What is Genchi Genbutsu? It’s part of the Toyota Production System conceptual toolkit. And it works.
It’s one thing to identify errors or weaknesses in your business, but it’s another to actually fix and improve them.
The crucial step in fixing an error is deciding the right solution to implement. Pick the wrong one and you create a different problem.
When you’re in a massive company, you want to make sure you’re picking the right solution before you start implementing across a whole corporate structure.
Because of this, investigating the problem as thoroughly as possible should be paramount. And this leads us to Genchi Genbutsu.
I was in the middle of a power cut, and the teabag floated despondently in a sad, mottled brew. In the confusion, I’d allowed the beverage to cool for far too long. All of that precious energy transferred to raise the temperature of the kettle to boiling point, gone to waste, and there was nothing I could do about it.
This is an example of poor energy management on my part.
As I sulked over the absence of my morning brew, it did get me thinking, would society ever face these kinds of energy management problems, like I easily had?
Some of you may have already experienced, say, aggravating waits in lines for gasoline, or your pocketbooks taking a punch from inflation. But, energy problems – like a cold cup of tea – are not only personal, they permeate into society and our economy.
80% of U.S. energy comes from fossil fuels. According to BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy, we have 115 years of coal and roughly 50 years of oil and natural gas remaining. To compound this, we also need to leave ~80% of current fossil fuel reserves untouched if we stand a chance of meeting IPCC 1.5°C (34.7°F) warming targets.
Energy management is the process of tracking and optimizing energy consumption for your business. It’s a continuous process, easily implemented by following the correct procedure.
In this Process Street article, you’ll learn about best practices for energy management, how you can successfully manage energy in your business (and beyond), as well as how to adopt best energy management practices using a handy free checklist to help you save time and money.
Don’t cry over cold tea. Learn how to manage energy properly, for a healthier business and a healthier planet. Click on the relevant subheader below, or continue reading as you please:
Virtual reality recruitment is a growing trend in the recruiting world, thanks to the many benefits it offers. This is especially relevant for employer branding because virtual reality offers an immersive experience that allows candidates to engage with your brand directly.
Imagine candidates many miles away from you being able to put on a headset, and get an office tour! VR has many promising advantages for remote and hybrid hiring.
Stick here to learn more about how you can use VR in recruitment and whether VR is really the future of recruiting.
When getting a project approved, you need to submit all pertinent information to stakeholders and then get their approval to start. This means listing the project’s background, timeframes and expenses in an easily digestible document.
Traditionally, this has been done in Microsoft Word or on paper, but by using Process Street you can generate as many proposals as you like just by running a checklist of this template and filling in the form fields. When the stakeholders sign off on the document, all they need to do is click the checkbox next to their name, and Process Street will log the activity.
Check out the project proposal template below, and when you’re done, scroll down for a breakdown of the steps and how it all works:
Ikigai, which means “a reason for being”, is a Japanese word that has gently risen to the forefront of the business world, like a whale coming up to greet the dawn. It is a welcome wave of thoughtfulness and quiet in the face of a usually loud, blustering, profit-at-all-costs model.
The Ikigai concept beckons to us, asking us to consider the question: What do I get up for in the mornings? For most of us, the answer is not “money”.
Money, for most people, is a means to an end. If you ask people at the end of their lives what they wish they could have done differently, the answers are not usually “I wish I’d made more money”. They’re along the lines of “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends”.
Heart matters, both in our personal lives and in business. It seems a bit short-sighted to assume otherwise or to see business as totally apart from our personal values. The industrial revolution saw people exchanging their labor for money and becoming increasingly alienated from the joys of pouring their hearts into their creative endeavors and trade. They became cogs in the wheel of the factory that is capitalism.
We still have a top-down structure in many work environments today, but some companies have begun to embrace a horizontal knowledge approach, where managers and employees are on the same level and treated as equals. The more we learn about what makes employees happy, hopefully, the more we will move towards those models, of which the Ikigai concept is a prime example.
While ikigai is generally applied to finding purpose in your personal life, this Process Street post will look at how the same 4 concepts can be applied to your business as well:
Customer success is vital to a company’s growth because customers are the ones that bring revenue. Although more popular in high-tech sectors, like SaaS product development or cloud services, the customer success manager (CSM) role is gaining more and more popularity in other businesses as well.
But you may be asking, what does a customer success manager even do?
A CSM’s role revolves around making sure customers get their desired outcomes while using the service/product, thus prolonging their life cycles.
In this Process Street article, I will walk you through a customer success manager’s tasks, from onboarding and training the customers, to reducing churn, dealing with critical events, getting and analyzing feedback from customers, and so on.
Read on to get a full 360-view of what the CSM role entails and why it’s so important for a company:
Keeping everyone on the same page in your business is easy with today’s technology. Using cloud-based calendars, you can have everyone synced up all the time from any device. In this post, I will go through our favorite setups to ensure your team never misses a meeting again.
Business systemization gained notoriety from the bestselling book by Michael E. Gerber, published in 1986, The E-Myth – Why most businesses don’t work and what to do about it. In 2011, this groundbreaking book was named the number 1 business book of all time by The Wall Street Journal. In The E-Myth (Entrepreneurial Myth) Gerber explains how businesses are usually started by those who know the content of a business – so-called “Technicians”, people who know how to do the technical work involved in an enterprise – rather than by those who know business itself – so-called “Entrepreneurs” – and why start-ups are therefore by definition prone to failing.
In order for a company or business to thrive, it must move beyond relying on the so-called “Technician” who is now also the company owner. Gerber uses the franchise model to demonstrate how a business does this: Franchises are prototype businesses that are operated in terms of well-documented systems, i.e., there are manuals describing in minute detail how to run the business. Gerber argues that the entrepreneur should spend time creating a business that can run by itself, without the presence of the entrepreneur, and this is achieved through business systemization.
This is a guest post by Adam Hempenstall, who is the CEO and Founder of Better Proposals – simple proposal software for creating beautiful, high-impact proposals in minutes. Having helped his customers win $500,000,000 in the last 12 months alone, he’s launched the first Proposal University where he shares best practices on writing and designing proposals.
A great business proposal means the difference between an unsigned contract and a successful deal. A poorly written business proposal will get turned down, even if the offer is good.
Business proposals are considered to be an art form that only the extremely skilled can write.
However, after analyzing over 189,000 successful business proposals, I can tell you that there’s no secret to writing a great proposal.
Allow me to elaborate as I take you through our analysis findings, and run through the following topics, in this Process Street post:
