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Operational Controls

13 June, 2022 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

Poor Operational Control Caused DC Metro Train Crash

Operational Controls are Worthless if They Aren’t Maintained At approximately 5 pm on Monday 22nd June 2009, a Washington Metro train heading towards Shady Grove smashed into the rear of the train ahead of it. The Automatic Train Control system had instructed the train to travel at full speed (55 mph). When the driver of […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: automation, business process management, checklist, continuous improvement, controls, error proofing

People Trump Technology

20 May, 2018 by James Lawther 1 Comment

Tibetan Monk

Poverty Nepal is one of the 30 poorest countries in the world.  In the fiscal year 2015-6, the average weekly income was 1,556 Nepalese Rupees. That’s about £10.50. Agriculture forms the base of the economy. Two-thirds of the population make their living from farming.  The industrial and commercial sectors are also based on agriculture; processing […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: automation, collaboration, human nature, systems thinking

Are You Too Clever for Your Own Good?

5 October, 2013 by James Lawther 10 Comments

Locked or Not

I travel a lot with work. It is not glamorous.  I’d love tell you that when I said I was in K.L. I meant Kuala Lumpur, but unfortunately it is far more likely to be Kings Lynn (for those of you who are not from the UK, Kings Lynn is sometimes, albeit unkindly, referred to […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: accident prevention, automation, complexity, East Midlands Trains, human nature, less is more, service design, simplicity

Can You Make the Right Decisions?

11 June, 2013 by James Lawther 4 Comments

Emergency Room

Decision-making is hard. So hard that we pay people handsomely to be professional decision makers: Doctors Underwriters Bank Managers Tax Inspectors All of them make their living by taking complex ill-defined situations and making decisions. Unfortunately they don’t always decide the same way If you put two professional decision makers in a room at the […]

Filed Under: Blog, Operations Analysis Tagged With: automation, decisions, error proofing, information technology, logic tree, medicine, pareto principle, problem solving

How I Lost My Job

20 October, 2012 by James Lawther 6 Comments

Job Disappeared

A while back I worked in a call centre. It was a big call centre, thousands of people worked there, talking to customers. But not any more… First we mitigated the work, we removed all the rework and mistakes and backlogs, we got rid of all the things that went wrong Second we automated the […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: automation, first call resolution, mitigating demand, outsourcing, redundancy

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