All posts from Mark Graban’s LeanBlog.org, including podcasts, announcements, articles, and more.
I’m about conferenced out! First was the excellent SHS/ASQ conference on healthcare operations improvement (read my posts), then the HIMSS conference focused on heathcare information systems, now the LEI Lean Transformation Summit that starts today (follow our tweets). As a…
Last Friday at SHS/ASQ, I heard a talk by Michael Riordan, the CEO of the Greenville Hospital System in South Carolina. He is one of what must be a very small number of Industrial Engineers who made it to the…
On Friday, I co-presented at the Society for Health Systems / ASQ Healthcare Division conference in Atlanta. It was the first time this was done jointly and it seemed we had more physicians and other clinical people around, which is…
Earlier this morning, I attended a presentation at SHS/ASQ about Lean implementation in multiple emergency rooms in a large health system. There were a lot of positives and one red flag that I heard that might be worth discussion.
I’ve always enjoyed my discussions with Sami Bahri, D.D.S., the “World’s First Lean Dentist.” One concept he talks about, most recently in our video podcast, is the application of the Lean concept of “single-piece flow” to dentistry and his patients.…
Random thought related to those from the Big 3 Detroit 3 who are happy to see Toyota suffer, I think I’m coining a term (I can’t find it, or this spelling, via google anywhere): I think I’m coining a phrase:…
I only watched a few minutes of Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda’s live testimony (thanks to online cable news streaming), but the first things I heard prompted me to Tweet about it and I’m following up with a quick post. You…
Episode 84 is audio from Video Podcast #10 (available on YouTube). This is a conversation with Karl Wadensten, President of VIBCO, a manufacturer in Wyoming, R.I. and host of the now-retired radio program The Lean Nation. Karl shares the remarkable…
Episode #10 is a conversation with Karl Wadensten, President of VIBCO, a manufacturer in Wyoming, R.I. Here, we talk about his radio show, “The Lean Nation,” which (formerly aired) on AM 790 in Rhode Island. This is the same discussion as…
You heard enough from me yesterday… today I want to share some other voices with you and their thoughts on Lean. First, familiar voices (John Shook and Jeff Liker) and someone who might seem like a new voice in the…
TL;DR: Standardized work, influenced by Toyota and Dr. Atul Gawande, is crucial for improving safety, quality, and efficiency in healthcare. It should be created by those who do the work, be flexible, and serve as a basis for continuous improvement.…
TL;DR: An NPR story about workplace “efficiency” illustrates L.A.M.E.–Lean As Misguidedly Executed–where tools like 5S are applied without respect for people or employee engagement. True Lean builds capability with the people doing the work, not through top-down cost cutting. Oh…
