How to Improve Distribution Performance dramatically

The objective of distribution is to maximise dissemination, availability and margin on minimal inventories and costs.

The trick is to reduce stock at the fringes, replenish and educate/equip frequently. 

How to Improve Distribution Performance dramatically

Example Drim Solutions

1. The Distribution Flow-Solution.
2. The Distribution Production Solution.
3. The Distribution DemandGen Solution.
4. The Distribution Sales Solution.
5. The Distribution Training Solution.
6. The Distribution Support Solution.
7. The Dsitribution Management Solution.

The Impact Potential

Foundational Solutions

Advanced Solutions

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Services

How to improve any Strategy dramatically

Any strategy can be improved dramatically: it can be targeted better, enhanced, accelerated, streamlined, simplified or made more engaging.  (Just because your strategy could be improved doesn't mean it should be improved!) 

How to improve any Strategy dramatically

Solution Examples

1. Flow-Optimisation.
2. Deliberate Genius.
3. Systemic Strategy Development.
4. The Strategy Assessment Framework.
5. GPS (Goal | Problem | Solution).

Impact Potential

Foundational Solutions

Advanced Solutions

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Services

How to accelerate and streamline PRODUCTION

Production throughput is a function of bottleneck throughput.

Production lead-time is the sum of setup, production, rework, wait and travel time. 

Production quality is a function of process, precision and tolerances.

How to accelerate and streamline PRODUCTION

1. Minimise waste at and get more through the bottleneck - synchronise other steps to it.
2. Adjust the batch-size at the bottleneck tomatch demand.
3. Minimise the impact of the biggest lead-time contributors.
4. Rank and target the most important quality elements.
5. Root-cause overall quality.

Impact Potential

Foundational Solutions

Flow-Rate Acceleration

The trick to accelerating flow-rate is to improve the flow-rate at the bottleneck.

Improving the flow-rate anywhere else is pointless - and is nearly always coutner-productive.

Flow-Rate Acceleration

1. Optimse the bottleneck for performance.
2. Prioritise bottleneck up-time.
3. Put quality control immediately before it.
4. Insert a buffer before it.
5. Choke in-flows to match bottleneck capacity.
6. Prioritise bottleneck up-time.
7. Use extra capacity at non-bottlenecks for pre- and post-processing.
8. Calibrate bottleneck batch-size to match demand.

Flow-Time Reduction

Flow-Time Reduction combines flow-rate acceleration with removing time from all steps in the end-to-end production process.

Flow-Rate Acceleration increases bottleneck speed and reduces inventory, but doesn't address time costs elsewhere in the line. 

Flow-Time Reduction

The primary contributors
to flow-time are:

1. Wait-Time
2. Travel-Time
3. Setup Time
4. Processing-Time and
5. Rework-Time.

Focus on reducing the easiest of the biggest contributors to end-to-end flow-time.

Advanced Solutions

Services

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How We Can Help

Services

Service Types

The opportunity for improvement in productivity and satisfaction lies in the reduction of wasted time and energy - and the refocusing of a portion of the savings made where it will make the most difference.  The more productive people are - individually and collectively - the more valuable and meaningful their contribution, the greater their satisfaction.  And the greater their satisfaction, the greater their engagement, collaboration and performance.

Ultimate State

We want our people to be fully engaged, vocational and collaborative in their role within our organisation - and we want them to feel valued and respected for the contribution they make.

The Performance-Limiting Problem

The problem is unpredictability of demand and invisibiity of opportunity, compounded by the human brain's need for clarity and predictability and the time needed to gain mastery.

Our train of thought is constantly being interrupted - if we're not by others, by ourselves - which kill thinking and consequently mastery development.  Add to that, unconscous incognizance - we can't take advantage of what we don't know we don't know - and it's no wonder we under-achieve and are unmotivated.

The Counter-Intuitive Breakthough Solution

Our dramatic improvement solution for productivity targets both in concert, by freeing up time and energy needlessly wasted in avoidable multitasking, while deliberately providing the opportunities for growth and development within a respecting environment.

Design batching and streamlining to meet demand ratios. Use handover-ready templates for all handovers.

Other solution elements

Common Traps and Pitfalls and How to Overcome Them

Standard Solutions

Defrag your Brain!

The best place to start is to free up thinking and processing capacity.  It takes a lot longer than we think to reach deep concentration on demanding tasks – and we incur this setup cost every time we return to uncompleted tasks.
Although we will never eliminate multitasking and interruptions completely, we can reduce their incidence and impact way more than we realise – and the indirect benefits are quite amazing!

It's easy to prove gains in capacity of 25% - and we have many case studies of significantly bigger gains than that.

We hold public and private (onsite and offsite) workshops to help people to understand the hidden impact of multitasking onthe human brain and apply and implement simple techniques for curbing unnecessary context swtiching.

Time Allocation Planning and Scheduling 

Over time, reality conspires to shift our focus from the important and challenging to the urgent and solvable.  We end up adopting a a 20:80 focus instead of an 80:20 one.  It's a trend that is very diffcult to resist - and not easy to rectify without a careful and focused effort.  The trick is to do a quick audit of where we're currently allocating our time and energy and compare it with where would ideally like to be allocating time and energy.  From there, it's a simple matter of developing strategies for migrating from the former to the latter.

We hold public and private (onsite and offsite) workshops to help people through the process and adapt our set of solutions to their reality - or build tailor-made solutions, if need be.

Process and Practice Optimisation

It's crucial to distinguish between process (the steps each work-item goes through) and practice (the steps we go through in dealing with many work-items).

This makes it a lot easier to increase the flow-rate and reduce the flow-time of work-items and acclerate and enhance the co-ordination, batching, processing, decision-making and creative problem-solving elements of the practice.

Flow-rate (or flow-capacity is determined by bottleneck flow-capacity.  Flow-time is the sum of waiting and processing time in the process.  And they're the consequence of the practice we use.  The following solution elements contribute various parts of the solution.

Solution Elements

1. Defrag Your Brain!
2. Time Allocation Planning and Scehduling
3. Deliberate Respect
4. Deliberate Synergy
5. Deliberate Mastery
6. Deliberate Genius
7. Create a Pull-System for Change

Productivity is producing more, better, faster and more enjoyably on lower effort, time and dollar costs.

Key success factors

1. The first step is to free up people's time
2. Next is to help them progress current workload
3. After that, deal with backlog and
4. Finally, help them accelerate throughput

Our approach to departmental or organisational productivity improvement is to run a Defragmenting Time & Focus Workshop (Defrag Workshop) and create a pull-system for the introduction of subsequent productivity solutions as part of the implementation support service.  Our Pull-System for Change solution replaces the conventional, coercive push-system for change (which people can't help but resist) with an appealing pull-system, which people can't help but embrace with enthusiasm.  

The Defrag Workshop helps people understand the huge cognitive cost of multitasking (it's way bigger than peopel realise) and provides them with tools and techniques for reducing it dramatically, both individually and collectively.

The productivity solutions that participants choose to "pull" into their practice include:

1. Time Allocation Planning & Scheduling
2. Provisional Solutions
3. GPS (Goal-Problem-Solution)
4. Deliberate Innovation
5. ActionEmail
6. TurboMeetings
7. Explor and
8. PowerDelegation

Defrag Workshops are affordably priced (currently NZ$999) and include a month's implementation support and a 3 month implementation and impact review.  We have delivered Defrag Workshops of different types to over a thousand people and the responses have been highly enthusiastic and the impact significant - sometimes within days.

Click here for a Defrag Workshop Service Sheet

Advice

1. Start by freeing up people's time - the quickest and easiest place to start is by reducing the impact of multitasking
2. Then remove or reduce the duration and frequency of unproductive activities, like meetings and administrative overhead
3. Then provide innovation techniques and, finally
4. Provide collaboration techniques
5. Focus all techniques at current workload
6. Immediate objectives and targets and
7. Backlog