DailyKaizen

This morning I ran into a former client of mine that I have not worked with in eight months. In fact, they were one of the first leaders that I worked with at Group Health. Early in 2006 I helped this leader facilitate a workshop on a bottlenecked process that was leading to a lot of frustration with other departments. We showed some good results at the event, but yesterday I learned that the real results have come afterwards.
It was fascinating to hear about the innovative process the leader has developed. Since the workshop the leader and a few designated supervisors have continued to apply Lean principles in their area and have begun to move upstream working with other departments. Due to staffing issues the leader determined early on that it would not be possible to conduct full five-day RPIWs and as a result developed a standard one-day “mini-event.” The leader has gone out and developed a future state map and then broken the implementation plan down into more then a dozen mini-events. During the mini-event the team focuses one specific problem like a lack of standard work or leveling workflow. Each team is made up of around five staff members and they are held accountable to achieve measurable results. An entire tool set have been developed based on the problem they are trying to solve. Over the last six months they have been able to free-up much needed staff and have greatly improved cycle times, quality, etc.
Lean is all about sharing knowledge. This is a great example of a Lean consultant learning a new Lean technique from an operations manager. I plan on using this process moving forward with some of the Model Line work. How fun!