Lean Thinking

Bizmanualz Solutions

Question of the month: How does fear impact continuous improvement?

The past four articles were associated with Lean Thinking. It is important to have a sound understanding your metrics, flows and constraints as well as the value-add and non-value add activities. We also discussed value stream mapping to support lean initiatives and selecting improvement opportunities.

Implementing Lean Thinking

Interest in Lean Thinking continues to grow. Many people have attended Lean training to learn the tools used to implement lean. But one question remains for many – how or where do you start to “lean out�? your organization?

Value Stream Mapping

One of the most critical steps in the value stream creation process is understanding your waste, which is also known as value-add and non-value add tasks. The definition of value-add we are using is based on whether or not the task transforms the product. Another way many look at it is whether the customer will pay for it or not, but this can be confusing.

Using Value Stream Maps
to Propose Solutions

Look for solutions that increase flexibility and create a more agile system. Focus the organizations metrics on process capability measures. And change the thinking. Your thinking governs your performance. So, if you fail to change the thinking, you have failed to truly implement lean.

Read the more about proposing solutions…

Selecting Improvement Opportunities

There are essentially three rules for selecting improvement opportunities. First, you look for opportunities that do not require a lot of time or money. Second, you pick internal over external opportunities and third, you start with easy opportunities with high impact.

Read more about selecting improvement opportunities…

Lean thinking is not a set of tools, a set of procedures to follow, or a series of logical steps. Rather, it is a thought process, a culture, or belief system. So the most important thing that you must work on is how to change the thinking in your organization so that lean happens.

On That Note

Answer to this month’s question:

Fear of failure kills improvement. However, it is only through failure that we can learn and improve. This implies risk taking. Without risks, we maintain what we have now—status quo. Since we don’t know what we don’t know we must take a chance and try something new to improve. We might be wrong…but it is only through being wrong that we change and learn something new. So, we must celebrate mistakes and learn to seek out failure to make improvement continuous.

The goal when implementing lean thinking is to drive out fear.

Please feel free to contact us with any questions or comments that you may have about our products, services or articles. Also, please let us know if you’d like any specific topic addressed in our future articles.

Regards,
Chris
Bizmanualz, Inc.

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