I’ll start the week with another post about my tour of the TMMTX (Toyota Motor Manufacturing Texas) plant in San Antonio. Today, I’ll write about the visitor center – other than having Toyota vehicles on display, what does the company…
TL;DR: The New York Times showed that Lean healthcare isn’t about “factory medicine,” but about removing waste so clinicians can focus on patients. When grounded in respect for people and strong leadership, Lean improves quality, access, and cost–while misapplied versions…
Working at the Lean Enterprise Institute gave me an unexpected daily benefit: I finally got to use a simple office kanban system instead of just helping others design one. In past roles, I’d set up kanban in factories and hospitals…
Language that undermines Lean, respect for people, and real improvement TL;DR: The words Lean leaders use matter–some common phrases quietly reinforce command-and-control thinking, fear, and misunderstanding rather than learning and improvement. If Lean is truly about respect for people and…
Running a hospital: MICUs go Lean: Result = Happiness In lieu of a blog post today, I’m leaving you with a recent post on Paul Levy’s “Running a Hospital” blog about Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital. You can see pictures and…
Hospital CEOs manage staff time, inventory to cut costs – USATODAY.com It’s nice to see a major publication covering Lean and, especially, Lean in healthcare. This time, it was USA Today who, again, did a better job than the WSJ…
Toyota Is Tightening Its Belt – NYTimes.com The words don’t appear directly in the article, but the RSS blurb for this article (repeated in many “Tweets” and RSS feed news sources) reads: “Toyota Tightens Its Belt – In a soft…
If Lean can work in healthcare, why not software? Today’s guest post is by Eric Landes, who currently works with Lean/Agile techniques in project portfolio management and development environments in an enterprise IT setting. He constantly works to add business…
Local doctors cut stress Below is a video from an Albuquerque TV news station, visiting a doctor’s office that was implementing Lean. I wish I could take credit… it was work done by someone I know, actually. The video shows…
Children’s Hospital is going lean – The Business Journal of Milwaukee: Wisconsin is a state that seems to have a disproportionate amount of Lean activity (as does Iowa). There are many good Lean manufacturers and ThedaCare is often held up…
One thing I observed at the Stars/Red Wings playoff game last Wednesday is that the arena crew could pretty much swap out one of the pieces of plexiglass behind the net faster than the concession crew could pour a glass…
In the course of my consulting work, I’m sometimes asked something like, “OK, so do you use this stuff at home? Do you 5S your kitchen and your garage?” Well sure, I’ve “5S-ed” my kitchen, in the sense that I…
