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Vacations and holidays are an important part of job satisfaction and employee retention. They provide employees an opportunity to recharge their batteries and to live their lives outside of work. Managing vacations can be difficult in any company, but the challenge can be amplified in a Lean organization where there Read more…
Staffing in a Lean organization is a bit different than it would be in most other companies. First of all, in general, a Lean organization will need fewer people to do the same amount of work that is done in a non-Lean company. But there is more to it than Read more…
“Workgroup” is a generic term used to describe an organization within a company that reports to a single individual. A workgroup may be a small team reporting to a lead, or a much larger group reporting to a department manager. In many traditional companies, workers are organized by function. In Read more…
Solutions in a Lean environment tend to be temporary. The rationale behind the statement lies within the term “continuous improvement”. Any new process you develop, by definition, will eventually change. “Solution” implies that a problem is solved once and for all. The two terms don’t play nice together. I don’t Read more…
There is a common misconception that Lean is free. The truth is that making improvements requires a variety of resources. That’s not to say you have to spend a lot of money to make changes, but every project does require an investment. In fact, that is one of the big Read more…
Responsibility is the state of being accountable for something. It may be a team, a process, or an entire company. In general, responsibility is the cost of leadership. Being in charge means that a person has to make sure that things go as planned. Responsibility means having to answer for Read more…
Walk time is an important factor in continuous improvement. Its main impact is on the seven wastes and on Standard Work. Obviously, the problem is that walking takes time that could be better spent working on a process. Walking distance adds up in a surprising hurry. For example, if a Read more…
A project is a set of interconnected tasks intended to achieve a specific goal. It is characterized by having a fixed end. Projects can be either individual or collaborative in nature. They are often limited by some constraint, usually cost. The practice of running a project is known as project Read more…
One of the key elements of any process is the workstation. Simply put, a workstation is the area that contains the work surfaces, fixtures, tools, and materials needed to perform a job. Classic thinking promotes the use of standard workstations. These off-the-shelf setups can be interchangeable, and often can be Read more…
The 8 wastes are a variation on the seven wastes that were first proposed by Taiichi Ohno, the father of modern Lean. The original seven wastes are: Transportation Inventory (Excessive) Motion Waiting Overprocessing Overproduction Defects (Note that the first letter of each of these wastes spells the acronym “TIMWOOD“.) The Read more…
Lean principles are the guiding concepts that drive the basic behaviors of an organization. While many Lean advocates create their own unique set of principles, the most famous were first presented by James Womack and Daniel Jones in their book Lean Thinking. The 5 Principles of Lean Specify value. This Read more…
Yokoten is a Japanese term that loosely translates into “horizontal deployment”. Essentially, it is the spreading of information across the organization. A key point to this is that it is not just the result that is shared, but also the process that led to the result. Most organizations have numerous Read more…