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Defining Value was the first chapter in this series of Lean Blogs. With a clear sense of what value is from the perspective of the customer, organizations can evaluate every aspect of how they facilitate the delivery of products and services to their customers. Value stream is a term Lean practitioners use to describe the transformation of customer demand to the fulfillment of that demand… a closed loop. The tool used to capture that transformation, no surprise, is called a

Chapter 1: Lean Principles, Defining Value and the Eight Wastes I recently delivered, on a behalf of a client, a two-day “Introduction to Lean” session. In an effort to make sense of the client’s training content, I scratched out three flip charts to help summarize for the students what Lean is all about. 200+ slides now condensed into three flip charts. Overproducing, one of the eight wastes I’ll cover in a subsequent blog, applies equally to training materials. “Lean is

In our role as continuous improvement specialists, we are typically challenged to “solve” difficult problems for our respective organizations or clients. We have acquired a wide array of tools, methods and techniques for that purpose. If, in our role of project managers and seasoned facilitators, we are able to establish the winning conditions for change, we can look forward to successful outcomes. However, the “devil is in the details” and that is what makes our jobs both

I had the privilege of working with several organizations this year, each representing very different industry sectors. One of the attributes they shared in common was the prevalence of manual data entry with many resources consumed in the activity of taking existing data, available from multiple sources including faxes, emails, forms, letters, spreadsheets, etc., and re-entering the same data into spreadsheets and enterprise systems. When tasked to map those value streams,

I have been on and off the phone with Google AdWords Express technical support for the last 20 hours and this has been an experience in customer service... but not the kind I would have expected from Google. The issue: Our firm, RPM-Academy (www.rpm-academy.com) has been running two ads for training courses over the last few weeks with each campaign (ad) offering having a dedicated landing page on our website (URL). The ads were set up correctly and recording "clicks" for w

When gathering data (sampling) from a population for the purpose of describing as well as making inferences on said population, randomization is essential. Why? "Random sampling eliminates bias by giving all individuals an equal chance to be chosen."(1) and, the “mathematical theorems that are the foundation for frequently used statistical procedures are based on this assumption”(2). When facilitating training in Six Sigma, I often “quiz” students after we have journeyed fo

Customer-focused thinkers like you recognize and passionately promote that value is defined by the customer and that any consumption of resources – people, equipment, materials, and time – should solely be for the purpose of creating value for the customer. We understand that this is a key principle of “Lean Thinking”. Close your eyes and picture an organization with 1,000 employees. It could be in manufacturing, transportation, travel, healthcare, financial services, publi