MM&A at the LEAN Summit 2018

I was delighted to be invited to speak at the LEAN Summit 2018 in Manchester last week. It was a privilege to be able to meet and work with such luminaries as Jim Womack and Dan Jones, who literally 'wrote the book' on LEAN back in 1991.

I hope to  be able to post the video of our plenary session on here soon, in the meantime links to the presentation and to the Learning Session workshop are below. Many thanks to Morné Fourie of Halfway Toyota in Johannesburg and David Male of Robins & Day in the UK for their help and support. It was real, guys.
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​LEAN Summit 2018 Plenary Session
M Fourie, M Moore
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​LEAN Summit 2018 Learning Session
M Moore, M Fourie, D Male

​Leveraging the power of no-code and low-code applications to support lean experiments ​

Experimentation has always been an important feature of continuous improvement. Running experiments helps the lean practitioner to understand the challenges a business faces, and to explore viable solutions, uncovering risk and complexity along the way. 

As businesses come to terms with a landscape where the rules are constantly changing, the need to be fast and agile, to react quickly to changing customer expectations, becomes crucial.

In designing business process experiments, the practitioner is often faced with the need to build supporting information systems. In an environment where most established processes are already underpinned by computer applications, a lack of effective digital technology can hamper progress, or worse, make an experiment appear cumbersome or inefficient.

Developing supporting software using conventional methods is usually prohibitively expensive and too time-consuming and so many lean practitioners turn to Microsoft Excel to fulfil their systems requirements. Deploying Excel as a database, it will be used to enter data, perform calculations, communicate outcomes and present results. For many years, basic applications like Excel have been the only option, and practitioners have put up with its many shortcomings as a database: lack of multi-user support, complexity, fragility, poor security and general unwieldiness.
Over the last few years the digital landscape has changed, and a range of products are now available that allow lean practitioners to build industrial-strength database solutions in the cloud, rapidly and at low cost. These solutions, collectively referred to as Low-Code/No-Code applications, have been designed to allow non-developers to design and build applications, often in a matter of a few hours. With the advantage of being browser-based and secure, users do not need to install new software on their devices and can access the resulting applications from their PCs, laptops or mobile devices.

This learning session affords delegates the opportunity to learn about this new, disruptive technology, to understand the new role of ‘citizen developer’ and to evaluate a range of no-code and low-code platforms. The session will be illustrated with examples of lean initiatives supported and delivered using these tools, and will also explore where the technology is headed, particularly in respect of systems integration and application connectivity.