Productivity Planner

The summer months present unique challenges from a productivity perspective, especially for management. Coming in to work in the morning, it might seem that half the staff is on vacation, and the other half is making great mental headway in joining them.

It is often suggested that employers should use incentives to encourage more employees to take vacations during the winter. This makes a certain amount of sense. In many parts of the world, winter weather means an almost inevitable drop in productivity due to delays in public transit, weather related car and traffic problems, and staff calling in sick.

If more employees took vacations during the winter, it would allow continued high productivity and less problematic transportation challenges during the idyllic summer months. This might be sensible, but it’s never been popular. Most people simply prefer to vacation in the summer, but an incentive of some kind might convince a few staff to take their vacations in the winter and cover for other employees later in the year. I know some companies that give one extra week of paid vacation to anyone willing to take all their vacation in the winter.

For many industries summer isn’t business as usual, but there’s no reason that has to mean less business gets done, in fact, in recent years, in order to remain competitive, companies have had to maintain productivity levels throughout the summer months. Making use of the right tactics can help make sure productivity doesn’t dip. This carries a nice bonus: the same practices can also help boost staff morale and encourage initiative which ultimately results in greater customer satisfaction.

One of the biggest challenges around vacation time is simply trying to synchronize schedules. The process can be very frustrating, but it’s important to remember that everyone involved shares at least on [Read more →]

Tags: , , Leadership, Inspiration, Management, Organizational Culture by Chris Russell
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Introduction

One of therequirements of ISO 9001:2000, specified in the paragraph 4.2.2 c), requires a company to develop a quality manual that, among other attributes, shall contain “a description of the interaction between the processes of the quality management system.” Through my experience, as a professional auditor, with dozens of companies around the world, I found that very few businesses had developed practical approaches to address this requirement. Attempts to document process interactions range from busy and hard to read flow charts to establishing cross-reference tables in the quality manual. I observed one of the best tools to address process interaction requirement at Quality Works, a small on-line publishing company.

Initiation of the project

Quality Works, a small Internet-based publishing company, has set a goal to establish compliance with ISO 9001:2000 standard. The Management Team assigned the company’s Business Manager to develop and implement documentation to address new requirements of the standard. While most of the new requirements were simply addressed through preparation of the corresponding procedures and work instructions, documentation of the interaction of the processes created some difficulties. Attempts to document interaction of processes through traditional flow-chart resulted in a hard to read busy document that did not impress the management team.

Brainstorming

To address this issue, the management group conducted a brainstorming session to search for a new tool. The group determined that there were two types of the processes: processes related to product realization and processes related to the management system as follows:

Business management processes:

- Documentation management

- Management review

- Internal au [Read more →]

Tags: , , Leadership, Inspiration, Management, Organizational Culture by Chris Russell
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There are various reasons for filing a claim against a factory but you will mainly be faced with:

1. Late or incomplete deliveries

2. Major quality issues
3. Copyright violations
4. Patent infringements
5. Non-compliance with laws of the destination countries

Let me give you more information about the likely background of these claims:

1. Late or Incomplete Deliveries claims can easily be avoided if your company exercises the necessary due diligence to monitor the production progress at the factory. If your factory was unable to produce the ordered quantity on time or could not supply part of it on time, you should have known this weeks ahead of time. It should not come as a surprise to you at the last minute. If this happens, it is likely your company’s control systems either are not yet in place or need refinement

2. Major Quality Issues are another claim that could probably have been avoided if your QC department and your inspection company had done their homework correctly. The exceptions are hidden defects that can be only discovered after products reach a certain manufacturing operation (properly operating technical products for instance).
3. Copyrights Violations are the worst case scenario and in general very costly. Since it is not a quality issue there are only a few precautions that you can take but they will not always prevent these claims. Chinese manufacturers have a different understanding of copyrights and from their point of view, everything looks alright. Unfortunately, it is still very common for factories to take famous brand name products and apply marginal changes in the hope that the design will be sufficiently altered to avoid copyright infringements. Most often, the design changes are not sufficient. My only advice yo [Read more →]

   Tags: , , Leadership, Inspiration, Management, Organizational Culture by Chris Russell
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