The most difficult lean principle and practice for an individual to embed in their thinking and for you to embed in your culture is the principle of “high agreement” or what is more commonly known as “standardization”. The principle of High Agreement is defined as “valuing a common way, or process, more than you value your [...]
Just saying the words “kaizen” or “business process improvement” conjures up the vision of making rapid process improvements that slash cycle times, dramatically reduce cost, improve the customer experience and more. It's been so exciting and gratifying to see the astonishing process improvements that with time, effort, and imagination people can achieve. I think we would [...]
The following is the final installment of the 3 part series on the current state. In the the first two installments we examined the importance of understanding the current state for process design and problem solving. This weeks installment is a focus on current state and innovation. Unlike with process design or even problem solving, there is [...]
The following is the 2nd installment of the 3 part series focusing on the importance of understanding the current state. Last week we examined why understanding current state is important for process design. This week we will focus on why understanding current state if important for problem solving. Often the unfortunate response to a problem is [...]
I think it’s generally well understood that process improvement should first start by understanding the current state before designing the future state. It’s also somewhat understood that’s it’s important to understand current state for effective problem solving. It is less understood that innovation often actually starts with understanding the current state. The following is the 1st [...]
Irish Rail (IR), the national rail system for Ireland, was recently recognized by the European Rail Congress (ERC) for their accomplishments in lean. IR prepared a position paper accompanied by an employee video and responded to ERC inquiries to support the submittal. IR was one of only ten shortlisted for an ERC award from numerous submittals for [...]
This is an unusual blog for the LLC website but we agreed it is necessary. Our professional community and the world lost a great man on Monday 12/9/13. Many of you probably didn’t know John O Whitney and certainly didn’t know him as well I did over the last several years. John was my friend but [...]
Congratulations to the Harley-Davidson York plant for being named a finalist on the IndustryWeek Best Plants competition. The site has come a long way over the years, as these pictures of the new and old demonstrate.
You might be in an organization that is all about the tactical. It's the "what's next?", action-oriented, go-go-go culture. There are certainly benefits to this environment. It avoids inaction and it gets things done; a good idea unimplemented isn't much value. It is generally pretty focused. It is generally performance-oriented. However, that comes at a price. [...]
A common lament that I hear from most companies, incluing my old company, is the difficulty they have getting employees to frequently contribute quality ideas (suggestions) to improve the performance of the organization, and even their own work. The good old “suggestion box” has been around for decades with varying degrees of success but mostly ineffective. [...]