Effective Rule Enforcement – Exploring Alternatives to Discipline By Kevin McManus, Chief Excellence Officer, Great Systems This article builds on an article from 2017 that provided four steps to effective rule enforcement. In that foundational article, I focused on the need for clear, well-communicated rules that are consistently enforced through the use of primarily positive, and in [...]
Our Need for Better Leadership Behavior Measurement By Kevin McManus, Chief Excellence Officer, Great Systems Do You Need Better Leadership Behavior Measurement? If you read my recent post on empowerment, engagement, and creativity, you may have come across a link that by itself could change how your organization is led every day. For years, I have been [...]
Empowerment, Engagement, and Creativity – the Essence of Innovation By Kevin McManus, Chief Excellence Officer, Great Systems Empowerment, Engagement, and Creativity Drive Your Innovation Potential Innovation is needed for sustained competitive excellence in today’s world of work, but so many teams and organizations struggle to sustain improvement, let alone innovation. What we often fail to recognize is [...]
Measuring Process Improvement Effectiveness By Kevin McManus, Chief Excellence Officer, Great Systems This post on process improvement effectiveness began as an Industrial and Systems Engineer magazine article that I wrote a couple of years ago, just after I wrapped up another national Malcolm Baldrige Performance Excellence Program site visit. On that particular site visit, my focus was [...]
In Search of Innovation By Kevin McManus, Chief Excellence Officer, Great Systems To what degree is innovation today’s competitive edge? Today, continual improvement and lean thinking - reducing process waste and providing superior product and service value - are the norm, whether we execute well in these areas or not. All leaders want to achieve [...]
Escaping Reactive World – Best Practices in Mistake Proofing and Corrective Action Writing By Kevin McManus, Chief Excellence Officer, Great Systems Contact System Improvements to request a quote for bringing this course to your site! ATTEND my 2-day Mistake Proofing workshop at the March 2020 TapRooT® Summit!! Why Do the Same Problems Keep Coming Back? Errors happen [...]
Our Industrial Engineer Survivor by Kevin McManus, Chief Excellence Officer, Great Systems After returning home from a week of teaching in Calgary, I was catching up on the first episode of Survivor: David vs. Goliath that had been recorded earlier in the week. The first show of the 37th Survivor season began as usual – two tribes battling [...]
How Many Processes? By Kevin McManus, Chief Excellence Officer, Great Systems How many processes do you have in your organization? On the surface, this seems like a fairly simple question to answer. If you try answering it yourself however, you might find that it is pretty tough to come up with an answer that you [...]
Recipes for Risk Reduction By Kevin McManus, Chief Excellence Officer, Great Systems Rarely do I come across organizations that are not interested in minimizing the risk of their operations. At the same time, I consistently come across people who underestimate the types of systemic changes that are needed to actually realize and sustain such a [...]
Top Five Tips for Effective Evidence Collection By Kevin McManus, Chief Excellence Officer, Great Systems Several years ago, I contributed a chapter to a John Wiley textbook on loss prevention engineering methods. My chapter focused on conducting effective incident investigations, which includes evidence collection. I also find that a lot of my TapRooT® root cause analysis [...]
