One of the barriers to both creating flow and providing value is that companies are not organized to do either effectively. They tend to have their management system set up in functional silos. To deliver something to the customer it must cross several managerial boundaries. Each manager has his or her own budget and agenda.
Instead, companies should…
p>Taiichi Ohno, the father of modern Lean is credited with saying something to the effect of “without standards there can be no improvement.” While the translation may not be exact, the gist of it is what is important.
The first problem is that…
Flow is a central concept in Lean operations. It is basically the premise that work should never sit. With this as a target, several things happen. The first is that lot sizes are reduced. Work doesn’t flow if it has to wait for a production run to be completed.
Flow also drives…
Most people base the way they think on fight or flight. In the early days of cavemen, people had only those two basic reactions to a problem. How they chose to respond to an event was based primarily on its similarity to something they had seen before. In their situation, it made sense to do this because many situations were a matter of life and death.
In the modern world, though…
p>Mark Twain famously said something to the effect of, “If I had more time I would’ve written a shorter story.” There’s a paradox that it can be harder to build a simple solution than a complicated one. That’s because we have been conditioned to…
An effective business management system built upon a continuous improvement culture demands a great deal of structure. While conventional wisdom says rigidity in processes stifles creativity, the truth is that when the structure is well designed…
One of the knocks against Lean and continuous improvement is that it treats people like robots. This is true only when it is poorly executed. Standard Work and other forms of standardization do require people to do work the same way every time.
The problem is that…
Most people take a passive approach to learning. They just absorb lessons rather than try to dive into problems and take wisdom away from failure. To be successful at building a continuous improvement culture, you have to take a different approach to learning.
An organization will not get better unless it…
p>Everything a company does can be boiled down to a process. Even highly flexible, creative jobs are processes.
When a process is followed the same way every time…
The work you do only matters if it is something that is valued by the customer. Granted, there are many non-value added tasks that support giving the customer what they want, but it is important to recognize that those activities are secondary to the things that customers are willing to pay for.
Some companies often get exceptionally good at…
Continuous improvement requires investment. Think of it like a rental property. There is an upfront cost to buying it and ongoing maintenance costs. But as the mortgage is paid off, more and more of the rental revenue becomes profit.
If you think of the development of this business management system as…
When a company doesn’t operate under a strong set of principles or with clear leadership, it needs rules and policies to guide behaviors. In most cases, this is not the most effective way to get things done.
In fact, it often creates …