Let's start the week on a positive note…. to borrow a phrase from the Yahoo Group “Healthcare Management Engineers, let's “dare to share.”
What's something positive that happened in your lean efforts last week? What's something positive that you expect to happen this week?
Last week was a very positive week for me and my current client, a hospital lab. We finally put our new cellular layout in place, with new standard work that the team developed to improve flow. The highlight was when someone commented, “This must be a slow day, that's why things are so smooth.” The great thing is that is was NOT a slow day…. it just appeared to be because the improved flow took away some of the peaks and valleys in the workload. The perception was that things were easier with better flow. Great success to build upon.
What can you share with your fellow blog readers? If this works well, we should make this a regular feature of the blog, maybe.
What do you think? Please scroll down (or click) to post a comment. Or please share the post with your thoughts on LinkedIn.
Don't want to miss a post or podcast? Subscribe to get notified about posts via email daily or weekly.
Mark's new book is The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation.
He is also the author of Measures of Success: React Less, Lead Better, Improve More, the Shingo Award-winning books Lean Hospitals and Healthcare Kaizen, and the anthology Practicing Lean.
Mark is also a Senior Advisor to the technology company KaiNexus.
…today, we implemented a parts washer into one of our workcells and eliminated one day from our cycle time by not having these parts wait at our “monumental” wash system. The material handler now brings these parts directly to assembly. The only stick in the wheel is our costing system. It now shows the parts more expensive as an operation was added to the routing….but we went ahead with it anyway…..
http://www.swlia.nhs.uk/View.aspx?page=/case_studies/default.html