Business Basics, LLC

An Article on "Brainstorming" BRAINSTORMING We experience creativity every time a fresh idea pops... into our minds. We recognize creative imagination in everything from a pastel painting to a business plan. In corporations of the future, the ability to brainstorm will become a very vital daily ritual, which can motivate your company to new levels of innovation. These ten tips will support you and your organization's best thinkers to bend, stretch, and grow your product or service. 1. Substitute someone else's perspective for yours. 2. How would a worker, customer, distributor, salesman, service people, or cost accountant approach your idea or subject? Don't know? Ask them! 2. Look at your idea through the eyes of a critic. For each idea, make a list of all criticisms that may arise. Try to develop as many solutions as possible for overcoming obstacles or repairing weaknesses in your idea. 3. Connect your idea to other types of manufacturing companies and countries. Can you make an analogy, and what ideas can you draw upon from these fields and worlds? 4. Magnify your idea. What can you do to enlarge, expedite, extend, strengthen, exaggerate, dramatize, or improve your idea? 5. Simplify your idea. Can you condense, trim down, compact, minimize, or narrow your idea? 6. Change your idea. Modify the name, shape, form, function, and properties of your idea. 7. Make your idea meet the needs and wants of the customers. Does your idea meet the basic needs and wants of more quality, profit, time, space, convenience, customer service and speed? If not, alter your idea to meet one if not all of these needs and wants. 8. Add more value. What will add more value? Add extra features, durability, safety, thickness, uses, accuracy, and guarantees, 9. Examine what others have done. Emulate professionals and experts who have had great success with a similar idea or product. Are you facing a problem that has already been solved? Use the past as a tool for experimentation and learning. 10. Flip a coin. When you cannot make a decision, flip a coin. Once the coin falls, use your intuition and gut to make a decision. If you feel comfortable with the result, go with it. If you feel uncomfortable with the coin toss, make the opposite decision.

Hi LMF Members, If your company is having problems identifying and eliminating non-value-added costs, a reducing of cycle times is where you should focus your efforts.... There just isn't a more important initiative in the pursuit of lean manufacturing success. So, if your manufacturing team can handle only one continuous improvement project at a time, then let it be the reduction of production cycle times. To that end, I have a prepared a new mini-present- ation, "Cycle Time Management." It contains a few tips and observations that may help you and your company with your pursuit of lean manufacturing success. To view it, simply click on the below link: http://bbasicsllc.com/LMF-2-02-P-ST.htm Have a nice day, and stay connected. Bill Gaw

Strategic Planning and Tactical Execution (Part 1 of 3) Strategic planning is a business process that many companies employ to identify their critical success factors that set the course for future growth and profits. Lewis Carroll in "Alice in Wonderland" makes a good case for it: "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?" said Alice. "That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat. "I don’t much care where," said Alice. "Then it do...esn’t matter which way you go," said the Cat. Like most business processes, the key to success is in the effective implementation of the plan. Companies that do a good job of developing and executing their strategies can create a competitive edge that provides increased market share and higher gross profit margins. Organizations that turn their plan into a "dust collector" upon an executive bookshelf will never achieve their full growth and profit potential. Most criticism of strategic planning is aimed at the planning process. They question the validity of a plan that has been based on market "guestimates", the questionable valuation of the depth and breadth of competitors and an optimistic assessment of the company’s internal strength and weakness. The fact that strategic plans can be overly optimistic is not the core problem. Although the criticism may be appropriate, it puts the focus for improvement on the wrong end of the process it’s the implementation task that is critical to producing positive results and it is here where most companies fail in implementing their strategic planning model. TO BE CONTINUED