Improvement Insights Blog
Work ON your business, not IN it.
COVID-19 has slowed business for much of the nation. Here’s how you can make use of the time:
“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” and the QI Macros [software].
“I don’t know about you, but with this COVID virus thing going around, business has slowed a little bit, but that’s great! That gives us an opportunity to start to focus and work ON our business, not IN our business. Now is the time to start to find ways to simplify, streamline, optimize everything that you do so that when things come back on you’ll be ready for it and you’ll be faster, better, cheaper than you ever were before. I think that’s an opportunity that we can’t overlook, right? Even if you have to work from home, you can still get a lot of things done. That’s what I’m doing.
“So this is a time to stop running the business but just focus on the business itself; just take a step back, look at that business and [think] “How can we be faster? How can we be better? How can we be cheaper? How can we help our customers get what they need more and more now than maybe ever in the past, so that when the economy rebounds I’ll be in a position to take advantage of the demand.”
“So if you’re in healthcare, you’re already overwhelmed. If you make toilet tissue you’re already overwhelmed. What about paper towels? Yeah, any sort of product that cleans anything, you’re crazy busy trying to fill up the pipeline, but the rest of us… hey, we’re kind of sitting around [thinking], “Well, there’s this one process that has been bugging me for a while but I haven’t had a time to work on it. Let’s go work on it.”
“That’s my Improvement Insight for this week. Let’s go out and improve something.”
