Archive for July, 2010
Kanban at Xerox Corporation
Posted by: | CommentsI had 2 experts, Michael Curry and Rob Piersielak of the Xerox Corporation on the Business901 podcast to discuss Kanban. With so much being written about Kanban in software development in general and in my own writings on the Marketing Kanban, I felt that giving my readers and listeners a perspective on the traditional form of Kanban would be interesting. We stayed on track through the podcast but wandered off for a moment to discuss Lean and Standard Work practices at Xerox. 
To Xerox, a KanBan is a designated area on the production floor where employees stage material that is scheduled for consumption. Once the area empty, a signal is sent to the “supplier” to replenish the Kanban area with the designated quantity. We discussed Internal, Local and Global Kanban.
Michael P. Curry is a Materials Manager for Worldwide Manufacturing Operations at Xerox Corporation. He leads an organization responsible for configuration, planning and purchasing in support of printer products built at Xerox in Webster, NY. He has 15 years of management experience with Xerox in positions such as Operations, Procurement and Materials/Logistics. Curry earned his BS from SUNY at Fredonia, NY and his MBA in International Business from St. John Fisher College, in Rochester, NY. He holds a Green Belt Certification in Lean Six Sigma and is a member of the Institute for Supply Chain Management.
Rob Piersielak was born in Rochester, NY. He received his BS in Industrial Engineering from Alfred University, and his M.S. in Engineering and Global Operations Management from Clarkson University. He is a certified Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, and is currently a Master Black Belt candidate. Over his 20 year career at Xerox Corporation, Mr. Piersielak has had numerous positions throughout the supply chain, all focused on process improvement and design. He lead projects redesigning manufacturing plants and warehouses in seven different countries, was part of the Global Just In Time Manufacturing Deployment team, and also lead the manufacturing team in rapid Time to Market product delivery project that delivered benchmark TTM results for Xerox. He is currently responsible for worldwide Supply / Demand and Order Fulfillment for the company’s flagship product, the iGen press, and is also responsible for Webster Manufacturing Materials Logistics Operations.
The Guiding Principles of Value Stream Marketing
Posted by: | CommentsOn my podcast the other week, I had Robert Martichenko of LeanCor co-author of the Lean Enterprise Institute’s newest lean workbook, Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream. The book builds on the concepts of waste, flow, and pull. This workbook illustrates how to analyze the traditional supply chain as a flowing stream of products and information. Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream provides the steps to a comprehensive, real-life implementation process for optimizing your entire fulfillment stream from raw materials to customers.
In the podcast Robert states that a set of guiding principles must be adhered to or simple chaos may result. Following his lead and using the Lean Fulfillment Guiding Principles for an outline, I developed a set of guiding principles for the Value Stream Marketing. An explanation follows:
Most companies have a process that moves prospects and customers through a progression such as a marketing funnel or a sales pipeline. This enables an organization to visual the process and give them an idea of how many sales are close to closing or how many people are entering the funnel or even how many are maybe A, B or C players.
The movement is rather complex and could cross many different marketing channels. At the end of the progression, a certain number of prospects become customers and the others are kept in our pipeline till they remove themselves. We even will attempt to enlist referrals, especially from our customers to put more people into the pipeline. This accumulation of prospects makes it difficult for business to understand the progression of their prospects and maybe even their marketing efforts.
Organizations must come to understand that they are building a value stream. Effective management of the pipeline is one of the most critical components in marketing today. Finding the obstacles that hinder flow creates one of the most cost-effective ways of increasing sales. A Marketing Value Stream can be very long and continuously changing. It is almost impossible for managers to evaluate every action taken with detailed analysis. Instead you must create a set of guiding principles that you take for fact and adhere to them. A set of guiding principles for Value Stream Marketing are:
1. Eliminate all the waste in the value stream: Creating flow in the value stream requires all departments and functions in an organization to work in harmony. Focus on the fundamental lean principle of eliminating waste.
2. Make marketing efforts visible to all members of the value stream through a Marketing Kanban: If marketing efforts are visible across the stream, then it is much easier for every participant to plan work.
3. Increase throughput: When a company can increase throughput to the point where it can exceed expectations of the customer, your marketing cycle times are reduced when work in process (number of prospects) in the cycle is reduced.
4. Establish a Marketing Cadence and create level flow: The ultimate goal is to have information move in a predictable, consistent, and uninterrupted manner based on the actual demand of the prospect or customer. This is known as level flow. Level flow reduces variation in processes and tries to spread activities equally over working time. This minimizes the peaks and valleys in movement that create unevenness and overburden, which result in waste.
5. Use pull systems: Pull Marketing systems are a way of introducing the value(achieve) that a prospect /customer would recognize by your involvement(access) within their communities(attract). These 3 levels of engagement evolved to a simple term of Pull Marketing. These three levels of Pull have been wonderfully described in the recent book, The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion
6. Increase velocity and reduce variation: Velocity is the speed with which information and material move through the value stream. Meeting customer/prospect demand by delivering marketing efforts more frequently increases velocity. This helps to reduce work in process and lead times, which allows you to more easily adjust delivery to meet actual customer requirements.
7. Collaborate and use process discipline: The collaboration of all participants in a value stream is necessary to identify problems in the stream, determine root causes, and develop appropriate countermeasures. To be truly effective, this collaboration must be combined with standard improvement processes and regular PDCA.
What principles do you have in creating a Value Stream in your marketing?
Related Posts:
Agile, Scrum, Kanban, or is it just a Marketing Funnel?
Pull: The Pull in Lean Marketing
Value Stream Marketing and the Indirect Marketing Concept
Marketing Kanban: Marketing Kanban
Value Stream Mapping
Starting with the TOC Thinking Process
Posted by: | CommentsTheory of Constraints Handbook authors John G. Schleier, Jr. and James F. Cox III were part of my recent podcast Holistic approach to the Theory of Constraints. We covered so much material during the interview that I split the discussion to 2 parts. The one preceding and another on the Thinking Processes of TOC. This was featured that in a podcast release on Tuesday, June 22nd. An excerpt from the upcoming podcast:
Joe: That seems like the passion that you have for Theory of Constraints is really personal development. Is it not?
Jim: I think so. I think Goldratt’s major contribution to all this is, the thinking tools. And it’s just the practical application from logical to common sense. But it’s so uncommon with most people today. They take actions, and they don’t understand the full ramifications of these actions. And then they have to live through the consequences of these actions. And I think his tools offer tremendous opportunity to change people’s lives where they can achieve their goals.
John: If we go back to the chapter we were taking about earlier of Kathy Suerken on TOC and education, one thing kind of connected to this that impressed me, was that her observation was that the thinking tools can really be learned. At least some of them can be learned by grade school children. And in her chapter there’s a picture of a conflict cloud.
That’s drawn in chalk, I think it’s in chalk, on the side walk in grade school in the UK. And these grade school kids come out and resolve conflicts that they have, by walking through that sidewalk diagram of a conflict cloud, because they have been taught how to do it. And it’s just kind of interesting. I think that these tools can be understood and used by very, very young people.
The conversation I had with them prompted me to re-visit the thinking process and even blog about it last week, Problem Solving – Think 3, Not 5. I have always liked the concept of the thinking process but admittedly struggle using it. As stated by John above, if grade schools kids get it why can’t I? So starting small or simpler was my goal. So why not start at grade school level, I read the paper everyday? My recent reading took me to Thinking Smart: Applying the Theory of Constraints in Development Thinking Skills
Tomorrow’s podcast not only discusses the Thinking skills but the applications such as: Schools, Juvenile Centers, Prisons, Healthcare, Athletics and College Courses.
