How a Lonely $25 Grease Gun Contributed to a $1Million Problem!
Many of us go to work each day, do our thing, and feel pretty good that we gave our organization a good days work. But how many of us go to work each day and really think about how we can cut cost and save our organization time and money. We’re all running around trying to get things done and never have time to think about how we can improve the process. The following is a true story...
Read MoreDon’t Let Excessive Motion Sabotage Your Operation
A simple, but effective tool to help you eliminate waste due to motion is the spaghetti diagram. You start by getting a layout of the area or by drawing a simple sketch. The idea is to observe an employee perform a task and document all the movement the employee makes in performing that task. Figure 1 is a spaghetti of a change over process on a machine. As you can see there is a lot of...
Read MoreUse a Gemba Walk to Help You Understand Your Process
A simple, but effective tool to help you better understand a process is a “gemba walk.” Gemba is a Japanese word for “where the work takes place,” and so a gemba walk is nothing more than taking a walk in the area where the actual work is occurring. Some of you may remember the term “management by walking around” that was popular many years ago. This is...
Read MoreA Successful CI Program Depends on Strong Project Management Fundamentals
I’ve seen it happen more than once where a company starts down the path of Lean, Six Sigma, or Problem Solving to only change course in mid-stream. It happens for many reasons – lack of resources, underestimating the time required to complete projects, allowing scope creep, project champions and sponsors that don’t ask the right questions, not putting the correct controls in...
Read MoreMapping Business Processes Isn’t That Difficult
Process mapping is a very useful tool that not only helps you document your current process but can also serve as a framework for making processes more consistent and efficient. Just last week, I had the opportunity to lead a group of 23 HR professionals and develop a process map for their on-boarding for new hires. All were from the same company, but represented about eight locations...
Read MoreHow Good Are You As An Organization? How Good Do You Want To Be?
Over the years, much has been written about the pros and cons of lean and Six Sigma. People often complain about the training costs, the infrastructure required, the teams of green and black belts, and so on, but in my 40+ years of experience nothing has proven to be more successful at getting things improved than a combination of lean and Six Sigma. I’m not talking about ten, twenty,...
Read More