Part of a six-part series on Toyota’s 1992 booklet, The Toyota Production System. See all six posts in order: What Toyota Didn’t Write Down. 102 seconds versus 300 seconds. That’s the comparison the 1992 booklet uses to make the case…
TL;DR: “Lean is for speed, Six Sigma is for quality” is a false trade-off. Lean improves flow by removing obstacles like waiting and rework–and when work flows better, quality improves too. High-performing teams don’t choose between speed and execution; they…
When I placed a mobile order at Starbucks recently, I was told up front that it would take 17 to 20 minutes to receive my drinks. That’s a long time to wait–for coffee (or two espresso-based drinks, I should say).…
This edition of Ryan McCormack’s Operational Excellence Mixtape explores strategy, flow, and culture in environments where improvement is harder than it looks. From how organizations can “play to win” without direct competition, to learning through cardboard simulations in healthcare design,…
The Chick-fil-A drive-thru process offers a useful example of studying work before choosing a fix. A March 2025 Wall Street Journal article described teams reviewing “game film” to find delays and uneven workloads. The problems included a veteran employee carrying…
When it comes to delivering life-saving care, optimizing the entire system–not just individual components–can make all the difference. This principle is exemplified by the work done at New London Medical Center, a ThedaCare-affiliated critical access hospital, in improving care for…
Scroll down for how to subscribe, transcript, and more My guest for Episode #520 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast is Bill Remy, CEO of TBM Consulting. Bill is both an accomplished business executive and leader who is frequently called…
Scroll down for how to subscribe, transcript, and more My guests for Episode #512 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast are Steve Pereira and Andrew Davis, authors of the new book Flow Engineering: From Value Stream Mapping to Effective Action.…
At the recent Healthcare Systems Process Improvement conference, David B. Reid, P.E. from Chick-fil-A Restaurants brought up a very interesting point about the batch size for their pressure cookers. They don’t cook one piece of chicken at a time that…
Thanks as always to Ryan McCormack for this… there’s always so much good reading, listening, and viewing shared here by him! Subscribe to get these directly from Ryan via email. Insights about improvement, innovation, and leadership… Operational Excellence, Improvement, and…
This is the starting point for a blog post that I should expand on… after posting these initial thought fragments on LinkedIn. JIT might have been given the wrong name… please hear me out. There has been so much confusion…
Any process should make defects visible when it can’t prevent them outright. A Krispy Kreme donut line shows the principle better than most factory floors. Here’s a photo I took a few years ago. What jumps out at you? For…
