Category: Lean

Organizations are often challenged with managing seemingly unmanageable work volumes with available staff. At times, staff may feel overwhelmed with high work volumes, or underutilized during periods of low work volumes. When a management team finds itself confronting these issues, team members may ask the following questions: How can staff respond to internal and external […]

Increasingly, organizations that use Six Sigma are making an effort to integrate Lean into their existing process-improvement framework. For many, combining Six Sigma’s focus on process quality and Lean’s emphasis on turn-around time results in more high-impact, quick-hit projects. To gain this advantage, however, organizations must face a difficult obstacle: integrating Lean without creating ripples […]

Extensive training and a thorough understanding of complex analytical tools are required to successfully perform traditional Six Sigma projects. Although this careful and methodical evaluation is an invaluable problem solving technique, traditional Six Sigma projects can be time consuming and must be carefully selected. Lean projects, on the other hand, are different. Lean is intuitive, […]

Value at the point of production does not necessarily translate into value at the point of consumption. Likewise, Lean Six Sigma initiatives focused on the factory floor do not ensure that the end user is receiving that value. As a product moves through the distribution system there are many factors that can diminish its value. […]

Until relatively recently, many quality professionals considered the term “Lean” to only be applicable to the manufacturing giants of industry. Lean, first created as a part of the Toyota Production System, is an operational approach and methodology embraced by world-class companies around the globe. With proven results, Lean has made its way into non-manufacturing industries, such as insurance, banking and even healthcare

The accounts payable process at the U.S. Coast Guard Finance Center was overstressed from increasing complexity and a patchwork of temporary IT fixes. A project team broke through the complexity and designed a Lean, effective and scalable process.

Will Lean practices take root within an organization and lead to transformational change? That depends on the organization’s culture and the role that leadership plays. Within a traditionally structured organization, ideas and direction flow primarily from top to bottom, or executive to worker level. This may be expedient in some ways, but it also can […]

Every Lean Six Sigma deployment leader must eventually confront the critical decision of how the various Belt roles should be allocated and deployed throughout the organization. Lean Six Sigma has existed for more than 10 years now in a variety of manufacturing, service and distribution environments, and through trial and error fairly standard niches have […]

Roy Madsen, Senior Advisor to the CFO and Lean Six Sigma Champion at the Office of Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), said his organization had long encountered a classic catch-22: “From 5 to 10 percent of our workforce each year are people hired into entry-level examiner positions, the majority who have to move to a […]

To survive in today’s competitive software-development market, organizations need to build their capabilities around delivering the best service within customer-stipulated time frames and costs. Increasing productivity – the rate of output per amount of input – is the factor most likely to give an organization an edge over others. Many software-development organizations have realized the […]

When initiating process improvement the question often arises which to pursue first – Lean, Agile, Six Sigma or a combination of these tools. There have been case studies surrounding the order of choice – or whether Lean and Six Sigma complement each other at all. Many Six Sigma experts have spent significant time living and […]

Despite a new lab, Ephrata Community Hospital faced the challenge of meeting the goal of a 60-minute turnaround time for all stat labs. Thus the lab management team chose to learn to use the Lean methodology to improve its lab processes.

Lean improvement of service processes is somewhat different from Lean improvement of manufacturing processes. Efficiency is usually a measure of speed and cost and Lean improvement in efficiency is achieved by eliminating waste in time or resources. Effectiveness is usually a measure of quality and the overall objectives of the enterprise in that regard. If […]

Having found that lab results assist clinicians in more than 70 percent of their patient management decisions, Virtua Health recognized that improvements made to lab processes would have a ripple effect on patient wait times in critical departments. For instance, blood work determines many emergency department (ED) decisions, and lab test results influence patient discharge. […]

As is true throughout virtually all areas of business across diverse industry sectors, Lean Six Sigma principles and practices applied to research and development (R&D) and product development in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries have a dramatic effect on reducing cycle times and the cost of developing new technologies, products, and protocols for research and […]

Process improvement teams at Virtua Health system’s 95-bed Virtua West Jersey Hospital Berlin achieve notable results by using Lean to make visual and operational improvements in the emergency department, operating room and central sterile supply.

Because I live in the suburbs, driving downtown to work can be an unnerving experience on the best of days. Even when there are no accidents or stalls, there is a particular stretch of road where the six-lane highway merges into three lanes, creating long traffic jams. Theory of constraints would suggest that there is […]

Developers in an agile setting may want to familiarize themselves with this simple set of Lean tools – quality function development, design structure matrix and visual control board.

A good acronym for the framework by which an organization can implement Lean is LEAP – learn it, explain it, adapt it, provide it. The 5As – assessment, awareness, association, adherence and ascendancy – are the steps to take.

Some common messages are beginning to emerge from several software-relevant areas – Six Sigma for software, Agile development and Lean thinking. The links between Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) and Agile have been explored recently, but now a broader view yet can illustrate the way that Lean thinking, evolved from just-in-time manufacturing, aligns well with […]

Successful transformation to a continuous process improvement culture is arduous. It requires an enterprise approach that engages the entire organization and challenges its norms. It requires knowledge of new tools and methodologies, and a level of internal discipline beyond that in which most organizations operate. Most organizations are addicted to quick fixes and immediate results. […]

Lean is gaining wide acceptance in these troubled times of recession across the globe. Organizations are striving to be more efficient in order to create more value for their customers. Many are using a project approach to Lean, which means focusing on a specific process and improving that process to achieve a certain output metric. […]

A strong possibility exists that some organizations using Six Sigma are failing to cash in on the true potential of the methodology. This can happen when proper care is not taken to understand what needs to be integrated with the Six Sigma methodology to make it effective, comprehensive and a focused approach to solve real-life […]

Practitioners must think “lean” from the beginning when they are starting an initiative in a certain area. Part of their job is to transfer the Lean philosophy. To do this effectively, they must be role models who live Lean all day, all night, all the time – this will earn them credibility. If not, a […]