Lean. Toyota Production System
These are words and concepts that any business person should readily know and understand – even if you are not an operations consultant. Process improvement initiatives built on these concepts take out billions of dollars of waste every year – from every industry.
A typical LEAN consulting project will easily take out $1-5 million of waste – because honestly – waste is everywhere. The Economist estimated that 1/3 of the US healthcare systems was waste and fraud here.
Even in this blog, when I talk about TIMWOODS, Poke-Yoke, Kanban, Andon, Muda, Kaizen, those are all words and phrases that have roots in the TPS. Yes, I could recommend a few of the main books on LEAN, but I think it’s even easier to just watch a few videos. This does not make you a LEAN expert, but you will quickly get the point that it’s about 1) thinking through what the client values 2) getting rid of waste 3) pulling demand 4) reducing defects and 5) continuously improving.
Great 90 second video animating these concepts here. Clearly, I love cartoons clearly.
Another healthcare video showing how Toyota’s lean manufacturing experts reduced the backlog of patients waiting for eye surgery by using Lean Concepts of value stream mapping, 5S, Gemba, CTQ below.
No wonder LEAN were adopted by many professions. The concepts are simply and justifiable. but many consultants including me sometimes find hard not on implementing solution using lean tools, but on searching for and assessing opportunities.
Thanks for reading – Agreed – LEAN by its nature is simple and designed to be easy to use. For searching for opportunities, have you used gap analysis, maturity model, prioritization matrix, and other opportunity-searching methods with you clients?
True…gap analysis are very useful in searching for opportunities unless a future states are defined. Referencing an industry best practice as the “To be” process could be an option but very likely they are non-disclosed.
Conducting surveys to customer/ executives is possible but not cost-effective when i am running a small scale improvement project.
Perhaps CMMI could be one of the means to get it done. thanks
Surely. Thanks for reading.