I was in a conversation today and we ended up boiling 5S down to three key points: You have everything you need. You need everything you have. You can see everything clearly belongs where it is. Of course at the next level, these statements are the standards you are continuously checking against. Presumably we have [...]
Mike Rother has made some significant revisions to his Improvement Kata Handbook. The role of “True North” is much better defined as the context of improvement. He has filled in a lot of valuable detail for “Grasping the Current Condition” and setting Target Conditions. The structure for the PDCA cycle has been tightened up. [...]
Learn to be thorough before working on speed. The speed will come naturally with competence. Every coach in the world gives some form of this advice to her students. This is true for athletics, for music, for any skill we are trying to develop. Yet when planning kaizen events, we tend to forgo this advice, [...]
One of the most common (and frustrating) problems for the staff lean practitioner is being asked to “measure the savings” resulting from specific improvements. (This problem is related to, but different from, trying to measure “lean progress” or the status of implementation.) There are two issues in play here. First is the level of understanding [...]
The classic one-week kaizen event ends with a report-out by the team that outlines the improvements they have made, and the results they have achieved. Actual results, though, are notorious for falling short of what was reported. Action items are left over, and things frequently peter out unless there is a huge effort to force [...]
What is the role of your lean facilitator? This question comes up now and again, was recently posed on the LEI forums by someone looking for help with a job description. I extrapolated from his question that he was looking to the job description as a line of defense against dilution of the facilitator’s focus [...]
There are a lot of variations on a theme where someone asks an Internet forum how to quantify or justify the benefits of implementing a continuous improvement program. If you think about it, though, this is really interesting question. What are the benefits of NOT having continuous improvement? Why would managers deliberately decide not to [...]
One of the more effective facilitation tools I have come across is to have a team first construct an ideal flow, without the constraints of the space geometry, known flow-busters, or even too much concern about the takt time. Just make things flow as smoothly and efficiently as you can envision. Develop the flow as [...]
Sometimes we like to talk in abstracts. “Reduce batch sizes” or “reduce lead time.” But let’s be clear what we are striving for. With every improvement we make, we want to converge on the idea of: Batch size of one. Lead time of zero. Zero waste of resources. Lest anyone thinks that is impossible, consider [...]
I have probably written around this question in the past, but it comes up often enough that I wanted to address is specifically. One of the challenges facing the lean practitioner is the “What can you do for me?” boss (or client). This manager wants to know the expected ROI and outcome of your proposal [...]