Habits from Lean Start-Up that organisations can use to lead successful innovation - A KEYNOTE PRESENTATION

Sean Buckland (Design For Service)

Humans love to innovate, they love to create. Organisations are often designed, however, to control, to structure, and to standardise. It is no surprise then that the larger an organisation becomes, and the more mature its processes become, the harder it is to remain innovative. In time, a radical alternative comes along and the blue-chip becomes the brown-chip. Starting twenty years ago, however, a major breakthrough happened: how to apply Lean to start-up environments. The underlying principles are the same, but the problems it is trying to solve are different: no proven market demand, no established processes, just uncertainty.

Recently some companies have been using Lean Start-up as a process for replacing incubators, getting heads out of the sand, engaging employees and uncrossing fingers. But, the bedroom start-up is not the same as an established company, and so like traditional Lean approaches, it is necessary to adapt to context and culture.

The author's presentation will give a brief introduction to the Lean Start-up process, then describe the key leadership habits and behaviours of a Lean Start-up entrepreneur that can be adopted within an organisational setting, some key traps to avoid, and provide a highlight of the advantages of using Lean Start-up within organisations.

Lean Six Sigma - less hype, more metrics. The way forward

Dr Stephen Foster (Harvington Management Solutions)

There is little doubt that Toyota did themselves and the world a great service when they invented the Toyoya Production System. We have been given the concepts of never ending continuous improvement, nothing is impossible; tied in with respect for the workforce and we have seen that these work. According to Takeuchi, Osono and Shimizu (2008) No-one "needs convincing that Toyota Motor Corporation has become one of the world's greatest companies because of the Toyota Production System (TPS)." "An industry of lean-manufacturing experts have extolled the virtues of TPS so often and with so much conviction that managers believe its role in Toyota's success to be one of the few enduring truths in an otherwise murky world." And yet Taiichi Ohno must be 'turning in his grave'. No one dares to report that not only has Toyota's stockturn successively nose dived year by year over the past 25 years, it has now plummeted to a mediocre 8.6 in year's 2016 & 2017.

There are many articles on why Lean projects fail. They talk of this and that, of the failure to get top management buy in, or of the failure to genuinely involve shop floor workers and these are correct truths. However, if Toyota have failed to sustain its programme, and they have, there must be another underlying problem, and there is. They over produce (one of the 8 wastes!) in order to declare profit, due to the lack of any alternative to the 19th century created management accounting systems which are outdated and not fit for purpose. Darlington (2016) explains "Standard unit costing was an 'invention'; it is nearly 100 years old; it has morphed into a financial accounting system in order to value inventory for periodic profit reporting and no longer does justice to 'decision making.' There are still some outstanding success stories out there, especially amongst some of the NPS Research Society member companies in Japan (Foster, 2015) but the issue of Lean Accounting is one that needs to be addressed by the world's Lean community if the benefits of Lean or LSS are really going to be accrued.

Hirotaka Takeuchi, Emi Osono and Norihiko Shimizu

Darlington, John, (June 2016) "Thinking allowed part two: 'Inactivity based costing'"

Foster, Stephen M. (2015). "How the Japanese have engendered long run continuous improvement outside of the car industry." Paper presented at Lean Six Sigma London conference 3rd/4th September 2015.

Role of Lean Six Sigma in Enterprise Transformation to deal with business disruption - A KEYNOTE ADDRESS

William Saraswat - is a supply chain executive with over 15 year of global experience in supply chain transformations, operational excellence, lean six-sigma, continuous improvement and business process improvement. He currently works as Sr. Director of Continuous Improvement for Pinnacle Foods LLC. Over past 15 years, he has worked in senior level positions for top public companies like Pinnacle Foods, Anheuser Busch InBev and Rexam. He has also served as a consultant to several companies in their journey to operational excellence. He has B.S in Mechanical Engineering and MBA in Operations Management. He is a certified Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt and a certified Change Manager.

In an ever-changing business landscape, with changing consumer preferences and a constant need for lightning-fast innovations with better quality and exceptional service at lowest possible costs, even the best organizations struggle to maintain their competitive advantage. The universal levers of cost, quality and customer-service still remain vital to growth and maintaining organization's competitive advantage. Business disruption can affect an organization's ability to operate successfully both short term and long term. When, not if, business disruptions do happen; Enterprise Transformation can be the difference between a mere business-survival and exemplary business-excellence. Several world-class organizations have attempted to use business disruptions as a precursor to Enterprise Transformation. Yet only a select few organizations have succeeded in offsetting business disruptions while creating a state of operational excellence which is sustainable. Most organizations, even at their best, only manage to mitigate the immediate crisis facing the organization with no sustainable and long-term gains. As a result, most organizations go from fighting one burning platform to another; wasting precious time and invaluable resources without any tangible capability-development. As long as the immediate crisis is averted, most organizations claim victory. Such victory celebrations, almost always, are invariably short-lived.

Long-term success of Enterprise Transformation efforts requires strategy based on a sustainable foundation which focuses on capability-building. Lean Six-Sigma is the foundation of a successful Enterprise Transformation strategy; from strategy development through execution to operational excellence. A state of operational excellence, where business disruptions are expected, will be the key differentiator between organizations which excel, even in face of crisis, and the ones which eventually sucumb to business disruptions. Even though a prescriptive solution to every possible scenario leading to business disruption across different organizations is outside the scope of this paper, the intent of the paper is to present a generalized LSS approach which can be modified into a situation-specific solution with the right level of expertise.