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The Rudolph Factor and the Eighth Waste 0
- Lean Basics, Lean Management
- July 23, 2009
In the Lean community the eighth and often hidden waste is unutilized talent or resources. I especially like to highlight this since human capital is the vital engine needed to support a business. It is this talent where innovation and continuous improvement comes from. The challenge for all business management is learning how to tap
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Doofus and Leanie – A Lean Style Cartoon 0
- Lean Basics, Lean Resources
- July 21, 2009
Mark Graban introduced a new “Lean Style” cartoon series called “Doofus and Leanie“. Many in the lean community know Mark as the founder of http://www.leanblog.org/ and a shingo prize winning author for Lean Hospitals: Improving Quality, Patient Safety, and Employee Satisfaction published in 2008. Now he is adding to his collection of literary works a
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In Search of Lost Time 0
- Lean Basics, Lean Management
- July 18, 2009
In all organizations meetings are necessary and natural to conduct business. As in all processes there are value added and non value added actions. These non value added actions can be very costly to companies and they don’t even “see” it. We have all been to meetings that don’t start on-time because people are late
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How to Save Time with Email 0
- Lean Office, Sharing Best Practices
- July 17, 2009
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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Stop Fighting Fires 0
- Lean Management
- July 13, 2009
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
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Lean, Visualization, and Current Events 0
- In the News, Lean in Practice, Visual Factory
- July 10, 2009
I 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
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