“B” Entries From Our Lean Glossary, Part of The Continuous Improvement Companion
This may seem obvious, but a brand is the identifier that lets customers know the company producing the product or service they are buying. It distinguishes between the products of different businesses. In many cases, brands are trademarked. To prevent confusion with consumers, other companies are not allowed to use Read more…
“Bells and Whistles” are the extras on a product…or on a process. On a product, bells and whistles are the features that enhance the product, but don’t significantly change the function. Years ago, power windows were part of the bells and whistles packages that carmakers used to distinguish cars from Read more…
The term ‘best practice’ is commonly used to describe a standout process that is the best known way to do something. ‘Best practice’ is really a misnomer. There is no such thing as a ‘best’ practice—only a ‘best known practice’. The term itself goes contrary to the whole premise of Read more…
Employee backups are the people who fill in when the regular operator is absent. Having backups implies something. It means that the team has regularly assigned positions and does little or no job rotation. In great Lean companies, standard work is in full force and people rotate in and out Read more…
There are two ways to look at the term “bias”. The first is the technical, statistical meaning. It is the systematic error component, or the difference between what the observed value is and what the actual value is. You might have selection bias in which a non-representative sample is chosen. Read more…
Batch manufacturing is the traditional form of manufacturing where production is completed in lots of various size, and the lots are passed along en masse to the next step. Typically, layouts in batch manufacturing are done by function—a weld shop, a paint shop, a fabrication shop, etc. Another name for Read more…
Boredom, not surprisingly, is simply tedium or a lack of excitement in your job. Boredom (or lack thereof) plays a big role in job satisfaction. Nobody wants to go to work and face eight or ten dull, monotonous hours every day. What a lot of people fail to recognize is Read more…
Backsliding it the act of reverting to a pre-improvement process. If you were to plot improvement over time on a run chart, backsliding would give the curve a saw-tooth look to it. A gain followed by a drop, followed by a gain and another drop. Backsliding is reduced by standardization Read more…
Buffer time, in project management, is the extra time added into a time estimate to keep a project on track. The purpose of this leeway in planning is risk management. It allows project managers to be able to account for unforeseen situations without having to change the coordination of a Read more…
The term “bottleneck” (capacity constraint) comes from the area at the top of the bottle that limits the flow coming out. It doesn’t matter how big the rest of the bottle is—liquid will only flow out as fast as the size of the neck will allow. That is stating the Read more…
Batches are groups of products that go through a process together. Batches work against the Lean principle of flow, because the first parts that are produced have to wait until the rest of the parts are completed before they can all move to the downstream process. Batches tend to drive Read more…
Bar charts are generally used to differentiate between the values of a parameter for buckets of data. The length of the bar shows the relative value of that data point. That just means that the bars represent a group, such as types of fruit in these examples, and the longer Read more…