever at just 5.6% of GDP. It used to be over 30% in its heyday in the 1960s. The government’s plan to resuscitate the ailing manufacturing sector over the recent years has been fundamentally built upon a heavy technology focus. Based on a recent Ai Group’s Performance of

Ben Hunt-Davis – former Olympic Champion Rower On Sunday Sep 24th 2000, exactly 20 years ago today, the British rowing team lined-up their boat in the men’s-eight finals race at the Sydney Olympics Games. Competing with them were Australia, Croatia, Italy, United States (defending champions) and Romania. The British team dominated the 2km race from