The Ideal Lean Process All employees show up to work every day, are motivated, can work at any operation and are constantly looking for ways to improve processes Supplies can be ordered and delivered immediately, in whatever quantities are needed and are defect free Equipment never breaks Processes have no variation and produce defect free…

Product development can include hard-goods, software or new services, and few processes involve as many different departments within a company as product development.  As the development effort crosses between departments such as marketing, research, engineering, purchasing, operations and sales there are numerous opportunities for the effort to stall or even reverse direction.  This can be…

Do you ever feel like all you do at work is go from meeting to meeting? Is it a challenge to squeeze all of the meetings you are required to attend on your calendar? How many meetings should a healthy company have and when do we cross the line on healthy communications and too many…

Lean Six Sigma in Healthcare Problem HR received the brunt of great frustration at this Hospital. They were only able to fill critical Nurse and Medical Technician positions, within the 90 day goal, only 30% of the time. This hurt the Medical Center’s ability to serve their patients. Lean Six Sigma Tools Process Flow Mapping…

Lean Six Sigma in Hospitals – 5S Visual Management Details: 5S Implementation 1). This HR department hoarded paper. Like many people the HR Specialists felt the messier their desks the busier they must be. It was cultural! Everyone’s desk looked like these pictures. 2) Once we did the initial 5S blitz, we created a 5S…

Finding Cost Reductions in the Value Stream We used Value Stream Mapping to evaluate costs from “Field to Table”. All processing costs were analyzed. The scope was to attack overhead costs and processes that were increasing expenses or reducing sales. “Costs of goods sold” was excluded. Examples of processing costs were distribution direct labor, store…

Sales is like any process, it operates by design or default. Using Lean Tools we redesigned a very successful company’s sales process to improve Sales Rep Productivity, getting more Profit from every Rep. Problem This month’s case-study Client sells transportation equipment, services this equipment and sells replacement parts. The owner had executed a successful growth…