Time management is the act of consciously planning out how one spends the hours and minutes of a day. For structured, repetitive production work, most people tend to be fairly good at managing their time. When the demand is not so consistent, though, people tend to squander a lot more Read more…
Where should we start our Lean effort? There are two basic ways to approach this question. The first is functional, as in which department is the best location to start with. The other is hierarchical, meaning the level within the organization. The short answer is that the best approach I Read more…
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…
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…
How do I “sell” Lean to my team? Like it or not, the early stage of any Lean transformation contains a sales pitch to the team. The members of the organization are being asked to take on something new. For them to fully commit, to fully buy in, they need to 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…
Frontline employees are the people who do the ongoing production work in an organization. While the range and skills of frontline employees vary widely, most of the entry-level jobs within the company fall into this category. That is not to say all frontline jobs are entry-level. There are many senior Read more…
The concept of perfection provides one of the great philosophical quandaries of Lean. Like most continuous improvement disciplines, Lean promotes the relentless pursuit of waste reduction. It also pushes the concept of zero defects. The problem though, is that perfection is unattainable. No matter how good an operation becomes there Read more…
While Lean and other continuous improvement efforts can make impressive changes in an organization, there are often some unintended side effects. The Lean side effects include: Possible accounting issues. The dramatic changes in inventory and the way costs are applied can be disruptive to financial documents. In some cases, it Read more…