Makoto Consulting Articles

Looking forward, on your value stream mapping journey, I want to talk about mapping a future state.   It’s important to recognise that your business needs to have some level of a target or goal that you want it to hit. This is the purpose of mapping a future state. It’s relatively easy to identify…

Let’s take another look at the importance of value stream mapping your business. The principle idea of generating a value stream map being to keep it simple and capture valuable information about your process.   How to perceive a challenge When looking to identify consistent data around your processes in the absence of a repeatable…

When we set KPIs, it is really important to think about how we actually achieve them Setting KPI targets Traditionally, when managers set targets,  it drives the behaviour of people to be purely focused on achieving that target- “I’ll get there whatever the cost.” This narrow focus puts the spotlight on short term gains in,…

So what does multi-skilling have to do with achieving targets?   Generating flow One of the things that are really important about generating good flow in a process, regardless of whether products or services are produced is the multi-skilling of your people. Without multi-skilling, bottlenecks (or places where work piles up), are created in the…

Today, I want to share with you one of the lessons in the book ‘Management Lessons from Taichi Ohno’   It’s by a fellow named Mr. Harada He was president of Toyota in Taiwan for some years. It’s a very interesting book, translated by my business partner Brad Schmidt in Japan, well worth a read.…

Recently I have been talking about the use of Kanbans, or visual indicators, to control production schedule and improve just-in-time processes or manufacturing.   One of the really interesting things about this is that traditionally we think of Kanbans as something like a card or some kind of indicator type arrangement that tells us how…