See Beyond the Horizon

              Lean Nation, As you navigate your quality and process improvement journey, you will inevitably need to engage suppliers and customers in your improvement work.   While you can create and deliver tremendous value within your four walls, truly excellent organizations reach into their entire value chain to take even more waste out of their enterprise. Many questions arise when facing this opportunity.   When is the right time to move outside your organization? How do you assess the opportunity? What are the logistics for this engagement?   Let me offer a few ideas on this specific topic.   This list is by no means inclusive of all the considerations, but can get you pointed in the right direction. 1) It is easier to engage outside the organization, when you have cleaned up your own sand box first.   Asking a different organization to change while you live in a sea of waste is risky.   Particularly of you a...

  Having been working as a lean consultant for a couple of decades, I continue to be amazed at the number of times I walk through the door of an organization undertaking some "lean" improvement who cannot give the definition of standard work, and have never seen a standard work combination sheet, or a standard work layout sheet. To refresh your memory, standard work is made up of three things; takt time, work sequence and standard work in process. Takt time is a theoretical calculation that shows the relationship between the time available to do the work and the volume of work to be done. You can see my earlier blog on takt time if you want more information on this topic.   Here's the link. Takt Time - Does this apply to my process? (breakthroughhorizonsltd.blogspot.com) Work sequence is pretty easy to understand. What is the easiest, safest, lowest cost, highest quality sequence of tasks necessary to complete the work in a standardized way. Think of this as a recipe....

Taking Improvement from the  Assembly Line to Healthcare The Application of Lean within the Healthcare Industry By     Ronald G. Bercaw          Copyright Year 2022   Paperback    $39.96     Hardback     $120.00     eBook     39.96  Available for pre-order. Item will ship after July 23, 2021 ISBN 9780367471545 July 23, 2021  Forthcoming  by Productivity Press 212 Pages 52 B/W Illustrations AWARDS Shingo - Award Winner Book Description Quality healthcare is a cornerstone of any healthy society. In the U.S., we have access to sophisticated medical technology, world renowned physicians, highly trained nurses and hospital personnel, advanced pharmaceuticals, and innovations in diagnosis and treatment. But for all of our sophistication, serious problems afflict healthcare systems across the U...

                                                 You've all read the articles on how execution eats strategy for lunch. But why is that so?   What's difficult about delivering on a sound strategy? Climbing the right wall is just critically important to your business.  But it also is important to climb the wall with tremendous, quality, lead-time and cost efficiency.  The basic premise here is that having a great strategy is useless if you have nor process to implement, monitor, and sustain your strategy work.   I find in the majority of organizations I work with often execute poorly for two common reasons. First, most organizations take on way too much. I was recently in an organization that had 196 strategic improvement projects underway. By the time those improvements get to the front line, there will be over 400 discrete changes ...

  Have you ever wondered how much productive time is lost in walking from point A to point B? I reviewed a year's worth of data on industries like healthcare and distribution and found that nearly 50% of the total time in the work day was spent in motion.  Recall that there are 7 common wastes we see when work is performed.  These wastes are: 1) Over Production 2) Over Processing 3) Defects 4) Waiting 5) Inventory 6) Transportation 7) Motion The movement of people that is not necessary to create value is the waste of motion.   What does this actually cost us? Let's assume we have 600 nurses in our organization, or 600 pickers in a distribution center. If 50 % of the time is spent in motion, then we have lost the ability of over 300 people to create value. If you put $ to this question, we are speaking in the millions annually. How much does it cost to eliminate the waste of motion? Usually by a simple redesign (like relocating equipment, supplies, materials, and...