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One of the most frequent quotes I encounter when helping people improve their processes is “Our process is different.” People who have not been exposed to continuous improvement efforts frequently believe that their process is so unusual that Lean or Six Sigma or whatever methodology you are using does not Read more…
A manager is a person in a formal position of authority, generally responsible for guiding a team or process towards an established goal. In virtually all cases, a manager is in a formal position, as opposed to a leader who may be in either a designated or an informal role. Read more…
A pattern is essentially a recurring “thing”. It could be behaviors, defects, markings, traffic, or anything else that can be observed or monitored. The relevance to Lean is that the pattern is caused by something. Pure randomness is actually surprisingly uncommon in nature, and even less common in the workplace. Read more…
Marketing is the combination of art and science used to determine which products or services a customer will buy, and then crafting a message to make those offerings more appealing. There is a veritable library of information available on marketing, so this term focuses on the impact continuous improvement efforts Read more…
Problems are generally looked at as a situation in which the current condition does not match the “should be” state. Opportunities, on the other hand, occur when you are meeting current expectations, but there is a potential “should be” state, further out, that would provide you substantial reward if you Read more…
Dictionary.com defines an opinion as “a belief or judgment that rests on grounds insufficient to product complete certainty. “ In the world of continuous improvement, people seldom have the luxury of complete certainty. But, unfortunately, they often act with a clear deficit of facts and data to make an informed Read more…
Leaders are the people who can envision a destination and inspire a group of others to join them on the journey to that goal. Leadership can be both formal and informal. In formal leadership roles, the leader is designated by someone of higher authority to act in that capacity. The Read more…
There are many different styles of management. One that works well in a Lean leader’s bag of tricks is abnormality management. In a nutshell, processes and systems are refined to highlight abnormalities. When abnormal conditions are highlighted, leaders and their teams can take action to return the situation to the Read more…
The term “birdcage” has two basic meanings in continuous improvement. The most common usage applies to when a work area encloses a person, trapping them inside. It is usually commonly applied to manufacturing areas where material racks and workbenches isolate a person, but cubicles act in a very similar way. Read more…
The waste of motion is one of the seven wastes attributed to Taiichi Ohno, the father of modern Lean. Motion is, simply put, moving more than necessary when doing work. It can be large motions, such as walking between work areas, or small motions, such as flipping a screwdriver over Read more…
The “Voice of the Customer” (VOC) is the collective information that an organization obtains from or about its customers. This information comes in one of four basic ways, as shown on the image below: Organizations can either actively request information from a customer or can seek out information that is Read more…
A big part of getting changeover time reduced to the point where it is a single-minute exchange of die (SMED), is figuring out how to do it with less motion. One-touch exchange of dies is an offshoot of SMED but is far more aggressive in what it advocates. Where SMED Read more…