The productivity wins UK manufacturers are leaving on the table

I’ve spoken with a few SME manufacturers recently, and the striking thing is how often the same worries come up. Different businesses, different products, and yet almost the same set of concerns each time. After enough of those conversations you stop treating them as one-offs and start seeing a pattern worth writing about.

It sits against a bigger backdrop. I was at an event not long ago where Huw Pill, the Bank of England’s Chief Economist, spoke about improving productivity as one of the key challenges facing UK plc, and at the same time manufacturers are being pulled hard towards AI and digital transformation as the answer. My worry is that in the rush towards the ‘shiny stuff’, many organisations are stepping straight over the basic productivity gains sitting right in front of them, because you can bolt technology onto a broken process and all you get is a faster broken process.

That basic improvement work has a name

— Lean, and when I ask why it hasn’t been tackled, the answer is almost never indifference – it’s a worry, and it tends to be one of six things.

SMEs don’t really know what Lean is

Strip it back and Lean is simply finding what wastes your capacity, finite resources i.e. time, effort and money and systematically eliminating it, starting with the problems that already keep you awake at night.

Time

Some tell me they simply haven’t got the hours in the week or the people. They’re too busy ‘getting product out of the door’ to stop and improve. Lean isn’t another job to pile on top of everything else; done properly it gives you time back by reducing rework, improving machine set up times and organising your shop floor so you can find what you need, when you need it.

Cost

To implement Lean is a concern as every pound is being watched closely. Yet Lean is a cost-reduction methodology rather than a cost to your bottom line. In fact it protects your margins and bottom line delivering improved flow, less stock sitting around, quicker changeovers. To get started usually requires very little investment upfront.

We tried it once and it didn’t stick

Nearly always that’s because not enough consideration was given to the human factors of change. The tools themselves are rarely the problem; working with your people and empowering them to improve their processes is an inescapable bigger challenge than most leaders realise. People make change happen and good leadership, coaching and listening are important skills and factors for successful and sustainable change.

Fear that change will disrupt what’s already working

That’s a fair worry, so the answer is that you don’t bet the entirety of your business on it. You prove ‘success’ in one cell, on one line, where a wobble costs you nothing, and you only transfer learning it once it has earned the right to be shared wider.

Belief that Lean is really for the big players

e.g. car plants, and not an organisation like theirs. Lean principles can be applied to any organisation of any size. Wherever you have people and processes – whether it’s low-volume, high-mix jobbing or fast moving consumer products work – you can apply Lean.

My reflection

I’ve worked across a number of sectors over the years, including automotive, aerospace and more recently healthcare, and what strikes me is how little these six worries change from one to the next. The setting shifts, but the concerns are remarkably consistent, and so is the manufacturing productivity being left on the table.

So let me ask you this. Of the six, which one or two resonate most with you, and why is that the one holding your business back? That question is usually where the real conversation starts.

If you’d like to have that conversation properly, book a short call with me here?