Interviews

Introducing Colombia to lean management

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InterviewsOct 14, 2019
Juan David Ruiz Valencia
INTERVIEW – As we look back at the evolution of lean management in our countries, the story of Instituto Lean Colombia will certainly sound more than familiar.

What does learning look like at Toyota?

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InterviewsSep 23, 2019
Martyn Hayward and Yian Baty
INTERVIEW – Toyota’s approach to developing capabilities and its focus on life-long learning are inspirational. But how do people at Toyota actually learn?

Taking the lean leap in private healthcare

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    string(1608) "Lean thinking may have been born in Toyota in the 1950s and 1960s, but it wasn’t until after the year 2000 that a few hospitals began to explore its application to the healthcare industry (lean healthcare). These pioneering organizations came together to share their stories at the first Global Lean Healthcare Summit in the UK in 2007, which in turn triggered many more experiments around the world. Since then, interest has kept growing.

Some fifteen years on, we have hundreds of examples to learn from, from clinics and departments through to entire hospitals and even whole hospital systems. Not all early experiments succeeded, and we are still a long way from making lean a widely recognized way of working across the industry.
Healthcare providers around the world still face huge challenges, as ageing populations and unhealthy lifestyles boost the demand for healthcare faster than the growth of incomes and tax revenues from the middle classes. At the same time, the quality of care has not improved as much as the quality of other services in the economy, which is why more and more healthcare organizations are turning to lean.

Historically, lean healthcare ideas have been applied in large hospitals, but in the past few years we have started to see the philosophy adopted in earnest in many smaller organizations following a do-it-yourself approach that has generated many positive benefits. An impressive example is the Consorci Sanitari del Garraf near Barcelona."
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InterviewsSep 19, 2019
Sharon Vasuthevan
INTERVIEW – A private healthcare group in South Africa has carefully studied the unique challenges it faces and customized its approach to improvement accordingly, embarking on a lean journey to better patient care.

Moving forward

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    string(1637) "While lean government and lean healthcare technically fall under this category, we consider lean service organizations to be those operating in areas like call centers, retail, hotels, restaurants, offices, banking, and so on. In such environments, there is a direct interaction with the customer, which should be seen as an opportunity to get real-time feedback on our service rather than a nuisance we have to deal with (if you have ever spoken with a customer care representative, you know what this means).

A common problem that practitioners trying to bring lean to services encounter is the difficulty to identify “the work” – whereas in manufacturing the product is in front of everyone’s eyes, in service organizations it is often hidden behind paperwork or a computer screen. Once the work is clearly visible, however, the opportunities for improvement are plentiful. To date, we have seen thousands of organizations striving to lean out the service they provide customers: from restaurants chains in the United States and China to a group of bakeries in Barcelona, from call centers to hotels, the application of lean services ideas can have an extraordinary impact on our economies. Especially if we consider that the service industry accounts for more than three-fifths of the global GDP and employs more than one-third of the global workforce.

Lean thinking is naturally a fit for the service industry, because of its focus on constantly delighting customers and on providing them with value-adding products."
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InterviewsSep 5, 2019
Gabriel Lam
INTERVIEW – This moving company in Singapore has taken its first steps down the lean road, reminding us that translating your strategy into small, actionable improvements people can make at the gemba is the way to a transformation.

The harvest of the future

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InterviewsAug 15, 2019
Luis Guillermo Amu
INTERVIEW – This agro-industrial business in Colombia is applying lean thinking to its harvesting process. The harvest manager explains the difficulties and opportunities encountered on the journey so far.

Leveraging tech to improve education

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InterviewsAug 13, 2019
Priya Lakhani
INTERVIEW – In a chat with our editor, Priya Lakhani explains how technology can be used to understand a student’s unique learning pathway and design teaching accordingly.

Leading large-scale lean change

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InterviewsAug 1, 2019
Rose Keanly
INTERVIEW – Rose Keanly discusses the role of lean in a strategic business transformation in the financial services sector and the dos and don’ts of bringing lean to a large organization. 

Learning at takt time in Thales

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    string(1593) "The term “lean production” refers to the set of tools and techniques used to streamline and improve a company’s production system. With its roots in the Toyota Production System, lean production aims to boost productivity while reducing waste. Companies that successfully embrace lean production methods can achieve impressive improvements in their performance. The superiority of a lean production system was first identified by Womack and Jones during their research on Japanese carmakers. Initially, it was believed that lean was only applicable to production, whereas today we know those principles can be applied in any sector.

With more and more organizations (not just manufacturing firms) turning to automation to try and solve every-day problems, lean production offers an approach that gives the operators and their work the dignity they deserve. This idea is best expressed by the concept of the andon, a cord hanging above lean production lines that operators can pull whenever they encounter a problem they can’t solve right way (this is the base of the fundamental lean principles of jidoka, “automation with a human touch”). Lean is clearly an alternative to reckless management that considers people as mere capital.

The main characteristics of a lean production system are the fact the different stages of production happen in a sequence without interruptions (known as flow) and that the pace of production is set by the customers (pull)."
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InterviewsJun 11, 2019
Norbert Dubost
INTERVIEW – A former VP of Operations from Thales tells Catherine Chabiron how he and his team turned around their department by committing to lean thinking and focusing on people development every day.

Industry 4.0 or Lean 4.0?

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    string(1594) "Manufacturing is where the lean movement originated from. For their MIT research in the late 1980s (which resulted in the 1990 seminal book The Machine the Changed the World), Jim Womack and Dan Jones identified a set of principles and techniques that made Japanese carmakers far more productive than their Western competitors.

The superiority of the Toyota Production System is now a recognized fact (Toyota has been profitable every year but one, for half a century), which means that today most manufacturing organizations around the world practice lean manufacturing thinking to some extent. The prevalence of this alternative way of thinking and managing in the manufacturing sector often generates confusion in other industries, in which people’s first reaction to improvement attempts is the now proverbial “We don’t make cars. Lean is a manufacturing thing.”

When applied to manufacturing, lean tools like heijunka, SMED or Kanban cards allow for the optimization of production processes and the systematic elimination of waste (in its three incarnations of muda, muri and mura – respectively, non-value-adding work, overburden and unevenness). These happen by implementing the fundamental lean principles of pull and flow. However, it has now been proved that the principles characterizing lean manufacturing are universally applicable. They work in any sector and they apply to any kind of work – even though at times they require some adjustment."
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InterviewsMay 28, 2019
Pieter du Plessis
INTERVIEW – Atlantis Foundries was able to achieve zero defects for three months in a row thanks to machine learning. Here’s why the human component can’t be discounted.

Leading a quality revolution

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InterviewsMay 23, 2019
Sadao Nomura
INTERVIEW – A couple of weeks ago, our editor caught up with Toyota veteran Sadao Nomura. In this Q&A, he discusses quality improvement and leadership engagement.

Supporting the Australian service industry

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InterviewsMar 16, 2019
Alister Lee
INTERVIEW – What skills do coaches need to successfully support lean transformations in the service sector? Our colleagues from Australia tells us about their experience.

Jishuken at Toyota Motor Kyushu

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InterviewsMar 2, 2019
Hideshi Yokoi
INTERVIEW – A team from LGN just spent a week on the gemba with Toyota veteran Hideshi Yokoi for a jishuken exercise. We asked him to explain to us how he used this practice while at Toyota Motor Kyushu.

Learning to ‘own it’

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    string(1440) "The construction industry has a reputation for delays, bad quality and unsafe working conditions. This makes it a prime candidate for the implementation of lean principles and techniques. The idea of 'lean construction' has been around since the early 1990s, when a group of academics in California started to look at opportunities for the application of lean in the sector. One of the results of this early work was the introduction of the Last Planner System to better manage construction sites.

The lean construction movement soon spread to other parts of the world, starting with the UK - where it influenced a number of organizations and large projects, like the construction of St Pancras station in London. Large construction companies quickly took on lean management. Like in other industries, at the beginning the adoption of lean focused heavily on the application of tools, whereas more recently the strategic importance of lean management has been recognized by the industry.

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InterviewsFeb 28, 2019
Lisa Ballantyne
INTERVIEW – During his recent visit to California, our editor sat down with a Senior VP from Turner Construction to discuss leadership transformation and the importance of diversity in the workplace.

How lean knowledge travels across a hotel chain

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InterviewsFeb 12, 2019
Cristina Aguiar Rivero, Noa Lírez Forneiro & Amalia Vidal Vázquez
INTERVIEW – Three hotel directors from the same chain in the Canary Islands give us the lowdown on the company’s strategy to facilitate the transfer of lean knowledge from one location to another.

Laying the foundations of a leaner industry

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    string(1440) "The construction industry has a reputation for delays, bad quality and unsafe working conditions. This makes it a prime candidate for the implementation of lean principles and techniques. The idea of 'lean construction' has been around since the early 1990s, when a group of academics in California started to look at opportunities for the application of lean in the sector. One of the results of this early work was the introduction of the Last Planner System to better manage construction sites.

The lean construction movement soon spread to other parts of the world, starting with the UK - where it influenced a number of organizations and large projects, like the construction of St Pancras station in London. Large construction companies quickly took on lean management. Like in other industries, at the beginning the adoption of lean focused heavily on the application of tools, whereas more recently the strategic importance of lean management has been recognized by the industry.

Technology is providing new opportunities for the sector, with 3D and 4D software tools taking the lead. Technological advances, coupled with the adoption of solid improvement practices, like lean construction methodology, in the construction industry, means we can design and build better, safer and lasting buildings - also guaranteeing working infrastructure for our increasingly urban world."
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InterviewsFeb 5, 2019
Charles Murphy
INTERVIEW – The editors of Planet Lean and Lean Post recently met with a senior executive of Turner Construction in New York City. Together, they discussed leadership development, respect for people, and the future of the industry.

Taking lean improvement to heart

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    string(1608) "Lean thinking may have been born in Toyota in the 1950s and 1960s, but it wasn’t until after the year 2000 that a few hospitals began to explore its application to the healthcare industry (lean healthcare). These pioneering organizations came together to share their stories at the first Global Lean Healthcare Summit in the UK in 2007, which in turn triggered many more experiments around the world. Since then, interest has kept growing.

Some fifteen years on, we have hundreds of examples to learn from, from clinics and departments through to entire hospitals and even whole hospital systems. Not all early experiments succeeded, and we are still a long way from making lean a widely recognized way of working across the industry.
Healthcare providers around the world still face huge challenges, as ageing populations and unhealthy lifestyles boost the demand for healthcare faster than the growth of incomes and tax revenues from the middle classes. At the same time, the quality of care has not improved as much as the quality of other services in the economy, which is why more and more healthcare organizations are turning to lean.

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InterviewsJan 29, 2019
Chiong Siau Chien
INTERVIEW – This cardiac laboratory in Singapore was targeting one improvement and ended up with something different, but equally impactful for its patient flow.

The formula behind the success of Toyota

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InterviewsJan 22, 2019
Tracey and Ernie Richardson
INTERVIEW – What is the secret to Toyota’s ability to engage people in continuous improvement? Tracey and Ernie Richardson look back at their time with the company and tell us.

Cooking up lean change

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    string(1637) "While lean government and lean healthcare technically fall under this category, we consider lean service organizations to be those operating in areas like call centers, retail, hotels, restaurants, offices, banking, and so on. In such environments, there is a direct interaction with the customer, which should be seen as an opportunity to get real-time feedback on our service rather than a nuisance we have to deal with (if you have ever spoken with a customer care representative, you know what this means).

A common problem that practitioners trying to bring lean to services encounter is the difficulty to identify “the work” – whereas in manufacturing the product is in front of everyone’s eyes, in service organizations it is often hidden behind paperwork or a computer screen. Once the work is clearly visible, however, the opportunities for improvement are plentiful. To date, we have seen thousands of organizations striving to lean out the service they provide customers: from restaurants chains in the United States and China to a group of bakeries in Barcelona, from call centers to hotels, the application of lean services ideas can have an extraordinary impact on our economies. Especially if we consider that the service industry accounts for more than three-fifths of the global GDP and employs more than one-third of the global workforce.

Lean thinking is naturally a fit for the service industry, because of its focus on constantly delighting customers and on providing them with value-adding products."
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InterviewsJan 10, 2019
Roberto Priolo
PROFILE – In an industry dominated by star chefs and big egos, meeting a humble leader who has made people development his battle cry is a breath of fresh air. PL interviews Legal Sea Food’s Richard Vellante.