Here at Marshall Wolfe, we are trying to shake-up our New Business approach. Well, I loosely call it New Business, when really it is ‘keeping in touch’ with all the business contacts made, contractors who have worked on client sites and permanent employees placed throughout the years.
Very few people like those dreaded New Business calls or as in years gone by being handed the yellow pages and targeted to call x50 companies a day – craziness and soul destroying! So, we have embarked on using Kanban in our New Business Process, and it appears to be working!
What is Kanban?
One description is – Kanban is a visual system for managing work as it moves through a process. Kanban visualises both the process (the workflow) and the actual work passing through that process. The goal of Kanban is to identify potential bottlenecks in your process and fix them so work can flow through it cost-effectively at an optimal speed or throughput.
Where did Kanban originate? – A Brief History on Kanban
It all started in the early 1940s. The first Kanban system was developed by Taiichi Ohno (Industrial Engineer and Businessman) for Toyota automotive in Japan. It was created as a simple planning system, the aim of which was to control and manage work and inventory at every stage of production optimally.
We are very aware that we are not in the automotive industry or producing an actual product at the end of a complicated supply chain but having the visual post it notes of key contacts not only is cheering up the office visually, but they are winning us new business as old connections are reacquainted with and new ones made.
I would not imagine that Taiichi Ohno ever had in mind that his planning system would be adopted by a growing Talent Consultancy Company based in Suffolk, but it is just the trick, thank you.
