We have two free webinars coming up in the next week, hosted by KaiNexus. I hope you can join us.
Oh, as a reminder, I'm doing a Measures of Success webinar this Friday, the 22nd.
The webinars are:
The Lowdown on A3 Software [Demo]
How to Ease the Pain of Change
For a long time, I've wanted to attend a "Statistical Process Control" (SPC) class taught by Donald J. Wheeler, Ph.D.
I'm finally doing this in September and I'd like to invite you to join me.
Today, I'm giving a talk at the International Society for Blood Transfusion (ISBT) conference in Toronto. I was invited by the company Quotient to participate in a panel presentation and discussion with some laboratory professionals from the U.S. and the U.K.
The others are presenting examples of how they have improved flow, productivity, and quality in blood collection and hospital blood bank settings. Lean often gets portrayed as just being about efficiency or flow, when Toyota's definition of the Toyota Production System talks about how flow and quality go hand in hand.
I was specifically asked to give a short talk titled, "What Do Cars Have to Do With Healthcare? How to Adopt and Adapt Lessons From Manufacturing."
Back in 2014, I wrote an article for The Lean Post:
"Standardization is a Countermeasure, Never the Goal"
I'm a big fan of Taiichi Ohno's advice to "start from need." I cringe when I hear people say that we should standardize the way work is done "because Lean says so." There's no substitute for judgment in the grey areas related to standardized work.
What should we standardize? For what purpose? How standardized should the work be?
Baseball is struggling with questions like this... how standardized should the balls be... and for what purpose?
I'm still working on my book Measures of Success, as I've mentioned here a few times.
The partial "in-progress" book is available through LeanPub.com. Or, when it's done, it will also be available through the Amazon Kindle bookstore and I will probably also produce a paperback version.
My goal is to have the book done by the Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit in mid-June (hope to see you there at the Summit and/or my workshop on these topics).
Here is a recorded webinar that I did for my friend Mike Stoecklein and his organization, the Institute for Excellence (IEX).
I'll be teaching my "Better Metrics" workshop (aka "Measures of Success," ala my book) twice in June:
Cambridge Investments - Open for Public Registration (Fairfield, Iowa) -- June 5
Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit (Chicago) -- June 13
After facilitating the Red Bead Experiment in the workshop, one other way I've found to simulate variation is an online simulation that's available, of all places, on the BBC website:
"Can chance make you a killer?"
I'm overdue in writing more about my last trip to Japan a few months back.
Today, I'll like to share some highlights from one organization we visited, Seki Chuo Hospital, which is located outside of Nagoya. I have visited this hospital in 2012 and 2014 and it's interesting to see how their approach to Total Quality Management (TQM), Lean, and Kaizen has progressed and evolved. I mentioned them in a 2014 post about "quality circles."
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been quoted as saying he will "school Toyota on Lean manufacturing."
OK, let's take inspiration and lessons from the apparent Tesla Way management system. What would happen if hospitals and other organizations tried emulating Tesla instead of Toyota? What are the methods and mindsets? The behaviors and principles? What's the management approach and culture?
Joining me for Episode #307 of the podcast is my friend Andre DeMerchant, the President of DeMerchant Healthcare Solutions Inc., based in Kitchener, Ontario. We first crossed paths when we had the chance to work together with an American healthcare client via our then-affiliation with Pascal Dennis and Lean Pathways.
In today's episode, we talk about Andre's history working for Toyota in Canada and what he learned there -- and why it's important that he learned about "how flow works" at Toyota. We chat about the terms "Lean" and "The Toyota Production System" and what those words mean to him. How does TPS "transcend culture and language," as well as industries?
We then shift to talking about healthcare and some of the common challenges, including "financial hardships," that are faced in many countries. Why are hospitals "poorly prepared for change" in many cases? Another main theme is "cost cutting" and why you can't cut your way to success.
Tonight is the start of the NFL Draft, which almost gets as much coverage nowadays as a Presidential election.
Can you imagine if CNBC and other TV channels spent as much time focusing on which Lean Healthcare prospects would be "drafted" from our leading universities and medical schools?
Here is our exclusive and official Lean Blog mock draft, featuring picks from our Lean Healthcare draft expert, Mel Kaizen, Jr.
Again, Tesla and their CEO Elon Musk are generating a lot of news and, I think, many things to think about, even if the lessons learned are, perhaps, about things NOT to do in our organizations.
See previous posts about Tesla
As you might know, Tesla has been very much behind schedule with their Model 3 production ramp up. Last week, we saw news stories about a production shutdown that's intended to get things back on track:
"Tesla Is Temporarily Shutting Down Model 3 Production. Again."
Are short-term layoffs the best thing to do for the long term?
Back on the podcast for the fifth time is my friend David Meier, a Lean / TPS consultant who is a former Toyota leader at their plant in Georgetown, Kentucky. He's gotten into what's, perhaps, the most Kentucky of industries... distilling bourbon (and more).
I'll have two more podcast episodes where David and I talk about bourbon, whiskey, and continuous improvement for almost 90 minutes total there. Those episodes are coming soon.
Today is a shorter episode, where we catch up and hear more about what David has been doing since his last podcast appearance in 2010 when we talked about the challenges Toyota was facing then. In this episode, David drops a lot of knowledge and wisdom in a very short time -- thoughts on problem solving and how Lean thinking isn't easy for anybody, even if you're Japanese.
