Disciplines
Lean
I’m an experienced practitioner in the principles of Lean, particularly in the areas of:
- Just-in-time processes
- Mùda elimination
- Inventory reduction
- Quality Circles
- Employee Engagement
You can read about how I’ve deployed these skills in pages like Distribution and Retail on this site.
Customer-Relationship Management
Too many people think this just pops out of a box labelled ‘Siebel’. It really can’t: not if it’s implemented as a business-driven, coherent approach that aims to deliver enhanced relationships and more sales — which must be the whole point.
My business-first approach to ‘CRM’ is outlined in pages like Finance, Car-Making and Retail on this site.
Marketing
I have deep experience of:
- ‘Shelf psychology’
- Dialogue Marketing and even
- Viral Marketing
I have developed and used these skills in the Automotive, Retailing and Consumer-Technology Industries.
Belbin
Meredith Belbin, developing his ideas in the eighties, gave us what I see as hugely valuable insights and tools to aid in our understanding of the dynamics of teams.
His approach helps answer one common question:
- How do all these able individuals make such
a mess out of working together ?
I’ve had Belbin at the back of my mind for years. I taught English in France for a few months, and worked over many years for The Industrial Society at a school in Taunton — and nothing makes Belbin resonate more than applying it in a school classroom. However, without the necessary self-awareness, the message would be lost on most students.
I have since used Belbin techniques:
- in manufacturing — looking at Quality Circles
- in the City of London — looking at Insurance-
underwriting teams - in retailing — improving the effectiveness of
customer-focus groups
and informally almost everywhere else I’ve worked to help understand how to improve the way people work together.
Process Modelling
I have used various techniques for process modelling, and now adopt a hybrid method. I believe that the principles behind looking at process design — the imperatives of Lean and the rigor of the more technically-inspired routes — are more important than the labels we give to the approaches. ‘Business-process re-engineering’ is what I do, though for some reason that label is deemed passé.
Much of my approach has been conditioned by my having a thorough grounding in relational database, where processes need to be analysed before data ... though it took us a couple of decades to work that out.
Relational Database
I contributed to the second edition of CJ Date’s Relational Database; Date and Codd being fathers of the science.