A Fresh Start: Lean Thinking for the New Year
- Goals
- January 1, 2026
In our high tech society people love to stay connected and it is so easy to do so with email, IM, wireless connectivity, and handheld devices. Email is part of all businesses and replaces many other methods of communication. Email has become a wasteful distraction costing company’s lost productivity with all the interruptions. In a
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Unfortunately, a far too common management style in many companies is the reactionary style commonly referred to as fire fighting. But fire fighting consumes an organization’s resources and damages productivity. Fire fighting derives from what seems like a reasonable set of rules–investigate all problems, for example, or assign the most difficult problems to your best
READ MOREI was watching Fox News the other day and they had a story called “Health Care Reform Visual”. They highlighted a video that Matthias Shapiro did using pennies to visual the financial numbers being talked about with Health Care Reform. Now you might say, what does this have to do with Lean? Well, the answer
READ MOREI believe those in the Lean community who are practitioners and educators are always learning from our own experiences and from others. There is great benefit in sharing what you have learned along the way with others. It is from this activity real learning, reflection, and improvement takes place. Ron Pereira from LSS Academy has
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Ron Pereira at the LSS Academy shared a great example of an inexpensive visual control using plastic cups. This has inspired me to share a kanban system employed in one of our factories that utilizes golf balls. As inventoried product is consumed by the customer a card signal is sent to a processing area to
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I was with a consultant the other day doing a training event and he said to a small group of us that he had a simple Lean definition. He drew a picture on a piece paper of a glass of water like this He asked “Is the glass half full or half empty?” The optimists
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