Articles on Lean Management and HR
Articles and insights from Inproov on Lean Management, people and organisations.
Electronics Manufacturing Services: designing for just in time
Like many other industries, electronic board manufacturing is evolving with an ever stronger focus on the hic et nunc: here and now! According to Assodel, writing on what is new for EMS companies, resilience is one of the main challenges ahead. Customer needs…
Giovanni Melai
Teams and leadership: the key to making a difference
A company’s success depends on its people. Good strategies or advanced tools are not enough: you need a team that really works. Above all, you need people who can take responsibility at every level, not just at the top. Teamwork does not simply mean dividing up tasks, but building a group in which everyone gives their…
Sanda Balas
The end of 2024: lessons learnt and a look ahead to 2025
As 2024 draws to a close, it leaves us with valuable reflections and lessons that will guide our approach to the future. It has been a year of significant change, of challenges overcome and opportunities seized, in which we strengthened the values that guide our work and mapped out new prospects for 2025. At Inproov, we believe every experience…
Sanda Balas
Training makes us unique
Why traditional training falls short. Traditional training often focuses on passing on theoretical knowledge through courses and seminars. Yet this method has often proved ineffective, because it does not let employees apply the skills they have acquired in practice on the job. This way of teaching assumes that knowledge is standard,…
Sebastiano Greggio
How to reduce staff turnover
Staff turnover is often linked to employee disengagement, considered the eighth waste, or “muda”, in lean thinking. This loss of engagement can lead employees down one of two paths: doing the bare minimum (quiet quitting), or resigning suddenly (great resignation). Steve Jobs used to say: “It doesn’t make sense to hire…
Sebastiano Greggio · Sanda Balas
Organisational culture and climate
What is culture? It is all in our heads. In his book “Toyota Culture”, Jeffrey K. Liker makes us think about the word “culture” by listing phrases managers often say: “It’s all about culture”, “It’s a people problem”, “The tools are the easy part; cultural change is the hard part”,…
Sanda Balas
Kaizen… is not enough
The context: speed matters. To describe the business world, and at times the world we live in, the acronym V.U.C.A. is often used: Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity. The acronym has military origins in the 1980s and was later recycled in a broader sense in the decades that followed. Famous is the…
Fabio Raoni Trombetta
Nemo profeta in patria
Bringing in someone with previous experience, whether a clerk or operator, a lean specialist or a senior lean manager, can certainly benefit the organisation. Depending on grade and role, of course, the positive effect of people already involved in continuous improvement will vary in scale. With the right sponsorship and the…
Fabio Raoni Trombetta
Lean is not cost-cutting
Cutting costs is not enough: you need higher profits and/or a better financial position. I say this because, on social media and in real-world Lean Management, I often see a lot of emphasis on aspects that are not, or should not be, the end goals of a Lean project. Here are a couple of them.…
Walter Bessega
Will the metaverse help the consulting world?
In many countries, “metaverse” was among the most searched words on the web between 2021 and 2022. Unlike many other passing hypes or news, political or entertainment stories, interest in this topic seems set to last and grow stronger. The reason why…
Fabio Raoni Trombetta
Diversity as a factor in human resources management
We are a globalised world, a single planet. More and more organisations include people of different cultures, identities, nationalities and religions. Can this diversity be an asset for them? Studies on the impact of diversity in companies: research carried out in recent years has shown that greater diversity makes companies more competitive. For…
Sanda Balas
More advanced technology does not always improve processes: the case of voice picking
In recent years, voice picking has spread across warehouse logistics: this technology uses speech synthesis to tell warehouse operators which route to follow and which tasks to carry out. The system was conceived to speed up warehouse operations: the operator wears a headset fitted with…
Daniele De Giuli
Staff turnover: complaining is not enough, you have to act (with method)
Almost every business owner I have spoken to recently shares the same concern: in their companies they are seeing a trend, sharpened by two years of pandemic, towards rising staff turnover. A phenomenon that in the United States has been called the Great Resignation. In the US, in April 2021, the…
Walter Bessega