American Lean Weekday: Leadership | Lean Culture & Intrapreneurship | Lean Methods | Industry 4.0 | Case Studies
222 episodes - English - Latest episode: over 3 years ago - ★★★★★ - 4 ratingsStart each workday with digestible nuggets on the benefits of running a lean organization. We cover 5 topics in 5 days in about 5 minutes.
1. Leadership- Discover key concepts for successfully leading your organization during its lean transformation.
2. Culture/Intrapreneurship- Learn how to support your intrapreneurs, those who are driving change within your organization.
3. Lean Topics- Still catching on to lean principles and methodologies? We’ll help you with the basics and advanced topics.
4. Industry 4.0- Learn how smart manufacturing, smart factories, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and more will change the face of business.
5. Interviews- Hear from others that are on their lean journey and learn their secrets to success!
Learn more about American Lean at www.americanlean.com
Tom Reed can be reached at [email protected]
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Episodes
Does your Company have Enough Industry 4.0 Skills?
June 04, 2020 11:00 - 4 minutes - 4.37 MBAs the COVID-19 pandemic continues to change the face of business and manufacturing as we used to know it, the pressure to increase the use of technology will increase. That might be great if you are making the robots or automated material handling equipment used in warehouses, your demand will increase, but what about the end-user? Does your company have enough Industry 4.0 skills to take advantage of this opportunity? Will companies find the talent to deploy new technology? Who will servi...
Setting up Your Lean Promotion Office
June 03, 2020 11:00 - 4 minutes - 3.76 MBYour organization has developed current state and future state value stream maps. You have identified waste opportunities that exist and have laid out your quarterly Lean Game Plan. Now it is time to set up your Lean Promotion Office. This is the “war room” or headquarters for all your lean communication, planning, and Rapid Improvement Events. I realize there are thousands of ways to set up a Lean Promotion Office but I would like to provide you with some examples I have seen work well. 1...
Two Reasons Why Change is Hard
June 02, 2020 11:00 - 5 minutes - 4.74 MBWhy change is hard. I could give a short answer and say that it is because you have to work with people. Why are people so hard to deal with in making a change? It comes down to two things hard for people to deal with. 1. Uncertainty The human mind doesn’t like uncertainty. It likes order and bases decisions on previous experiences. Which of these options gives you the most anxiety? I am going to re-design your job. I am definitely going to re-design your job. I might or might not re-desi...
Level Four Leadership in Lean
June 01, 2020 11:00 - 5 minutes - 5.27 MBLevel 4 Leadership: People Development John Maxwell in “The Five Levels of Leadership” writes that with Level 3 leaders, the emphasis is on personal and corporate productivity and this ability to create a highly productive team, department, or organization shows a higher level of leadership ability than most others display. To reach the upper levels of leadership that create elite organizations, leaders must then transition from producers to developers. Why? Because people are an organizati...
Five steps to Take Now to Prepare for the Future
May 29, 2020 11:00 - 5 minutes - 5.46 MBI heard Alex Rodriguez on a podcast with Gary Vaynerchuck yesterday and he made a great point about the current times. He said that Joe Torre would tell him during a rain delay that the players that went to the back and ate burgers during the rain delay wouldn’t perform as well after the delay as the players who kept their head in the game, rode the bike to stay warm, etc. Joe said it was important to prepare for the future. What type of player do you want to be? Now before I continue, I am...
Are you Adopting Industry 4.0 Quickly Enough?
May 28, 2020 11:00 - 4 minutes - 4.29 MBAs the COVID-19 pandemic has shown us, companies can pivot quickly and produce entirely different products in a short period of time. The need for ventilators, n95 face masks, and other personal protective gear has made companies pivot quickly. Are you adopting Industry 4.0 quickly enough? Even organizations as large as General Motors (GM) have pivoted. They won a $489MM award to build 30,000 ventilators for the US Government to stockpile. They will deliver all 30,000 by the end of August 2...
Developing Your Lean Game Plan
May 27, 2020 11:00 - 4 minutes - 4.44 MBLast week I talked about developing a future state Value Stream Map. After you have developed what you want the organization to look like in the future, now comes the hard work of moving toward that future state. That calls for developing your Lean Game Plan. I believe there is a simple way to ensure you will have a successful Lean Innovation- one that involves true culture change. This entails developing your own Lean Game Plan one quarter at a time. To keep it simple, focus on four steps ...
Tips for Developing a Culture of Personal Responsibility
May 26, 2020 11:00 - 4 minutes - 4.22 MBHave you worked in an organization where no one seems to take any personal responsibility for meeting their deliverables, deadlines, or project results? As a top performer, how does that make you feel? Let’s talk about how we can develop a culture of personal responsibility and drive results! 1. Understand the Aim of the organization Everyone must understand the aim of the organization. What are the goals for this quarter? For the year? How will we handle business in a pandemic? I have men...
Level Three Leadership in Lean
May 25, 2020 11:00 - 6 minutes - 5.58 MBLevel Three Leadership – Production: Making Things Happen Separates Real Leaders For the past few weeks, this blog has been reviewing “The Five Levels of Leadership” by John Maxwell and how those levels relate to lean leadership. This week’s blog will discuss Level 3: Production. The 5 Levels are like a staircase – all the higher levels rest on the lower ones. Every leader must pass through every level to get to the next one. For example, Level 2 builds on Level 1. You cannot be a Level ...
Learn what this Essential Business is Doing to Keep Employees Safe
May 22, 2020 11:00 - 5 minutes - 4.76 MBOne of the key elements on my American Lean Weekday podcast are the weekly interviews that I conduct with companies on their Lean Journey. These companies are from various industries and are all different sizes. I have interviewed leaders from family-owned businesses to multi-national organizations. This podcast can be found here. It is episode sixty-seven of the American Lean Weekday podcast KV Engineering is a machine shop located in Santa Ana, California and primarily supports the Aerosp...
Additive Manufacturing in Industry 4.0
May 21, 2020 11:00 - 6 minutes - 6.13 MBAs I mentioned in the original Industry 4.0 blog, nine key enablers support Industry 4.0 or Smart Manufacturing. As a reminder, the nine key enablers are listed below. Additive manufacturing will be a key enabler and is being deployed quite often right now. Some of the key enablers of Smart Manufacturing include: Cyber Security/Blockchain Cloud Computing IIoT- Industrial Internet of Things Big Data System Integration Autonomous Robots-Cobots Additive Manufacturing- 3D printing Augme...
Developing Future State Value Stream Maps
May 20, 2020 11:00 - 4 minutes - 4.48 MBIf you have read my book the Lean Game Plan, you know that I talk about Value Stream Mapping as an enabler to help your organization understand where you should focus your improvement efforts. This blog will cover how to develop a future state value stream map. If you have never completed a Value Stream Map (VSM) for your organization, your first step should be to develop an Enterprise Value Stream Map (EVSM). This shows how the entire organization adds value to the customer. It covers from...
Three Tips to Help Your Team Make Good Decisions
May 19, 2020 11:00 - 4 minutes - 4.26 MBWhen part of a team focused on making improvements, many opportunities arise when you have to make good decisions. Where are we going to put this equipment? How many should we design the line for? Who needs to be in this event? There are many opportunities to make decisions during a three, four, or five day Rapid Improvement Event. Here are three brief tips that you can use that will help your team make good decisions. 1. Make the decision as early as possible in the process Often, when y...
Level Two Leadership in Lean
May 18, 2020 11:00 - 6 minutes - 5.9 MBLevel Two Leadership – Permission – You Can’t Lead People Until You Like People John Maxwell, in his book “The 5 Levels of Leadership” writes that this leadership level is about the human relationships that the leader has built up around him. Making the shift from Level 1 leadership -Position to Level 2 leadership- Permission is a person’s first real step into leadership. Leadership is influence, and when a leader learns to function on the Permission level, everything changes. This is whe...
Lean in a Printed Circuit Board Company that sees Huge Savings
May 15, 2020 11:00 - 8 minutes - 6.86 MBOne of the key elements on my American Lean Weekday podcast is the weekly interviews that I conduct with companies on their Lean Journey. These companies are from various industries and are all different sizes. I have interviewed leaders from family-owned businesses to multi-national organizations. NeoTech in Longmont, Colorado is a contract manufacturer that primarily supports the Aerospace and Defense industry. NeoTech is the combination of Natel, EPIC Technologies added in 2013 and OnCor...
What Would You Have Your Digital Twins Do
May 14, 2020 11:00 - 5 minutes - 5.2 MBAs I mentioned in the original Industry 4.0 blog, nine key enablers support Industry 4.0 or Smart Manufacturing. I list the nine key enablers below. The adoption of 5G internet speeds will enable Digital Twins to add value for your customers. Some of the key enablers of Smart Manufacturing include: Cyber Security/Blockchain Cloud Computing IIoT- Industrial Internet of Things Big Data System Integration Autonomous Robots-Cobots Additive Manufacturing- 3D printing Augmented reality S...
How to Develop a Current State Value Stream Map
May 13, 2020 11:00 - 5 minutes - 5.2 MBIf you have read my book the Lean Game Plan, you know I talk about Value Stream Mapping as the first step to understand where you should focus your improvement efforts. If you have never completed a Value Stream Map for your organization, it will be helpful to develop l an Enterprise Value Stream Map (EVSM). An EVSM shows how the entire organization adds value to the customer. An EVSM shows what happens from the time the phone rings until you deliver a product or service to your customer. A...
How to Deal with Frustrating People in an RIE
May 12, 2020 11:00 - 5 minutes - 5.27 MBOccasionally, within a Rapid Improvement Event, or daily interactions, we will deal with frustrating people. Given the speed of an RIE it's hard to slow down to deal with those frustrating people on the spot. Here are four tips to help you deal with frustrating people in an RIE. Keep perspective and have patience Often when we get frustrated with people it’s because we are in a hurry ourselves. Maybe they had a deliverable to meet but didn’t deliver on time. We often make assumptions about...
Level One Leaders in Lean
May 11, 2020 11:00 - 5 minutes - 4.96 MBResearch states that "46% of all improvement initiatives fail because of lack of leadership."1 Having too many Level One Leaders will kill your Lean transformation. Here is how to identify them! Much has already been written on Lean Leadership. Jim Womack and John Shook at the Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI) describe the evolution of leadership models as going from ‘Do it my way’ (old Dictator style) to ‘Do it your way’ (1980s Empowerment style) to ‘Follow me … and let’s figure this out tog...
Inside Secrets on Working with Fortune 100 Companies
May 08, 2020 11:00 - 12 minutes - 11.3 MBOne of the key elements on my American Lean Weekday podcast is the weekly interviews that I conduct with companies on their Lean Journey. These companies are from various industries and are all different sizes. I have interviewed leaders from family-owned businesses to multi-national organizations. This week is a little different, I share the mic with James, a buyer at a Multi-National Fortune 100 company. He shares inside secrets on supplying a Fortune 100 company. James is unique in that ...
Augmented Reality- Seeing is Believing
May 07, 2020 11:00 - 4 minutes - 4.13 MBAs I mentioned in the original Industry 4.0 blog, nine key enablers support Industry 4.0 or Smart Manufacturing. I list the nine key enablers below. This blog post will introduce augmented reality. Key enablers of Smart Manufacturing include: Cyber Security/Blockchain Cloud Computing IIoT- Industrial Internet of Things Big Data System Integration Autonomous Robots-Cobots Additive Manufacturing- 3D printing Augmented reality Simulation/Digital Twins Augmented reality (AR) is not a ...
How to Increase Cash Flow without Laying Off Employees Part 4
May 06, 2020 11:00 - 4 minutes - 4.57 MBIn the previous blog, I talked about setting up our pull chains for the parts that support the top 80% of the products you sell to customers. We calculated the quantities we need to keep at each location within the pull chain. In this blog, let’s talk about how we will signal when we are out of parts in one of our bins and what happens next. We will do that using pull cards. The whole purpose of a pull system is to react to what is happening on the shop floor based upon consumption. MRP sys...
How to Increase Your Confidence as a Lean Coordinator
May 05, 2020 11:00 - 5 minutes - 4.84 MBWhat if you are the employee assigned to guide your companies Lean journey but you have little experience? Here is how you can increase your confidence. 1. Have Confidence in your Lean Abilities In our minds, we believe that we have to know everything there is to know about Lean before we can confidently deliver results. We overcomplicate things. Increase confidence with the decision to be confident in what you are doing. This is a choice that you make every day. Choose to have confidence!...
Five Levels of Leadership Applied to Lean
May 04, 2020 11:00 - 4 minutes - 4.11 MBWhen talking about Lean, people often focus on the process management part. They focus on value stream mapping and try to improve processes while neglecting to update leadership and management systems. The lean leadership model is based on one crucial belief – the leader’s goal is to raise new leaders. To do that, leaders must become teachers and coaches. A good roadmap is a book- The 5 Levels of Leadership. In his book, “The 5 Levels of Leadership” John Maxwell details the concept of 5 lev...
Keep Better Score with Lean Accounting
May 01, 2020 11:00 - 16 minutes - 15 MBLean accounting may not sound very exciting, but this podcast episode with Jerry Solomon brings all kinds of energy and excitement! Jerry shares how he moved from an accounting role into VP of Operations roles and shares the struggles of getting business performance information that employees can use to make improvements. These are some key points taken from my interview with Lean accounting expert Jerry Solomon. I was asked to move from the COO position to running operations. What a dif...
The Cobots are Coming!
April 30, 2020 11:00 - 6 minutes - 5.72 MBAs I mentioned in the original Industry 4.0 blog, nine key enablers support Industry 4.0 or Smart Manufacturing. The nine key enablers are listed below. In this blog, I want to talk about how cobots will enable you to expand your operations. Cyber Security/Blockchain Cloud Computing IIoT- Industrial Internet of Things Big Data System Integration Autonomous Robots - Cobots Additive Manufacturing- 3D printing Augmented reality Simulation/Digital Twins As we continue our discussion ab...
How to Increase Cash Flow Without Laying Off Employees Part 3
April 29, 2020 11:00 - 7 minutes - 6.59 MBIn the previous blog, we talked about setting up our pull chain for the parts that support the top 80% of the products you sell to customers. We discussed understanding the pull chain for each type of part that goes into your finished product. Next, we need to consider the customer demand for the products that make up your top 80% of sales. Assuming that we want to keep two day’s worth of material at the assembly location, four days of material in the supermarket, and our supplier takes 20 ...
How to Hold Meetings that Add Value
April 28, 2020 11:00 - 5 minutes - 5.05 MBDo your daily activities and meetings add value as they should be? Do your employees routinely miss your meetings? The analysis shows that out of each day, employees conduct Non-Value-Added activity up to an average of 280 minutes per day. That is 4.6 hours a day. NVA Meetings (reactive)- 80 minutes NVA Phone calls- 30 minutes NVA Email communication- 80 minutes Repeat system failures- 40 minutes Rework- 20 minutes Report generation and excess tracking- 30 minutes This adds up to abou...
Mastermind Groups Can Speed Up Your Lean Results
April 27, 2020 11:00 - 4 minutes - 4.29 MBFor many middle-market organizations, they want to speed up their Lean Transformation as quickly as possible, but they don’t have experienced Lean professionals on their staff. A great way to speed up a new Lean coordinator's learning is to encourage them to join Mastermind groups. I led Mastermind groups in the late nineties consisting of four companies within different industry segments and we conducted round-robin Rapid Improvement Events (RIE) at these four companies. Each month one co...
MD Engineering's Lean Journey Helped them Free Cash to Grow
April 24, 2020 11:00 - 13 minutes - 12.1 MBOne of the key elements on my American Lean Weekday podcast is the weekly interviews that I conduct with companies on their Lean Journey. These companies are from various industries and are all different sizes. I have interviewed leaders from family-owned businesses to multi-national organizations. These are keynotes from a conversation with MD Engineering. MD Engineering founded in 1999 and located in Corona, California is a nationally recognized leading producer and distributor of quality...
Systems Integration in Industry 4.0
April 23, 2020 11:00 - 5 minutes - 5.05 MB1. Requirements Gathering What does your business hope to gain from undertaking an Industry 4.0 digital transformation? What do your systems do today and what would you like them to do? Do you know what customers expect from you regarding systems and scalability? Will you be invited to a larger company’s private blockchain to collect data? These are all questions that you and your integrator should explore. 2. Analysis Given the wants and needs of your company, the analysis stage is wher...
How to Increase Cash Flow without Laying Off Employees Part 2
April 22, 2020 11:00 - 8 minutes - 7.78 MB1. Conduct a Pareto analysis Understand the 20% of your items that make up 80% of the demand by conducting a Pareto analysis. Focusing on the top items will allow you to have immediate gains in inventory turns and improve cash flow quickly. This is great for today’s environment when you might not be sure what your demand will be. Chances are your customers will still order your top items. 2. Review the BOM's for these items After you understand the top sellers, review the Bill of Material...
Say yes…and... to Improve Brainstorming and Engagement
April 21, 2020 11:00 - 5 minutes - 4.61 MB1. Say yes…and... Try communicating with these two words to keep brainstorming moving along and engaging your employees. It shows you want to hear more from them and increases engagement. 2. Be flexible It’s hard to be creative when you are rigid. Your brainstorming and creative process will be more authentic if you are flexible and will do a better job of meeting your customer's needs of tomorrow not yesterday. Allow the creative process to flourish and then filter the many ideas through...
How to Overcome Imposter Syndrome as a Lean Leader
April 20, 2020 11:00 - 4 minutes - 4.29 MB1. Establish a vision for your Lean transformation This helps drive alignment and support. Develop a management system and share the vision with the entire organization. Employees will get behind the change effort then they can see there is a vision for change. 2. Select a few KPI's to measure the business There is a saying in Lean that is very important- measure what matters. Don't go to the KPI smorgasbord when developing your KPI's. Keep them simple, and don't use so many that you conf...
Capco Inc. Seeing Benefits from Lean in 7 Months
April 17, 2020 11:00 - 8 minutes - 7.64 MBOnly 7 months into their Lean Journey- Capco Inc. a $65M company headquartered in Grand Junction, CO has seen benefits and inventory improvements by implementing Kanban. Capco Inc. has 100,000 square feet, 404 employees and has been around since 1968. They are a Department of Defense critical supplier. This interview is with the Paul Kobishop the Director of Production and Inventory control. He has over 30 years of lean experience and is a great example of how a company can speed up result...
Big Data in Industry 4.0
April 16, 2020 11:00 - 6 minutes - 6.01 MBFirst, let’s understand what Big Data is and what it means to us in a connected world. Big data refers to very large data sets- petabytes (1024 terabytes) or exabytes (1024 petabytes) of data. To put this into something you can envision, if a laptop has a 1TB hard drive, a petabyte uses 1024 laptops worth of storage. An exabyte would use 1,048,576 laptops worth of data. That’s a lot of data. It can also refer to how companies handle large unstructured data and store information. Realize th...
How to Increase Cash Flow without Laying Off Employees-Part 1
April 15, 2020 11:00 - 6 minutes - 6.08 MBThe natural tendency will be to reduce staffing levels when we are allowed to go back to work. This is the first part of a four-part series that will share a proven better way to increase cash flow. If we are a $25M company with a gross margin of 36% like in the example above, our COGS is $16M. Keeping 76 days of inventory that means we have 3.3 inventory turns. 250 working days/76 days of inventory = 3.3 inventory turns. Since we have 3.3 inventory turns that means we carry about $16M/3.3...
Four Ways to Improve Employee Commitment
April 14, 2020 11:00 - 4 minutes - 4.55 MBWhen beginning your Lean journey many companies ask the question of how can we get employees engaged? Another question that goes through their mind is often WHY do I have to get people involved? The answer is simple. Employees who are included are committed. Here are four ways to increase employee commitment. Many years ago, when conducting some 6S activities within a department the leaders wanted to keep the area building product while others on the Rapid Improvement Event team (RIE) did t...
How to Coach Employees to Their Possibilities
April 13, 2020 11:00 - 4 minutes - 4.47 MBAs leaders, it is important to remember we are there to coach employees to their potential. This often gets overlooked because we get busy running the business, attending meeting after meeting (many of which are non-value added). Then, with the little energy we have left, we get around to doing our hardest work, coaching and directing employees. What requires even more energy is coaching an employee or group that isn’t performing to expectations, which is our fault as their leader. Typicall...
Lippert Component Inc. Uses Report Out Process to Celebrate and Drive Employee Engagement
April 10, 2020 11:00 - 14 minutes - 13.4 MBOne of the key elements on my American Lean Weekday podcast is the weekly interviews that I conduct with companies on their Lean Journey. These companies are from various industries and are all different sizes. I have interviewed leaders from family-owned businesses to multi-national organizations. Lippert Component Inc. (LCI) in Goshen, Indiana world’s leading supplier of highly engineered products for the leisure and mobile transportation industries. LCI employs roughly 9000 employees th...
IIoT in Industry 4.0
April 09, 2020 13:30 - 6 minutes - 5.98 MBLearn about the five benefits of IIoT in Industry 4.0 1. Reduced Maintenance costs and response time Predictive analytics can provide a real-time picture of the state of your equipment. This allows you to conduct maintenance only when the equipment needs it and not before. Analyzing historical information means that you can have a better picture of maintenance parts to keep on hand to reduce response time. Also, a great business value add. 2. Condition monitoring on a real-time basis IIo...
Keep Employees Safe and Minimize WIP Using In-Process Kanbans (IPK's)
April 08, 2020 11:00 - 6 minutes - 6.19 MBGiven what is happening, we should deploy everything possible to protect employees. That is why I want to share the In-Process-Kanban or IPK. What’s a Kanban? Kanban is the Japanese word for signal. An In-Process-Kanban is a very high-tech device that signals you when to work or when not to work. I’m kidding, it’s not high-tech, it’s an X on the assembly line. It signals operators when to build, when to stop building, and when to flex to another operation. Typically, these are used in asse...
Five Ways to Overcome Company Procrastination
April 07, 2020 11:00 - 5 minutes - 5.35 MBLearn the five reasons companies procrastinate and how you can overcome them 1. Overconfidence The organization believes that it can implement Lean quickly with little effort. The reality is true culture change takes time. Yes, you might see savings as quickly as your first Rapid Improvement Event. I have written other blogs about that very thing. Then what happens? Are you suddenly world-class? Are all your employees engaged in becoming daily problem solvers? Have you removed all the was...
Attack the Problem Not the Person- Using a Fishbone Diagram
April 06, 2020 11:00 - 4 minutes - 4.14 MBThere are huge benefits to problem solving when an error occurs in your business. Learn four tips to use in this podcast! 1. Believe that the person is trying to do the right thing It helps to have a belief that employees come to work every day to do their best work. Does that always happen? No. Automatically assuming that they have bad intentions will not provide you with the best mindset to begin the problem-solving process. It’s easy to say in your mind that someone is a bad performer....
Geater Machining Increased Throughput by 60% after one RIE
April 03, 2020 11:00 - 7 minutes - 6.56 MBHere are the key elements from my interview with VP of Operations Dan Heller of Geater Machining. 1. “We were able to increase throughput through the bottleneck process of paint by 60% after one Rapid Improvement Event. 2. “Lean applies to many areas, especially a machine shop. Any time you want to increase throughput, and save money, Lean applies.” 3. “Seeing the employees’ enthusiasm, give their ideas, be heard and provide their input is very exciting.” 4. The biggest successe...
Cloud Computing in Industry 4.0
April 02, 2020 11:00 - 6 minutes - 5.84 MBCloud and Edge computing will allow for huge benefit in Industry 4.0. Learn about them in this podcast. 1. Big Data Analytics Chances are, your cloud computing service provider can provide data analytics quickly. Using detailed data collection and analysis you can quickly understand how advertisements, social media campaigns, marketing, and internal business processes are performing. 2. Data recovery options Having information in the cloud helps prevent on-premise disasters. What if your...
Five Steps for a Successful Waste Walk
April 01, 2020 11:00 - 5 minutes - 4.87 MBWaste Walks are an important first step in identifying waste in your business. Here are five steps to ensure you have a successful waste walk! 1. Walk the process backward 2. Take notes on the waste walk 3. Interview team members 4. Use a DOWNTIME chart to identify waste 5. Brainstorm ways to eliminate the waste Rate and Review Here More show notes are here Schedule a free 1/2 call with Tom Reed. Buy the Lean Game Plan Follow me on Twitter: Join me on Linked In
Four Steps for Developing a Winning Team
March 31, 2020 11:00 - 4 minutes - 4.41 MBLearn about the four steps for developing a winning team in this podcast! 1. Have good listening skills Yes, we’ve all heard that we have two ears and one mouth and that we should listen twice as much as we speak. I’ve found this to be very good advice, but the problem is that when things pop into our heads, we feel as if we have to get them out right away or they will be lost forever. No matter how hard it is for you, try to wait until the other person is done speaking before responding....
Great Leadership begins with Self Leadership
March 30, 2020 11:00 - 4 minutes - 3.96 MBLearn how to become a great leader using Leader Standard Work (LSW)! 1. Providing consistency Leader Standard Work is what it sounds like. Daily standard work that doesn’t vary. It may only be half an hour of your day, but that consistency is important for your employees to see and model. 2. Ensures long-term success Leader Standard Work ensures consistency over a long period which ensures you will be successful as a leader. Leader Standard Work isn’t a one-time act. It provides leaders...
Filter Minder uses Mixed Model Flow Line to Improve Operations
March 27, 2020 11:00 - 6 minutes - 6.05 MBHere are some key takeaways from my interview with Lean Coordinator Allen Anderson: 1. Using mixed-model lines, they reduced WIP, co-located employees and made ergonomic improvements. 2. “Moving from batches of 50 to one-piece flow, we eliminated operator conflict.” 3. “It’s important to understand the change model that employees will go through. You need a people-centric approach. It can’t be a textbook approach” 4. “Surprised by how receptive employees can be when they realize Lean ben...