Improvement
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Developing your AI Strategy
I realize that I am wading into controversial waters with this topic, but AI is truly the proverbial elephant in the room at this point in time. I am by no means a technophobe. Nor am I the type that cowers in the dark corner fearful that the human apocalypse is drawing near. I believe…
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Productivity isn’t just about labor anymore
Lean often has a bad reputation. I’ve heard countless times that Lean is an excuse for reducing headcount. Nothing could be further from the truth. Lean is a practical means to becoming more efficient, more disciplined, and less wasteful to set your team up for ongoing success. Ultimately, we want to work smarter, not harder…
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Operation: Delayed Permanence
There are several key concepts in the Lean toolbox that are intended to simultaneously constrain materials without sacrificing manufacturing flexibility, such as SMED, Kanban, and Just-in-Time inventory. There are also other powerful Lean strategies that, while lesser known, offer additional advantage in stewarding bloated production costs regarding inventory. No toolkit would truly be complete without…
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Is Having All Green Really a Good Sign?
Green means good and red means problems, right? Therefore, people commonly interpret an array of green indicators to mean that “My ability is confirmed by the sea of green. I’ve succeeded in spinning all the plates.” This mentality, however, misses the whole point of continuous improvement. The indicators are there to measure the health of…
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The PDCA cycle may yet hold some surprises.
We’re all familiar with the Plan, Do, Check, Act cycle (PDCA). It’s the embodiment of the Scientific Method in a simple and memorable form. The PDCA cycle is a democratized process that anyone can use to analyze a problem and test possible solutions without extensive training or certifications. Let’s dive into the PDCA a little…
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Enhancing your Improvements through Teams
As the saying goes, “there is no I in team”. You will also find it true that improvement – sustainable, intense, and profitable improvement – isn’t well suited for just the individual either. Whether continuous improvement (kaizen) or radical step-change improvement (kaikaku), we often make the grand mistake of relying on the genius of one…
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Managing your Value Streams is a critical part of your Lean journey.
All too often organizations want to claim to be Lean without committing to the journey to become Lean. Lean isn’t for the faint of heart, you see. It’s fairly easy to adopt all sorts of Lean tools while neglecting the philosophy and the critical cultural shift that follows. Lean should be a transformation, rather than…
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Can an incremental improvement mindset transform your operational excellence journey?
Continuous Improvement (CI) commonly takes many forms in todays’ organizations. Some companies take a very surgical approach, applying CI selectively to the high-profile corporate “strategic imperatives”. Others may engage dedicated change agents with specially honed skills to resolve specific process or product gaps. Sometimes companies train the multitudes and encourage CI through suggestion systems and recognitions programs. Whatever…
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You can do better than just improvement.
Deploying Continuous Improvement is no picnic. It requires commitment, patience, hard work, and a critical shift in the organization’s culture before CI can be sustainable and effective over the long haul. A transition this massive can’t be well-established through a couple of seminars and an inspirational book or two. As I’ve spoken with Continuous Improvement gladiators over the…
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Don’t Settle for Surface Solutions. Dig Deeper…
Business moves quickly. The pressure to produce results is always high. We can all relate to the constant call for more output, more productivity, more improvement, and more results. It’s tempting in those moments to look for shortcuts, to make assumptions, or to make unjustified leaps. Unfortunately, succumbing to these temptations is a gamble that often doesn’t pay off…