Ideas are Cheap; Execution is Everything
Why are ideas cheap? Supply and demand – there are lots of ideas out there – everyone fancies themself an innovator, the supply far outstrips the demand. BUT, coming up with a good idea is only 1% of the success of a business. The hard part remains….
Why does execution matter more? Once an idea is created, there are hundreds of steps needed to turn it into a viable product backed by a viable business model, such as:
- Understand the market need
- Develop a list of potential customers and engage with them
- Create a business plan
- Assess financial viability
- Develop the idea into a working product or service
- Sell it!
- Iterate the product/service to perform at the right level
- Develop the production process and produce it
- Understand distribution and shipping
The big challenge lies in getting over all of these hurdles effectively and efficiently. To succeed, you've got to get to market on time with a high performing product to beat your competition, and you need to do it with the minimum of resources and lowest spend to develop and maintain an advantage. Driving rigor at speed through the product development, marketing and sales, pre-launch, and production ramp processes is what will make your business successful.
Rigor at speed is what CAEDENCE is all about. We improve your bottom line by leading issue resolution & prevention in product development & introduction for your company and supply chain. We address your most pressing issues related to customer satisfaction, product development, launch readiness, quality and manufacturing, business processes, and strategic initiative rollouts. In addition to solving today's challenges, we strengthen your teams and systems for long-term success.
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Over the years we’ve been exposed to Six Sigma, Juran, Deming PDCA, 8D, Dale Carnegie, A3, Shainin, and more. Each technique works pretty well, and has been demonstrated many times in a wide variety of industries and circumstances. At the core they are all essentially the same!
Each approach relies on an underlying logical flow that goes like this: [a] make sure the problem is clearly defined; [b] be open to all sources of information; [c] vet the information for relevance and accuracy; [d] use the process of elimination to narrow down all possible causes to the most likely few; [e] prove which of the suspects is really the cause of the issue; [f] generate a number of potential solutions; [g] evaluate the effectiveness, feasibility and risk of the potential solutions; [h] implement the winning solution(s); and [i] take steps to make sure your solution(s) don’t unravel in the future.
The differences between the paradigms resides in supplementary steps and toolkits. For example, 8D contains the important “In
Your team is marching through the tools of your company's chosen problem-solving approach. This is time not spent on growing your business or delivering cost reductions. Yet your customers are suffering, and they're not shy about letting you know it! Why isn't it working?
Does your team struggle to deliver the kind of rapid and effective problem-solving your business requires? Can you really afford the unhappy customers, wasted engineering hours, cost of poor quality, and lost opportunities? Use the Visual 8D™ / Visual CAPA™ approach by CAEDENCE.
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Your primary role as a manager is to ensure your team’s success. Internalize this. Make sure your team members know this. Build an environment of trust and collaboration. A direct report of mine would frequently leave me out of the loop as problems escalated, preferring instead to “work harder”. It was clear that he felt uncomfortable delivering bad news to me (his boss) when things were not going according to plan. Let me tell you the rest of the story.
