My guest for Episode #274 of the podcast is Jay Arthur, author of Lean Six Sigma for Hospitals: Improving Patient Safety, Patient Flow and the Bottom Line, Second Edition. To me, "Lean Sigma" is often a controversial topic... not because anything is wrong with Six Sigma…
I saw this article a few days ago in one of the larger healthcare industry trade publications: How One Woman Saved IU Health $54 Million The headline is misleading, as addressed in the opening sentence / sub-headline of the story (via HealthLeaders): “With a little help from about 10,000 of her friends and colleagues, the head
I was fortunate to take a nearly two-week vacation recently, a trip that included a week in France. My wife and I had a chance to, I guess, do a number of “gemba visits” at some wineries in the Burgundy,…
My guest for Episode #264 is a friend from here in the Dallas / Fort Worth area, Tyrone Butler. He is LSS Managing Partner at his company, Butler Active Business Solutions LLC. He has a background in the Air Force, he pre-dated…
Continuing my series of blog posts about my July trip to China, today’s post is about the second city I visited: Shanghai. This post has some photos and descriptions of the high-speed train trip and other travel-related details. You can…
We'll probably also talk about this article that was published yesterday on QualityDigest.com: "Lean Is About Quality, Not Just Speed or Efficiency... in Factories or in Hospitals" It might ruffle some feathers, but oh well.
As is often the case, I have too many open browser tabs full of articles that I was going to potentially blog about. This slows down my Mac (thanks, Chrome!). So, it’s time for me to clear out my backlog and…
Our friends at Gemba Academy produce some really nice online Lean education materials. It’s a subscription service, but you can see some free videos on YouTube. As part of their “Gemba Live” series, host Ron Pereira visited Franciscan St. Francis Health…
Another question I get thrown at me very often is something along the lines of “How do we get more buy in for ______” with that space being filled with Lean, Kaizen, 5S, using the EMR system, improvement, or any number of terms. If you do a Google search for Lean “lack of buy in”...
Alternate title: “Lean is an Integrated System. Of Course Just Implementing Pieces Leads to Failure.” Throughout the 10 years that I’ve been involved with Lean healthcare efforts, I’ve heard multiple stories of organizations that ended their formal Lean initiatives. They do so, as I’ve been told, because they need to cut costs...
Today's post is an excerpt from the collaborative ebook project Practicing Lean. I wrote the first two chapters of the book and then asked others to contribute their early stories about mistakes and lessons learned.
In this 2015 conversation, John Dyer reflects on his career at General Electric — including attending Dr. W. Edwards Deming’s four-day seminar and a smaller follow-on course — and what happened when he took Deming’s 14 Points back to GE…
