Our guest for Episode #96 is Pascal Dennis of Lean Pathways, Inc. Pascal is a faculty member with the Lean Enterprise Institute and he’s the author of the books: Lean Production Simplified, Andy & Me: Crisis And Transformation On The…
Due out in June is a book that I think will be an important one for the Lean Healthcare movement. That book is about the Lean journey of the Wisconsin health system ThedaCare. It’s called On the Mend: Transforming Healthcare…
This sign and picture might be a bit rude, so I saved this for a Saturday. To me, a very powerful and often unknown principle of the Toyota Production System and Lean is the idea that managers must “explain why”…
Firms Race To Regain Control Over Inventories – WSJ.com With the dramatically slowing global economy, it’s no surprise that companies and supply chains are getting socked with excess inventories right now. The WSJ discussion very quickly turned to software: The…
I’ve written before about the “Ask Me” campaign that runs in many hospitals, usually in context of “ask me if I’ve washed my hands.” One hospital runs a slight variation of the buttons and a sign campaign that encourages patients,…
Listen: LeanBlog Podcast #31 is a discussion with David Meier, most recently the co-author of the book Toyota Talent, written with Dr. Jeffrey Liker. In this podcast, we discuss the topics from Toyota Talent, including standardized work and how to…
CIO Magazine Article Hat tip to Curious Cat for finding this and blogging about it first. I couldn’t resist chiming in. The author brings up the old Deming philosophy approach that you can’t really motivate people, you can only demotivate…
Toyota: A Carmaker Wired to Win: Dan Markovitz beat me to the punch, but I also wanted to comment on some things in the article: The article says: “Visit any Toyota plant in Japan, and it’s easy to grin at…
A few weeks back, the British media was having a field day with reports of and complaints about what sounds like a horribly misguided “office lean” effort at a British government office. Read more about it. The picture below is…
I saw this at a hospital lab last year, a great example of true error proofing vs. just putting up warning signs. “Cautions” and “Warnings” are lazy engineering, in general, with product design. Signs are not good problem-solving in any…
As Auto Prosperity Shifts South, Two Towns Offer a Study in Contrasts – New York Times Here’s a free Detroit News version of the article. My hometown, Livonia, Michigan is hurting with the prolonged slump in the auto industry. I…
Lean was on my brain traveling home yesterday. Mostly bad examples, but one thing jumped out at me, somewhat positive. I love the TPS notion of “explaining why” (and blogged about it here after touring NUMMI). In the Lean and…
