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Archive for March, 2010

Legal Re-engineering – Masterclass and Whitepaper

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

The tough economic environment is driving an increased cost focus across businesses, causing budgets to be cut and cost reduction measures to be introduced. This cost-down pressure rolls back through the supply chain, impacting other businesses. Professional services organisations, such as Law Firms, are not immune to this. In the UK this pressure for change has come on top of ongoing deregulation in the legal sector. Law firm management is looking at ways of increasing their own efficiency to operate within this tougher business environment. We are now seeing increased interest in process re-engineering approaches – typically firms have not applied process management and improvement methods to their work. But needs must, and the current business conditions have created an increasingly ‘hot platform’ for change, giving support to those Partners and Directors seeking new ways of working in their firms.

For those interested in understanding more about business process re-engineering and how it can be applied within law firms, then why not come along to a a masterclass on ‘Re-engineering Law Firm Work for improved efficiency and service’ being given by Alastair Ross, Codexx Director, on behalf of ARK Publications in London on 27th April 2010. He will be sharing his experience gained over the last 20 years in re-engineering across multiple business sectors and with law firms since 2005. For more information, go to http://www.ark-group.com/mp_introduction.asp?ac=887&nc=1&fc=167

In addition we are just completing our latest whitepaper on ‘Business process re-engineering in law firms’ and it is just undergoing peer review with selected firms. This document provides a substantial and practical introduction to re-engineering and how it can be applied in law firms, considering both the opportunities and the challenges to be faced. If you work in a law firm and would like to receive a complimentary copy of the paper, then contact us via our website https://www.codexx.com/contact-codexx.php

Maintenance – Cinderella shall go to the ball

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

In many (most?) manufacturing businesses,Maintenance is very much a ‘Cinderella’ function – it works away in the back-room of the business and never gets to go to the Ball unlike other more glamorous business functions.  Maintenance is not somewhere that ambitious young managers typically seek a career in as it is often seen as something of a ‘backwater’ in the business. Maintaining and repairing equipment is not something seen as difficult or even that important to the business. The image of the spanner, the hammer and the oily rag are what many people envisage when the subject of maintenance comes up. Maintenance is somewhere out of sight where grubby stuff goes on that senior managers don’t spend much time thinking about.

But hang on a moment. Aren’t most factories these days filled with machines? Aren’t these machines expensive and complex devices like CNC machine tools, laser and water-jet cutters, presses and robots? And with Lean being a dominant way of working in most factories, isn’t equipment availability critical to achieving on-time delivery and high OEE? And isn’t RONA (Return On Net Assets) a key financial metric for any review of a company’s effective use of key assets such as production equipment?

Well, yes, indeed.

So what’s wrong with this picture? It’s simple: The view of maintenance as a non-critical function is out of date and a serious impediment to factories achieving high performance manufacturing. Maintenance must be brought into the 21st Century, along with management thinking. A key result of this old thinking on maintenance is the return on production equipment being lower than what would be possible with high equipment availability and also impacts on on-time delivery performance. Simply put, low equipment availability results in poor delivery performance and unnecessary purchasing of new equipment to provide additional capacity.

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Energizing Change

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