The Digital Dealership, Your Audience: Marketing Activities, Part 2
In tonight’s blog post, guest writer Mets Kramer continues his exploration of the digital dealership. Part 2 of a series, tonight we look at marketing activities for your audience.
Digital Marketing to your Audience
Anyone who’s read marketing articles or blogs or attended a course will be familiar with the 4Ps of marketing, along with many similar acronyms. Product, Price, Placement and Promotion sum up the core tenant’s marketers need to consider when creating a marketing and advertising plan. In digital marketing and for the Digital Dealership this is even more important.
In the Digital Marketing world, we often speak about engagement. Engagement is critical to digital marketing success and why reconsidering the basic tenants of marketing is so important. In the digital world, what we see and what we want to see are determined by Engagement levels.
Over the past couple of years, you’ve heard a lot about the engagement algorithms used by social media sites and other platforms. These platforms have two main goals, to create user engagement with the platform and extend the time spent by users on the platform. To do this the platforms have highly intelligent algorithms that present content it calculates will be of interest to people. This is often based on the type of content or early engagement with it. If content has low engagement the algorithm effectively buries the content and, even if you have lots of connections, most of them will not see your content.
Creating content and marketing to your audience through digital media requires careful thought to be effective and this is where defining, segmenting and building strategies for your audience is important. Take a moment at this point to think about how you interact with various types of digital marketing, you’re someone else’s audience segment too, it will help with your own strategy.
In the first part of this series, we looked at defining who’s in your audience, and segmenting them. These segments can be defined by any criteria, from sales volumes to location to fleet size and industry. What’s important is to have segments defined to create strategies. You can define these for known contacts in your audience, but you can also create these segments in the unknown audience. For each of these Segments of the audience, consider the tenants of marketing.
First, what is the Product you want to present to each segment?
Is it the dealership, the experience of the people in the dealership, is it machine inventory or is it services like rental, your shop or parts? Each of these items is of varying degree of interest to your audience. Content should be created for each of the products your dealership has to offer. Your existing customers may want to learn more about service products. Your prospect customers may want to know about the inventory you have for sale or about the brand you represent and the capabilities of that brand. Your unknown audience likely needs to learn more about who you are and about the dealership in general. This will help them to recognize and consider your other products, like machines, in the future. Regardless, it’s important to understand all the products you have to offer as each audience segment will find different values on each product. Furthermore, don’t forget, your content needs to be engaging, so try and use video, audio, closed captioning and imagery.
Second, what channels will you use to place the content for your audience to see, engage with or react to?
There are traditional channels, like advertising sites, billboards and magazines. There are digital channels including email campaigns, your website, Linked In, Facebook, Instagram etc. and there are also physical channels like signage, brochures, posters and even invoices. What is important is to understand what audience you’ll be addressing through each channel and what the purpose of the content is.
The Channel selection can be approached from multiple directions. Consider for each channel, “what audience segments use the channel?” or approached from the other direction, “what channels do your target audience segments use?” You need to determine this for each audience segment.
In the last few years, I’ve seen LinkedIn be corporation and brand development focused, Facebook focuses on small contractor and community focused, Instagram looks to be Brand, Product or announcement focused etc.
Third, what will be your plan combining these 3 main aspects. Audience Segment, Contact and Channel?
For this step it is often helpful to create some matrixes. For each defined audience segment create a grid with 2 axes. One for Product content and the second axis for Channel. This work will help you really think through what content to place on each channel to engage your audience. For your digital channels this is critically important, and the work done to define your audience and your product content will help you make sure the content is engaging. Content placed on the right channel designed for the audience in the channel will always get you higher engagement, and in return, your content will be viewed by more of your audience members.
Finally, as a Digital Dealer, how will you use Information to augment your marketing?
Using and collecting information is the hallmark of a smart and digital dealership. Analyzing information about your audience, including feedback from marketing and advertising efforts, help you to fine tune all the above 3 aspects, content, audience and channel. Here are some examples.
- Add user specific information to Email Campaigns. “Hi John, because you own motor graders, we thought this inventory item might be of interest to you”. This can be done though tagging in the mail software and merge codes. This content will be many times more engaging.
- A Dealer website that recognizes returning customers and provides shortcuts to frequently visited pages or functions, and filtered inventory or promotions based on existing Fleet. “Welcome back Bill, this section lists the functions you often visit; Online Parts, Machine Specs. Your 410 is due for a service, here’s a link to the filter kit”
Spending time analyzing your audience always pays. They can be your existing customers, local contractors or people you don’t know. Building a marketing plan, for each of the audience segments you’re interested in, will help you retain the customers you have and funnel in new customers to your sales and after sales operations.
Mets Kramer
Me*********@*****************ns.ca
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Friday Filosophy v.11.19.2021
Friday Filosophy v.11.19.2021
Steven Alexander Wright (born December 6, 1955) is an American stand-up comedian, actor, writer, and film producer. He is known for his distinctly lethargic voice and slow, deadpan delivery of ironic, philosophical and sometimes nonsensical jokes, paraprosdokians, non sequiturs, anti-humor, and one-liners with contrived situations. Wright was ranked as the 15th Greatest Comedian by Rolling Stone in its 2017 list of the 50 Greatest Stand-up Comics.[2] His accolades include the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film and two Primetime Emmy Awards nominations as a producer. In this, our Friday Filosophy v.11.19.2021, we share some thoughts from Steven Wright.
The Time is Now
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Thoughts on Our Resources
Thoughts on our Resources
I don’t know if you have noticed but we have been quite busy over the past few months. I wanted to bring it to your attention and provide you with some suggestions going forward.
As you know at Learning Without Scars, we have three purposes and main goals.
I would like to direct you to “The Resources” tab on the home page @ www.learningwithoutscars.org.
You will see a dropdown that lists off everything under that tab. Go first to Contributors. We have been able to engage a series of highly skilled and talented people who share their knowledge, experience and wisdom with us. These skills and that knowledge and wisdom comes to you free of charge. But there is a caveat to that. Reading through a blog you will find that there are suggestions and ideas for you to consider. This is not reading the Sunday Paper and moving on. This might require you to make changes ton something in your operations. We hope so as our Contributors have “been there done that.” As you scroll down through the Contributors you have a brief biography of the individual and a picture to see not just their work. Then you will see the most recent three Blog posts and Podcasts.
Then if you go back up to the Resources tab and slide down to Blogs you will see our Socrates Says Blog series. There are some 900 different blog posts there for you to read through. We are creating better search criteria for you so that you will be able to find more easily what you are looking for in the blogs. While you are there, PLEASE take a moment and subscribe to the blog. All you have to do is provide us your email address then you will receive the blogs when they are posted automatically. We typically post blogs on Tuesday. Normally we have two blogs each Tuesday. If it becomes too much for you simply unsubscribe.
Next are Podcasts. Go back to the Resources tab on the Banner line at the top of the screen and slide down to Podcasts. We are very pleased we just had our 1000th download of one of our Podcasts. Not bad in only three or four months. We are really pleased that so many skilled people have agreed to spend time with me talking about various subjects of interest to the Product Support world. We cover HR issues with two very talented people, Sonya Law from Australia and Bruce Baker from Canada. We cover Technology with four very talented people in Dan Slusarchuk from Oklahoma, Dale Hanna from Arizona, Ross Atkinson from Canada and Alex Schuessler from New York. We cover dealer operations with Steve Day from Alabama and Brad Stimmel from North Caroline, and Ryszard Chciuk from Poland. Ed Gordon and Ed Wallace two men who were once College professors weigh in on Workplace Development and the Skilled Workforce as well as Relationship Management and Selling. There are more. Our Podcasts started out running between 40 and 50 minutes. We covered a lot of content. About ix weeks ago we surveyed our viewership and the results indicated that the audience wanted shorter Podcasts. We now offer 10-to-20-minute Podcasts. I hope you enjoy them.
Continuing on this path, go to Resources again and slide down to Newsletters. We started producing a Newsletter July 1st, 2021. They run quarterly so our second Newsletter went out October 1st 2021. We are currently putting the next Newsletter together which will be published and released January 1st 2022. We are becoming better at developing the Newsletter and have modified how we bring them to you so that you can maximize the benefit they provide you. Today we provide the Newsletter in several pieces to allow you more flexibility in how you use it. You receive the Newsletter in your email if you SUBSCRIBE to it (please take a moment and do that for us). The Newsletter is split into six pieces. We start by highlighting an individual from history who has had an overly large impact on humanity. This includes several significant quotations from that individual. Then we provide a short position paper on where we stand with Learning Without Scars. Then we move into the meat of the Newsletter. We have four sections that are highlighted for you; Parts, Service, Selling and Marketing, and Business. Then we close with a reading list of books that I have been reading in my work to stay current with what is going on in our Industry in Business and other fast-moving areas like technology or Cyber Security or Artificial Intelligence. Each of the four section you can obtain in a pdf format by clicking on the statement near the end of that section. These pdfs are intended for you to share with your teams to allow them to read them and then have a discussion on what the subject matter means to your operation. Ideally each of those employees will obtain their own subscription.
Finally, we are in a Beta test with a Company in the UAE that has developed an AI tool to convert word documents to audio tracks in multiple languages. We currently have 50 audio tracks up in US and UK English with another ten or so coming shortly. This is a beneficial tool for people to get an idea of the content of learning before taking classes and assessments. We are hopeful but very optimistic this will work for us and can be expanded.
So, there you have a more detailed explanation of our Resources. There is a lot of material there for you to consider. Everything in our Resources is something that is in place in dealerships and businesses worldwide. None of this is “pie in the sky” it is all in place in business today.
And don’t forget our big news.
Effective November 1, 2021, Learning Without Scars became fully accredited as a provider of continuing education through the International Accreditors of Continuing Education and Training (IACET). This accreditation sets us apart in our field: we are the first and only education provider in our industry to hold outside accreditation. From this point forward, all students will receive CEUs when they take a course through Learning Without Scars. Now we begin the critical work of collaborating with technical schools and professional associations to develop ongoing programs for all students.
We are pleased and proud to welcome you to Learning Without Scars: an IACET accredited education provider.
The Time is Now.
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Keeping Up-to-Date and Current in a Learning Business
Keeping Up-To- Date and Current in a Learning Business
I read this article recently and wanted to share it with all of you. It presents some interesting perspectives on employee development and learning. I hope you enjoy it.
To adapt to technology disruptions and meet the modern-day learners’ demands, many organizations are looking at modernizing their existing learning material.
But modernization is not only about repackaging an ‘old wine in a new bottle’, but it should ideally be looked at as a transformational strategy to deliver business results by creating new and unique experiences for the learners. In fact, it should be embraced as an opportunity:
Having said the above, modernization comes with its fair share of challenges. In order to arrive at a robust and proven modernization framework that can be successfully implemented, it is absolutely essential to spend efforts on understanding the key factors that are driving the need for modernization. Here are a couple of factors that could be considered while designing a modernization strategy:
Technology disruptions
There are multiple technology disruptions that are happening all around us. Technology in itself has undergone numerous transformational processes impacting the way learning is delivered, perceived, and consumed. While organizations need to leverage technology to meet the need of the hour; the modernization strategy has to factor in this reality by future-proofing the content for new technological disruptions.
Skill Gaps
The Covid 19 pandemic has suddenly accelerated the need for new workforce skills. According to a new McKinsey Global Survey on future workforce needs, nearly nine in ten executives and managers say their organizations either face skill gaps already or expect gaps to develop within the next five years. Owing to the new generation of learners and needs of modern-day workplace, new skill areas are popping up regularly. Closing on the skills gap and enabling employee growth should be one of the strategic themes of the modernization initiative.
The Modern-day Learner
The profile, preference and habits of learners keep on changing because society, workplace, and technology continue to evolve. While the modernization initiative should account for the needs of the modern-day learner, it should not be limited just to millennials and Gen Z. It should be more holistic, starting right from the baby boomers.
Maintenance
As content owners, one of the key things is to ensure that we are able to maintain content that we are developing. For instance, a pharma company has to ensure that the content is updated as per latest FDA regulations. The other aspect of maintenance is the variety of technology infrastructure that is being used to deliver content. Today you might have a SCORM LMS in place and you design and develop content for it, but tomorrow, if an xAPI compliant LMS comes into picture, the requirement would be to pass data into the Learning Record Store (LRS) of the LMS. The modernization strategy should account for such technology changes and make content available in a format which could be easily transitioned.
Have you come across any other factors which might be driving the need for content modernization? You can write to us at **@***************ng.com“>in**@***************ng.com and we would be happy to have a conversation.
The author of this article, Rahul, is a digital learning enthusiast and is passionate about helping organizations and leaders solve challenges around learner engagement and student outcomes through intervention of learning technologies. In a career span of over 15 years in the digital learning space, he has helped a host of global organizations and educational institutions in implementing new initiatives around their digital learning strategy.
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Friday Filosophy v.11.12.2021
FRIDAY FILOSOPHY v.11.12.2021
Vincent Willem van Gogh March 1853 – 29 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who posthumously became one of the most famous and influential figures in Western art history. In a decade, he created about 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of which date from the last two years of his life. They include landscapes, still life’s, portraits and self-portraits, and are characterized by bold colors and dramatic, impulsive and expressive brushwork that contributed to the foundations of modern art. Not commercially successful, he struggled with severe depression and poverty, eventually leading to his suicide at age thirty-seven.
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The Hidden Revolution in the Equipment Industry
The Hidden Revolution in the Equipment Industry
With 20+ years of business system design and business intelligence experience, Dale Hanna founded Foresight Intelligence in 2009 to help leading equipment dealers achieve operational excellence and a sustainable competitive advantage through effective use of real time KPI’s throughout the organization. Recently, Dale has added telematics to his passion and is enjoying the challenge of making oceans of disparate data useful to manufactures, dealers, rental companies, and end customers. Dale obtained a BSEE degree in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University and has been engaged in many associations serving the equipment industry. In his first guest blog for Learning Without Scars, Dale writes about the hidden revolution taking place in the equipment industry.
Technology is driving a revolution in the equipment industry that we can easily see: grade control, idle tracking, fault codes, autonomous equipment, electrification, etc. While the advancements are amazing and will continue to be, dealers are noticing brand differentiation becoming more and more of a challenge. In this margin-conscious market, we see the battle of the future being fought on customer experience and we see technology is quietly but rapidly driving that revolution.
This hidden revolution is happening in all areas of dealership operations. Today we focus on how technology is increasing efficiency and enhancing customer experience in the service area, especially during this time of unprecedented labor and parts shortage.
Below are strategies that are giving some equipment dealers a leg up:
Increasing Trust from Your Customers
We all know trust is a vital ingredient in delivering a great customer experience. If you are like me, I used to think building trust was an elusive and subjective endeavor. Chris Voss, a lead FBI hostage negotiator, gave us a formula to build trust quickly and predictably:
Trust = Predictability.
A system that can be configured to your workflow to automatically notify customers at key milestones creates a predictable service experience every time without adding more work for your people. Yes, UPS and FedEx have perfected this. You know exactly where your packages are all the time and the moment they are delivered. It is hard to imagine any shipping company being able to survive without it. Our expectations for the service experience are quickly reaching the same level.
Doing Business at the Speed of Text
When we do not get an email response from someone, what do we do? We text. According to a research report, on average, people respond to a text in 90 seconds and an email in about 90 minutes. Adding an integrated SMS (text) platform is like adding nitrous to your service engine. A fully integrated text platform notifies your customers of progress, provides new quotes, gets instant sign off for additional work, shares inspection results and obtains satisfaction survey results at lightning speed. All the communication history is saved for future reference. With the busy schedule your customers have, who would not appreciate a faster ride?
Self Service Makes Happier Customers
The pandemic has accelerated a trend that was already happening – we want to do more things online, by ourselves, at whatever hours we want, without having to wait on anyone. Providing information your customers need, in the forms they need, always accessible makes them feel informed and in control, both are important elements for happiness. A robust dashboard, easy to use interface, searchable/sortable/exportable data and schedulable reports keep your customers smiling while your people sleep.
Have Your Process Your Way
A lot of service systems were built based on someone else’s ideas, usually from the first few customers the system makers had. Your workflow is what makes your people efficient, and your organization stand out. Today’s technology allows an effective system to adapt to you rather than the other way around. Dynamic dashboards by user and role, quick and easy work order assignment and tracking, Apps for field technicians to easily add comments, pictures/videos, inspections can be required and enforced as a part of your workorder process are all examples of how today’s systems serve you the way you do business.
We Are More Powerful When We Are Connected
So are data and systems. At dealerships, we still use multiple systems to get things done. The last thing we want to add is another siloed system. Any service system today should connect with your OEM system for fault codes, warranty information and even submission, your telematics system for real time dispatching, customer’s telematics system for asset location and hours, maintenance management system to organize all the maintenance plans you sold and your business system for cost and PO information. The more your systems are connected, the more efficient you become.
The current pandemic will end for sure, but our world has changed forever. If we look at carefully, there is an undeniable trend – tech rich companies have done better in general, some has done exceptionally well and taken sizeable market share from competitors during COVID 19. This trend is definitely here to stay. Technology is not only changing things we can see and buy, but it is also changing the way we perform and experience service. Customers will certainly buy more equipment, especially with the new infrastructure bill, and whoever delivers the best customer experience will have the bigger share.
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The Digital Dealership, Your Audience: Marketing Activities, Part 2
The Digital Dealership, Your Audience: Marketing Activities, Part 2
In tonight’s blog post, guest writer Mets Kramer continues his exploration of the digital dealership. Part 2 of a series, tonight we look at marketing activities for your audience.
Digital Marketing to your Audience
Anyone who’s read marketing articles or blogs or attended a course will be familiar with the 4Ps of marketing, along with many similar acronyms. Product, Price, Placement and Promotion sum up the core tenant’s marketers need to consider when creating a marketing and advertising plan. In digital marketing and for the Digital Dealership this is even more important.
In the Digital Marketing world, we often speak about engagement. Engagement is critical to digital marketing success and why reconsidering the basic tenants of marketing is so important. In the digital world, what we see and what we want to see are determined by Engagement levels.
Over the past couple of years, you’ve heard a lot about the engagement algorithms used by social media sites and other platforms. These platforms have two main goals, to create user engagement with the platform and extend the time spent by users on the platform. To do this the platforms have highly intelligent algorithms that present content it calculates will be of interest to people. This is often based on the type of content or early engagement with it. If content has low engagement the algorithm effectively buries the content and, even if you have lots of connections, most of them will not see your content.
Creating content and marketing to your audience through digital media requires careful thought to be effective and this is where defining, segmenting and building strategies for your audience is important. Take a moment at this point to think about how you interact with various types of digital marketing, you’re someone else’s audience segment too, it will help with your own strategy.
In the first part of this series, we looked at defining who’s in your audience, and segmenting them. These segments can be defined by any criteria, from sales volumes to location to fleet size and industry. What’s important is to have segments defined to create strategies. You can define these for known contacts in your audience, but you can also create these segments in the unknown audience. For each of these Segments of the audience, consider the tenants of marketing.
First, what is the Product you want to present to each segment?
Is it the dealership, the experience of the people in the dealership, is it machine inventory or is it services like rental, your shop or parts? Each of these items is of varying degree of interest to your audience. Content should be created for each of the products your dealership has to offer. Your existing customers may want to learn more about service products. Your prospect customers may want to know about the inventory you have for sale or about the brand you represent and the capabilities of that brand. Your unknown audience likely needs to learn more about who you are and about the dealership in general. This will help them to recognize and consider your other products, like machines, in the future. Regardless, it’s important to understand all the products you have to offer as each audience segment will find different values on each product. Furthermore, don’t forget, your content needs to be engaging, so try and use video, audio, closed captioning and imagery.
Second, what channels will you use to place the content for your audience to see, engage with or react to?
There are traditional channels, like advertising sites, billboards and magazines. There are digital channels including email campaigns, your website, Linked In, Facebook, Instagram etc. and there are also physical channels like signage, brochures, posters and even invoices. What is important is to understand what audience you’ll be addressing through each channel and what the purpose of the content is.
The Channel selection can be approached from multiple directions. Consider for each channel, “what audience segments use the channel?” or approached from the other direction, “what channels do your target audience segments use?” You need to determine this for each audience segment.
In the last few years, I’ve seen LinkedIn be corporation and brand development focused, Facebook focuses on small contractor and community focused, Instagram looks to be Brand, Product or announcement focused etc.
Third, what will be your plan combining these 3 main aspects. Audience Segment, Contact and Channel?
For this step it is often helpful to create some matrixes. For each defined audience segment create a grid with 2 axes. One for Product content and the second axis for Channel. This work will help you really think through what content to place on each channel to engage your audience. For your digital channels this is critically important, and the work done to define your audience and your product content will help you make sure the content is engaging. Content placed on the right channel designed for the audience in the channel will always get you higher engagement, and in return, your content will be viewed by more of your audience members.
Finally, as a Digital Dealer, how will you use Information to augment your marketing?
Using and collecting information is the hallmark of a smart and digital dealership. Analyzing information about your audience, including feedback from marketing and advertising efforts, help you to fine tune all the above 3 aspects, content, audience and channel. Here are some examples.
Spending time analyzing your audience always pays. They can be your existing customers, local contractors or people you don’t know. Building a marketing plan, for each of the audience segments you’re interested in, will help you retain the customers you have and funnel in new customers to your sales and after sales operations.
Mets Kramer
Me*********@*****************ns.ca
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Friday Filosophy v.11.05.2021
FRIDAY FILOSOPHY v.11.05.2021
Gautama Buddha, popularly known as the Buddha was a Sramana who lived in ancient India (c. 5th to 4th century BCE). He is regarded as the founder of the world religion of Buddhism, and revered by most Buddhist schools as a savior, the Enlightened One who rediscovered an ancient path to release clinging and craving and escape the cycle of birth and rebirth. He taught for around 45 years and built a large following, both monastic and lay. The Buddha was born into an aristocratic family in the Shakya clan but eventually renounced lay life. According to Buddhist tradition, after several years of mendicancy, meditation, and asceticism, he awakened to understand the mechanism which keeps people trapped in the cycle of rebirth. A couple of centuries after his death he came to be known by the title Buddha, which means “Awakened One” or “Enlightened One”. Gautama’s teachings were compiled by the Buddhist community in the Vinaya, his codes for monastic practice, and the Suttas, texts based on his discourses. These were passed down in Middle-Indo Aryan dialects through an oral tradition.
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Cyber Security Incident Response Planning
Cyber Security Incident Response Planning
Learning Without Scars is pleased to introduce our new guest writer, Danny Slusarchuk. His first post for our blog is on Cyber Security Incident Response Planning. Danny Slusarchuk enjoys spending time with his family and being a productive member of the community. He serves on the Oklahoma Venture Forum (immediate past Chairman) and Oklahoma Innovative Technology Alliance boards. He leads the Oklahoma National Guard Defensive Cyberspace Operations Element. Danny founded Standards IT in 2012 and continues to be a managing partner at the headquarters in downtown Edmond. He has been recognized as 20 Edmond Business Leaders under 40 and was a recent Edmond’s Young Professional of the Year award recipient. Danny spoke most recently at the FBI’s Information Warfare Summit and has for 4 years running. This year he spoke at SECCON as well. He was a guest speaker for the Youth Leadership Edmond conference, 45th Field Artillery Brigade Honorable Order of Saint Barbara Dining Out. He was the keynote for Oklahoma Officer Candidate School Class 63.
Cyber Security Incident Response Planning
Let’s understand the why.
Your business is shut down for the foreseeable future and you don’t have the slightest idea how you are going to get back to the way you were operating yesterday. Your customers, employees, and even competitors know you have been hacked. Someone in another country is extorting you for ten Bitcoin to maybe restore your precious data on their good word. To top it all off, your customers have brought a class action lawsuit against your negligent handling of their data.
Do not let that scenario play out solely on the bad actors’ terms. It is possible to do everything right and still get hacked. A living incident response policy and procedure accompanied by routine tabletop exercises and vulnerability assessments can be the difference between surviving and shutting your business down.
The Sans institution provided great cyber security training. The incident response considerations in this post draw from their Global Certified Incident Handler curriculum.
Your plan should have input from all departments that require systems and data to operate. I recommend you nest it with your cyber liability insurance policy and have it legally approved.
Now, if you were to pull out as much of the lingo as possible and boil it down to bullets here is how I would state it:
That was high level steps, and each has significance. Overall, the concept is to prepare, identify, contain, eradicate, recover, and realized lessons learned. The steps also include adding one-time resources like forensics and crisis public relations.
In future posts I will explore specific sections covered in greater detail that will help educate the reasoning behind the order and specific terminology. Cyber liability insurance is only good if it pays out when you need it for example. Yes, there are some gotchas in choosing your protection.
References: https://www.sans.org/cyber-security-courses/hacker-techniques-incident-handling/
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Why Lean Manufacturing Doesn’t Work Today
Why “Lean Manufacturing Doesn’t Work Today”
Guest writer Bruce Baker shares with us the reasons why lean manufacturing doesn’t work today: the reasons are not exactly what you might think…
Whether you own a bookkeeping business, cabinet-making business or legal practice, all businesses are made up of routines, which rely on consistent, one-at-a-time processes. Everything we do that keeps society “together” relies on repeatable activities. Whether it’s brushing our teeth, getting dressed or eating breakfast, all rely on repeatable processes.
For those who are not aware of the practice of Lean, allow me to provide you with a brief history and definition. Lean is the concept of efficient manufacturing/operations that grew out of the Toyota Production System in the middle of the 20th century. It is based on the philosophy of defining value from the customer’s viewpoint and continually improving how value is delivered by eliminating every use of wasteful resources, or that does not contribute to the value goal. In short, taking things one step at a time is the make or break of business and general success in life.
Many have heard before… “take it down a notch…one thing at a time”. Several months ago, I wrote a short article called “Your Interpretation of Time,” where I stressed the importance of how reactive we have become as a society, including business. Our interpretation of time today is drastically shorter, and the general consequences of failure, impressively higher and more extreme than before. This inevitably leads to reactive, narrow, and short-term decision-making. Albert Einstein once said, “When you are courting a nice girl, an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder, a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.”
My bold statement of “…Lean doesn’t work today” is not that the practice and methodology are ineffective; on the contrary. Lean is applicable in every industry and every business and mentioned in the beginning of this article, in your personal life. The practice and adoption of Lean are fantastic when a business and its people adopt this “way of business life.”
A challenge we are all presented with is that if we adopt Lean as a practice, we need to accept that our reactional, short-term, and high-crisis manner of thinking will always stop us from adopting practices like Lean.
Building and growing a business is never easy emotionally, but requires a strict set of routines and processes, and each process must be executed effectively. This can only happen if each process performs effectively in an individual manner parallel to its fellow processes. This requirement is not limited to the business world but the very nature of our world, yet we insist on a short-term, high-crisis manner of thinking.
As I write this article, I sit in a Lean manufacturing training session with Quantum Lean. Lynn (the Lean instructor) mentioned that adopting Lean “takes time” and that “people do not like to change”. Although I completely agree with Lynn, people resist change primarily because they fear the unknown. Statements like “I don’t see the reason to change,” “I don’t have time to wait for them”, “I have so many problems to deal with, I don’t know where to start” or finally, “Oh, I’ll add this to my list of problems I have to solve…I don’t have time to deal with little issues like this now!”
In conclusion, if you have or are anticipating implementing Lean in your business, remember this. It all starts with the leader of the business. If the leader does not make this mind shift, the rest of the team will not make the shift either. Lean is not another tool or method. It is a change in the state of mind and subsequently changing the business’s culture from fighting fires to experiencing the inherent joy of work and life in general.
As a wise mentor of mine once said, “one step at a time, grasshopper….”
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Friday Filosophy v.10.29.2021
FRIDAY FILOSOPHY v.10.29.2021
Many of you will have noticed we have been writing Blogs and recording Podcasts that are trying to provoke businesses to embrace continuous improvement and make changes. Most recently as a result of a Podcast with Mets Kramer. We were talking about how Amazon and Google conduct their businesses. How within Amazon they were constantly reviewing customer needs and wants and making adjustments. They were working on their businesses not just in their business. Mets and I talked about the fact that within our Industry we were problem solvers. That isn’t a bad thing. We were working hard in the business trying to satisfy customer needs and wants. We didn’t find many dealerships that were working on their business. Trying to change their systems and processes. That simply won’t be sufficient. Time is running out on continuing to do what you have always done.
The Time is Now
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