Lean within the Creative Industry
Ten tips for improving processes
A special environment
The creative industries - including Sign, gaming, graphics media, design, Internet companies & ICT, advertising, fashion, fine arts, architecture and publishing - are a special environment.
The creative industry is also one that our government considers worth encouraging. According to the top sector policy, the Creative Industry is 'a driver of innovation' and a 'supplier of creative solutions to social problems'. Companies derive their right to exist from creativity, entrepreneurship and especially innovativeness. The Netherlands has a number of internationally renowned players in addition to the traditional innovators: small agile companies with inspired people.
John Koekenbier
Author
Price or creativity
In any industry, of course, price is important to a client. But within the Creative Industry, the opportunity to be something other than a price fighter is already contained in the name: delivering creative power. A mission and vision of truly thinking with the client. Being more than a mass factory of code beaters or machine operators. A client who has once experienced the "wow effect" of a brilliant creation is a different kind of relationship than a client who once managed to buy cheap. And if that customer can use that result again for their own, the effect is doubly strong.
Change
This means that an entrepreneur must always strive to find ways to bring customer-centric creativity into the organization. And that same entrepreneur must continually redirect that creativity into efficiency in their own learning organization. Only then will returns improve. The further the company can advance in this, the more it can be called "world class.
Many methods and systems with as many abbreviations have been developed to evolve companies through continuous improvement. Existing companies naturally have the advantage of a certain stability but are less likely to arrive at revolutionary business models. The cause is simple: people are busy with the normal course of business. Only when the need for change is irrefutable AND people are respectfully encouraged to change does something really happen. Then the culture of a company can fulfill the promised potential of the Creative Industry.
Lean
Lean is one of the methods of improvement. This time not an abbreviation, but an English term: "lean. Continuous improvement by eliminating waste and utilizing the qualities of people.
Lean has similarities with many other systems. Indeed, certain instrumental solutions are simply a good idea and thus part of more systems - working in a short-cycle and manageable manner (compare with SCRUM), securing continuous improvement with clear standards (ISO 9001), paying attention to delivery time and rapidly changing customer demand (QRM), efficiency of machines and the importance of a well tidy workplace (TPM) and improving the whole by focusing on the bottleneck in the organization
Lean toolbox
However, the visible tools from the LEAN toolbox must always be combined with less visible things. Respect for people and leaders who can turn strategy into motivation, continuous development of people and the right behavior in the workplace are at least as important. According to more recent LEAN publications, a long-term vision is also important, even in the increasingly volatile network economy. The Dutch government, by the way, recognizes this through its recent focus on Sustainable Employability.
People's Work
That same importance of less visible, "soft" aspects of change has a number of implications.
One is that respectful as well as equitable leadership is required. Painful but necessary changes must be named constructively to help people transform. The same hard facts must be used to adjust business choices. That is often a big challenge. In SME companies in the Creative Industry this is particularly true. Here the relationship between colleagues is direct and strong and creative employees are convinced of their own value and rightness.
That same human work also has the effect of diminishing the importance of the method chosen. In other words, whatever method is followed, it will always have to be made appropriate to the organization and the spirit of the times. The company's strategy must be well thought out and equally good leadership is needed on the shop floor. This, of course, without falling into arbitrariness.
Improve
The pleasant by-product of all the above then is this: there is plenty to be gained in companies without hair-splitting about the theoretical correctness of the chosen method. Whatever works in practice for a company is good, as long as one is sufficiently self-critical. Advanced techniques such as in Six Sigma can and should wait until the basics are sufficiently mastered.
The authors of this piece have spent most of the last few years working under the LEAN banner. This we were allowed to do with esteemed national and international partners in small and large projects. Thus, from the power of repetition and for better recognition, our tips are also captured in terms of LEAN.
Ten tips
1. Start with the people work. Find the people in the organization who must and can do it. Involvement in management: involvement on the shop floor.
2. All beginnings are difficult. Make sure there are people who can observe the process and provide feedback.
3. Be honest. Do not use LEAN or your improvement method as a disguised remediation. But do dare to name where things are going wrong and need to be improved.
4. Guide your change with facts. Search and find the bottleneck in your process or value stream (VSM). Ask 5x "why?" and you are at the source cause of your problem!
5. Measure customer desire. Create those products for which the customer pays best. Get paid as much as possible for consulting, innovative or creative activities that may not be tangible but are named by the customer as valuable services.
6. Get everyone to contribute to improvement. On the shop floor, use techniques for better setup and control (5S) and create small horizontal teams of motivated improvers. The big crowd needs pioneers to watch.
7. Keep it practical and keep it visible. Work with visible numbers, people and plans in the workplace (gemba).
8. Make sure there are successes to celebrate. So choose doable, manageable and valuable improvement actions. Have people from the shop floor present to their colleagues how this will permanently contribute to a better company for everyone.
9. When the culture is ripe for it, make sure that enough meaningful "big" changes are started. If you really need to change course, do so.
10. Don't just think about "production. The company will not benefit from higher production capacity if more products cannot be sold. Don't just think about sales: think about marketing and customer experience, precisely because of the exploitation of its own creative power.