Tag: Andon

The Academy Awards Add an Inspector, Practice “Andon Cord Pulls,” Avoid...

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Tomorrow, my post will be about headlines that scream about ratings for The Oscars being "down from last year" or "the lowest in X years." As I've blogged about before, I'm always skeptical of such simplistic comparisons that might mask the real underlying trend. But first, could the Academy avoid last year's embarrassing mixup?

What We’re Looking Forward to Learning at the Toyota Plant Tour

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Tomorrow, with the entire KaiNexus team, I'm going to visit the Toyota truck plant in San Antonio, the plant referred TMMTX. The 15 of us will be there in closed toed shoes and all other required clothing to learn about the Toyota Production System, Kaizen (continuous improvement), and Lean. I've blogged about it on the KaiNexus blog. I asked the KaiNexus team to say a little bit about what they hope to learn in the visit and you can read their comments it here. In this post, I share a 24-minute tour preview webinar that I put together, links to past tour blog posts, and more.

Live Blogging Day 1 of #HCSummit17 – #Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit

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I'm at the 8th annual Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit in Palm Springs, California. Follow on Twitter using the hashtag #HCSummit2017. If you're here at the event,...

A Lesson From Toyota: Thanking Employees for Pointing Out Problems

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Thanks to Lean Frontiers for sharing a story from Mike Hoseus on LinkedIn. Mike is, of course, co-author of the excellent book Toyota Culture: The Heart and Soul of the Toyota Way (written with Jeff Liker, who I just learned is retiring from the University of Michigan... more on that soon).

The Oscars, An Embarrassing Preventable Error, #Lean, and Process Improvement

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Alternative headline: “Poorly Designed Card Trips Up Beatty and Dunaway at The Oscars.” Or “A Bad Process Beats Warren Beatty Every Time.” What are the Lean lessons from this mistake?

Lean is Not Just Process Improvement; It’s Much More Than That

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In my travels, I often meet people or visit organizations that say something like: "We're doing Lean... we just call it Process Improvement." They have a "Process Improvement" (PI) department...

Lean at UCLA Harbor Medical Center Featured by the BBC

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The BBC radio program "The Science Hour" recently aired a program with a segment where an unexpected person (Dr. Kevin Fong) to an unexpected...

This Doctor is Upset About Something, But It Doesn’t Really Sound...

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Now, there’s a story written by an emergency medicine physician, Dr. Brad Cotton, that appears in a publication called “Emergency Medicine News” — FIRST PERSON: ‘We Fired Our Hospital’...

Moving from “Visuals” to “Visual Management” and to Broader Lean Thinking

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I've been studying and working with Lean for 20 years now and I love Lean because I'm still learning and getting better at this...

Is Your Lean Journey Being Embraced With “Open Arms?” Are you...

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The phrase "Lean journey" is used widely to describe an organization's transformation over time. It's either a phrase that invokes helpful imagery or it's...

Lean Factories and Lean Hospitals Are Safer and They’re Better Listeners

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When we introduce the idea of Lean to healthcare organizations, it's very common for somebody (often a senior physician) to say something like, "But we...

10 Ways That Lean Concepts Respect & Support Healthcare Staff

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Lean provides a philosophy and a management model that should be nothing but good for staff and patients. The idea of “respect for people” might sound nice in principle, but what does it mean in a practical sense...