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Businesses seem to be waiting for government stimulus money to trickle down into their cash flow.

Unfortunately, few people seem aware of the glacial slowness of big government. Rather than wait on the Fed, businesses can create their own stimulus plan.

While in this economy it’s hard to increase sales, it’s easy to focus on reducing costs. Every dollar saved goes straight to the bottom line. And employees love finding ways to simplify, streamline and optimize the business to better serve customers.

According to the July-August 2009 Harvard Business Review survey (How Bleak is the Landscape?):

27 percent of businesses are streamlining product or service offerings

34 percent are reengineering processes

37 percent are improving products, services or customer support.

Shouldn’t your business be using this opportunity to improve the value chain?

STIMULUS PLAN STEP 1 - SIMPLIFY

Every business collects clutter over the years in offices, factory floors, inventory, product or service lines. Now is a perfect time to put employees to work on eliminating the flotsam and jetsam of the past. When the clutter is gone, it’s easier to see where to focus on the next step: streamlining.

STIMULUS PLAN STEP 2 - STREAMLINE

Far too many businesses make stuff and then try to sell it. Instead of trying to push products or services onto the customer, change the business to let customers pull products or services when they need them. Any business can employ the principles of Lean Thinking to deliver what customers want when they want it.

Pushing products or services on customers results in excess inventory, both finished goods and raw materials. Pull companies only make the product or deliver the service when the customer requests it. Think of it this way: Inventory is fundamentally evil. It has to be stored, managed, moved, and so on. It eats up time and money that could be employed elsewhere.

Pushing causes the ordering of large batches of raw materials and the production of large batches of product. Using a Pull system results in ordering and production of as small a batch as possible. The ultimate form of this is called “one-piece flow.”

When people hear this, they often ask: “What about economies of scale?” GM and Chrysler are examples of the problems that result from economies of scale thinking: too much inventory. Consider a better alternative: economies of speed.

Pushing products or services results in delays between steps in the value stream that slow the delivery of the product or service. Even though employees seem to be working hard, if you watch the product or service, it spends a lot of time waiting on the next step in production. Even if the production line is fast, the delays between an order, scheduling, production, delivery, invoicing and payment are often excessive.

The 3-57 Rule: Employees work on the product or service as little as 3 minutes out of every hour resulting in 57 minutes of delay. Most people doubt this, but when managers shift their attention from the employees to the product, they discover that this holds true in all processes: office, backroom, billing, purchasing, etc.