The Power of Discovery: Lessons from Columbus Day

On the second Monday of every October, the United States observes Columbus Day — a holiday rooted in the voyages of Christopher Columbus, who in 1492 set out across an uncharted ocean and sighted land after two grueling months at sea. While his journey is remembered in classrooms as the one that “sailed the ocean blue” aboard the Niña, Pinta, and Santa María, the real legacy worth honoring lies in the spirit of discovery his voyage represents.

From its earliest observances, Columbus Day was about more than the man himself. In October 1892, President Benjamin Harrison proclaimed the first “Discovery Day,” asking Americans to “cease from toil” and honor both the achievements of exploration and the opportunities it had unlocked. The celebrations of that era recognized a uniquely American spirit — one of risk-taking, pioneerism, and relentless improvement. It was the same mindset that transformed a sparsely populated wilderness into a thriving, ever-evolving nation.

That spirit is just as relevant today in our workplaces as it was on the high seas in 1492. In Lean manufacturing, discovery is the act of finding something new — or uncovering something long present but previously unseen. It is about asking questions that challenge the status quo, provoke thought, and push us deeper into the “why” behind our processes.

Thinking is not driven by answers but by questions. Answers often bring thought to a halt; only when an answer sparks another question does true thinking — and improvement — continue. Deep, purposeful questions help us navigate complexity, clarify our objectives, and evaluate the quality of the information we rely on.

In this way, Lean improvement mirrors exploration:

• Questioning is our compass. Asking “Why?” multiple times digs to the root causes of problems.
• Risk-taking fuels progress. Just as Columbus ventured into the unknown, organizations must step beyond familiar routines to uncover better ways of working.
• Learning drives advancement. Every discovery should lead to shared knowledge, so improvements ripple across the organization.

Without questioning, there is no discovery. Without discovery, there is no improvement.

So, this Columbus Day, consider honoring that legacy not just with a history lesson, but by reigniting the spirit of exploration in your own sphere. Take the time to discover — your company, your employees, your processes, your problems, and your customers. Embrace curiosity. Encourage bold questions. Chart the course for improvements that will move you, your team, and your organization forward.

After all, Lean success, like great voyages, begins with the courage to set sail toward the unknown.

Celebrating National Manufacturing Week: Advancing Lean and Inspiring Future Makers

Each year, National Manufacturing Week provides an important opportunity to celebrate the contributions of manufacturers, highlight the value of modern manufacturing careers, and inspire the next generation of makers. As we recognize the essential role manufacturing plays in our economy and communities, it’s also a time to reflect on how lean principles help drive continuous improvement, innovation, and sustainability across the industry.

Why Lean Belongs at the Heart of National Manufacturing Week

Lean manufacturing is about more than eliminating waste—it’s about creating value, engaging people, and building a culture of problem-solving. During National Manufacturing Week, manufacturers can showcase how lean practices such as standard work, visual management, and respect for people make workplaces safer, more efficient, and more rewarding. These practices don’t just improve processes; they also empower employees and strengthen the long-term competitiveness of our organizations.

Key Activities to Celebrate and Promote Manufacturing Careers

National Manufacturing Week is not only a celebration but also a chance to inspire interest in manufacturing pathways. Here are some impactful activities for organizations and communities:

• Plant Tours & Open Houses – Invite students, educators, and community members to experience modern manufacturing firsthand. Highlight lean practices in action to show how teams solve problems and create value.
• Lean Demonstrations & Workshops – Offer hands-on simulations or kaizen events to teach participants about continuous improvement and the power of small changes.
• Career Panels & Mentorship – Connect current professionals with the next generation by sharing diverse career stories and growth opportunities in manufacturing.
• Showcasing Innovation – Use National Manufacturing Week to spotlight lean-driven innovations, sustainability initiatives, and digital transformation.
• Employee Recognition – Celebrate the people who make manufacturing possible. Recognize teams who embody lean values like respect, collaboration, and continuous learning.

Building the Future Together

National Manufacturing Week is a reminder that manufacturing is not just about making products—it’s about making progress. By integrating lean thinking into the celebration, we not only honor the industry’s past achievements but also inspire the next generation to build a future where manufacturing is smarter, more sustainable, and people-centered.

Call to Action: As you celebrate National Manufacturing Week, take the opportunity to share your lean journey with others—whether that’s through a plant tour, a workshop, or simply recognizing the people behind the process. By opening the doors of manufacturing and showcasing the power of lean, we can engage new talent, strengthen our communities, and secure the future of this vital industry.

5 Ways to Accelerate Your Lean Roadmap

Many organizations have begun the journey to make their businesses lean. Some have reported early successes while others have struggled or fallen into the rut entitled "flavor of the month." As is usually the case with this kind of organization change, implementation precedes understanding. What follows are missteps, rework, confusion, organizational angst, and the aforementioned "flavor of the month" criticism.

As you continue your Lean Journey here are 5 ways to accelerate your roadmap:

Start With Lean Training for Everyone

The key to implementing any new idea or concept is training. It must be top down training so that everyone is on the same page. The more understanding of what lean manufacturing is all about, why you are implementing it and the expected benefits from it, the more likely you are to get buy-in.

It is very important that everyone in the company become committed to lean culture. In order to make the culture successful, managers and employees need to be aware of waste within the company and be prepared to attack and eliminate it. Making sure that the employees are empowered to do this, not just pushing the job off on someone else, is imperative in the proper function of lean culture.

Ensuring everyone is on the same page will help to avoid conflict. At the same time, it is important to ensure people have the space in which to think about what improvements they think need making.

Use Daily Management to Engage Employee in the Gemba

Lean organizations make use of Daily Management systems, a structured process to focus employee’s actions to continuously improve their day-to-day work. Daily Management empowers employees to identify potential process concerns, recommend potential solutions, and learn by implementing process changes. Daily Management, if done right, can be a critical tool in any organization’s toolbox to engage frontline staff in problem-solving and to deliver customer value.

Lean Daily Management includes three components: (1) alignment of goals and effort; (2) visual data management, daily huddles, and problem-solving; and (3) leader standard work.

Focus on Problem Solving

One of the most common mistakes that companies make when embarking on a Lean transformation is trying to do too much at once. These “boil-the-ocean” initiatives are long, costly and often end up stalling under the weight of their own ambition.

The PDCA cycle (Plan-Do-Check-Act) is a simple and effective framework for lean problem-solving. It guides your employees through four steps: defining the problem and its scope, implementing a solution and testing its results, evaluating the outcome and identifying any gaps, and standardizing the solution and making further adjustments.

Empower Improvement with Kaizen

Kaizen events are a powerful improvement tool because people are empowered to come up with new ideas to help the business. Employees are isolated from their day-to-day responsibilities and allowed to concentrate all their creativity and time on problem-solving and improvement.

The purpose of kaizen is to involve everyone, everywhere, every day in making simple improvements. These small improvements add up overtime and result in an extraordinary and never-ending transformation of processes. Companies which use Kaizens have found they generate energy among those who work in the area being improved, and produce immediate gains in productivity and quality.

Seek Expert Help from Lean Sensei

A Lean coach or sensei provides the necessary guidance, support, and expertise to help organizations navigate their journey successfully. They guide teams in adapting to new ways of working and help them overcome any challenges encountered in the process based on their extensive experience and knowledge of Lean. They help organizations identify inefficiencies in their processes and implement effective solutions.

The challenge with lean is that, despite its attraction to many executives who want to cut costs and increase productivity, a lean process doesn’t happen overnight. There are plenty of obstacles to overcome.

2023 Northeast Lean Conference Re-cap

Last week I attended the Northeast Lean Conference in Worcester, MA. The Northeast Lean Conference was created by GBMP to provide information and inspiration to Lean practitioners - from those just starting out to seasoned Lean leaders from the manufacturing, healthcare, service and other vital industry sectors.

The theme, It’s About Time, has a double meaning:

• First, the correct use of Lean methods – from 5S to SMED to Standardized Work – absolutely reclaims and repurposes wasted time for the betterment of customers, employees, and the company.  Provide employees with these methods and watch the creativity surge.
• Second, there has never been a better time than today when so many organizations regardless of industry share a common motivation:  How to satisfy increased customer demand in the face of scarce resources?  Doesn’t that sound like Lean?  It’s about time for management to make a visible commitment to continuous improvement.

Andrew Koenig, CEO of City Furniture, kicked off the conference with message about Lean implementation with heart. Andrew’s lean journey started in college with a trip to Toyota in Japan. He implemented Lean throughout all departments in a retail company by creating a culture of mutual trust and respect, teamwork, and a deep sense of urgency to continuously improve. As a result, they have seen many major breakthroughs in turnover reduction, operational process improvement, customer experience, safety, associate satisfaction, strategic planning, and finance. We need to focus on people and teamwork – not just problem solving. “You need to have strong mutual respect among all the associates, so they feel no fear in offering ideas and highlighting problems,” Andrew explained. “Every day, we are pulling problems out of our associates, and leaders, working together to solve them.” For strategic planning purposes, Andrew has a catchphrase: Bottom Up, Top Down, Closed Loop. “We are trying to get everyone in the entire company to participate in our strategic planning processes, give us their ideas, and share that with the senior team, who then share that with me. What I learned from Toyota is that you need to get everyone engaged in improving the business."

Melinda Mante, GBMP Lean Consultant, showcased a set of practical habits you can immediately implement to inspire action from her experience at Intel. There are 3 leadership actions:

• Set direction – challenge the status quo
• Show the way – go first, learn, and demonstrate
• Support – enable, encourage, and care

There is approximately 4000 weeks to live on average. Every day matters. At work its’ much less. Set aside time on calendar for these leadership elements.

Tom Sullivan, Senior Vice President of Operations at Ruger, ended the first day share their journey to develop a Lean New Product Development process.

Highlights included:

• Dedicated formal project management is very important – Obeya Room co-located teams
• Simultaneous product & process development (Single Thought Flow) “Tatakidai” = chopping block, rapid prototyping
• Virtual Obeya Room – COVID pushed this idea but still very effective for dispersed teams
• Leaders Genba with Lean NPD Team – Servant Leadership
• Focus on Lean Thinking – PDCA, 8 wastes for NPD, Mura, Muri
• Standard Work – the one best way to do something

Billy Taylor, Founder and CEO of LinkedXL, got day 2 going by sharing three key principles: Deliberate Clarity, Deliberate Ownership, and Deliberate Practice to achieve success in any organization. Billy says “Winning is not everything, how you win is everything.” Most people don’t know if they are winning and many leaders only know at end of month. If you make people visible, hhey will make you valuable.

From his book “The Winning Link” Billy outlines how we win:

• Deliberate Clarity - You can not manage a secret, Define Winning
• 10ft and 10sec rule – ask people close to board what the board means to them
• What is your leadership standard – What you tolerate, you cannot change
• Walk by and not say anything and then that is new standard
• Deliberate Ownership
• Strategy + Execution = Results
• In the absence of ownership comes blame
• Celebrate the red so you can harvest the green
• Deliberate Practice – Daily Management Process, Let’s people know if we are winning or losing.
• Enables problem solving, drives ownership
• Physical Safety is needed
• Take action
• Be hard on the process so you can lead easy on the people
• Trust
• Earning the Right to Change
• Create a safe environment for change
• Behaviors are visible, Mindsets are hidden
• Critical to measure what matters…Everything that matters cannot be measured?

Allan Robinson, Professor at UMass Isenberg School of Management, discussed strategies for managing change. It is said that 70-80% of change initiatives fail because:

• Poor execution of the chosen change methodology
• Current methods require time, effort, and patience
• They require extremely strong leadership

Most methods (from the 1940s) don’t incorporate modern understanding in continuous improvement, innovation, and lean. The limitations of traditional approaches to management of change:

Perhaps our management approach makes a difference: How can we make our organizations more adaptable to change. A big part of the answer emerges from feedback loops and dependencies discovered more recently by the lean, continuous improvement, and innovation communities. Front-line driven important is a powerful way to make your organization is more adaptable.

80% of organization’s improvement potential is from front-line ideas

Frontline driven improvement is very sensitive to poor leadership and misalignment, so it forces managers and leaders to significantly change their behavior, and address misalignments that are normally ignored. It cannot happen without also getting high levels of trust and respect between management and the front lines. It cultivates a culture of constant improvement and problem-solving.

Helen Zak, Director of Research at The Shingo Institute, closed out the conference with tips, words of wisdom, and learning from 38 years as a change agent. Helen’s Top 5:

• It’s All About Time – the most valuable resource on the planet
• Psychological Safety – free from fear of acknowledging problems and comfortable tackling problems
• Team Sport – transformation requires alignment and teamwork
• Dissatisfaction with status quo – good enough is not enough
• People Development – lean leader’s job is to develop people

There were many other great presentations, but this is a brief highlight. Mark your calendars for next year’s conference Leveraging Lean to Thrive in Uncertain Times in Providence, RI November 7-8, 2024.

6 Strategies to Reduce Production Costs

For any business, waste strains profitability. Waste can come in the form of time, resources and labor; it shows up through poor process planning, inventory imbalance, or poor warehouse layout. Essentially, waste is any expense or effort that does not transform raw material into a finished product. By optimizing processes and eliminating waste, businesses can add value to each phase of production.

One way to improve profitability is to reduce production costs. Production costs are the costs incurred in manufacturing a product or providing a service. These can include expenses such as raw materials, labor, suppliers and general overhead.

Consider these six ways to reduce production costs:

1. Track your costs

To begin with you need to ensure you’re tracking your costs — you can’t change what you don’t measure. The first step is to identify all operating costs and understand which costs have increased. Decide the intervals for tracking key information to help you make informed decisions about manufacturing cost reduction.

2. Eliminate bottlenecks and redundancies

Analyze each stage of your production process: is each activity required? Does it add value? You should also consult the relevant employees to find out what steps in the process are not adding value, redundant, or interrupt their workflow. Drop non-value-adding activities to cut out unnecessary costs.

3. Tighten your inventory control

Optimal inventory control means you hold the right quantity of stock so you’re not stuck with excess inventory that costs money to store, insure and can go to waste; but neither are you caught short by stock-outs.

4. Improve employee engagement

Engaged employees means lower staff turnover, which in turn leads to reduced labor costs. Engaged staff are also more effective and productive. This means you should:

·        Hire the right people

·        Provide training

·        Offer appropriate incentives

·        Share clear production goals

5. Embrace automation

Review your process to see where you can use automation to boost efficiency. Simplify the manufacturing process with automation so you can save time, make the best use of resources, ensure consistent product quality and more. Before investing in an automated system, make sure that it will meet your business needs and has flexible integration capabilities.

6. Negotiate with suppliers

Another way you can save your manufacturing costs is to ask your suppliers to reduce their prices. The first step in this process is to build genuine relationships with your suppliers. Once you’ve built a rapport, negotiating money is less uncomfortable.

Already have a good relationship with your supplier? You’ll be better placed to negotiate for discounted prices. Consider:

·        Signing a long-term contract with your top suppliers

·        Offering cash payment in return for discounts

·        Asking for a turnover discount at the end of a financial year if you’ve contributed significantly to their business

Saving on operational costs is one of the biggest goals for manufacturing companies. Most manufacturers look to streamline systems, reduce production costs, and increase profitability without sacrificing product quality. Often, the quickest and easiest way to cut costs is by accepting minimum quality levels or reducing employees. This can lead to increased product returns, warranty claims, and loss of a loyal client base that will probably increase costs in the future.

Reducing manufacturing costs is important regardless of the company size or the type of products manufactured. Estimating the cost of production is essential to manage cash flow and eliminate unnecessary spending. Reducing production costs results in more available money to innovate, grow, or save for contingencies.

Businesses have the option to lower prices and pass on their production cost savings to customers. Lower prices can increase the demand for products, resulting in more sales. The company can also offer staff bonuses or an increase in pay to improve employee satisfaction levels.

Simple Engineering Solutions with Karakuri Kaizen

Manufacturers across the nation are looking for faster, more efficient ways to streamline processes and production. While automation seems to be top of mind for most, it’s also an expensive investment that some may not be ready to take on. Luckily, there are other solutions you can implement to improve your manufacturing facility’s efficiency.

Karakuri kaizen, or karakuri, provides low-cost, simple, hands-free solutions to support manufacturers’ needs. Karakuri literally means a type of doll that moves with simple mechanics. In manufacturing, karakuri refers to simplified engineering for kaizen that improve your system. Karakuri is the use of mechanic gadgetry rather than electric, pneumatic, or hydraulic devices.

Core principles and benefits to implementing Karakuri include:

Easier maintenance. The maintenance of Karakuri is often much easier than other types of devices. When something goes wrong, workers have an easier time seeing what the problem is and typically can fix the issue themselves, rather than calling a mechanic, electrician, or other professional. Waiting for devices to be fixed can cause a delay in production; Karakuri helps reduce lost time.

Improved safety. Implementing Karakuri allows a process to improve without risking the safety of employees. Mechanical devices don’t pose as many hazards as electrical or hydraulic machines, resulting in less lost work days due to injuries. Karakuri can also help reduce human error within the production process.

Cost-effective materials. Mechanical systems typically are much cheaper than computerized systems. They also require less time to develop, don’t take as much energy to operate, and are built using less expensive materials.

Easy improvement for the long term. Because Karakuri is easier to maintain, workers are often able to take care of problems and improve the process themselves. This makes room for small changes that lead in the long term to continuous improvement.

Karakuri is all about supporting the operator through simplicity, so their job is easier and safer. So while you consider the benefits related to development, installation, maintenance, and versatility, understand that human efficiency, ergonomics, and safety are at the heart of karakuri.

A Karakuri system is a way of stimulating creativeness and craftsmanship, figuring out solutions together as a team. Karakuri Kaizen utilizes the knowledge present on-site. Employees are key in this, with their amazing sense of adaptability and ingenuity. Only humans know how to improve their work, how to invent different ways of working and figuring out answers to problems. The result is smart people building smart equipment, that are high in creativity and that later become a benchmark for the others.

Keep in mind that bright ideas emerge from smart people, and smart people emerge from kaizen. It is actually one of the major benefits, because they empower production workers. This is made possible by encouraging the use of individuals’ creativity to build their own improvement solutions with other team members from process departments. Karakuri Kaizen promote on-going “kaizen” improvements by workers who want to make their work go faster, smoother and smarter. This supports the idea that there is always a better way, a truly motivational team experience. When you think about it, it’s a virtuous cycle.