Warehouse Optimization Kaizen at HD Supply

Jitendra Badiani

What is a Kaizen?  It is a planned/structured facilitated event that enables a group of cross-functional employees to quickly improve or enact "good change"  to a business process. In this case, Focused Improvement facilitated the Kaizen with a team from HD Supply. The Warehouse Optimization Kaizen was incredible. The teams generated over 50 process improvement actions.  Implementation of the short-term action items began that afternoon. This year Focused Improvement through Kaizens has generated over $900,000 in savings, improved on-time shipping to Read More

Preparing for a trade war? A quick guide for Canadian business leaders

Jitendra Badiani

Every week seems to bring new news stories for Canadian business leaders to contend with when considering the international geo-political landscape. In this post-globalization era of interconnectedness, the consequences of a trade war are not simply the trade that might be lost, but also the impact to capital markets, foreign investments, lower dollar values and slumping stock prices. This has been brought to the fore recently for Canadian business leaders with tariff concerns from the US as well as recent Read More

Trade War? NAFTA, US Corporate Tax cuts, what must Canadian businesses do?

Jitendra Badiani

David Dodge, the former governor of the Bank of Canada, claims “Canada has a competitiveness problem.” This situation has been building over the last few years which has seen Canadian investment in the US triple while US investment into Canada in 2017 was $40.6 billion.  This investment is just about half of what it was almost four years ago. While corporate Canada lobbies the Finance Minister to match the lowered US corporate tax rates, a better strategy for Canadian manufacturing Read More

How to start a Lean transformation

Jitendra Badiani

Choosing to start a lean transformation journey in your business is a big step. Our clients often ask what steps they should take once they have committed to a lean transformation. Here we detail 5 Lean Principles you need to take your business through in order to transform your business: Specifying Value The first step towards transformation is to define value from the point of view of your customer. To identify what produces value in the operations your company is Read More

An age old question – Chicken or the egg?

Jitendra Badiani

What comes first - an ERP system (the chicken) or lean management (the egg)? Lean management is all about waste elimination. It starts by identifying and mapping out each step in a business process followed by a critical review to eliminate any steps that do not create value for the business. A question that often arises within an organization is whether this should be done prior to the selection of an ERP system. The argument for implementing Lean management first Read More