Lean thinking, better teaching
FEATURE – A school board in Holland is discovering the potential of lean thinking and improving its processes to tackle the overburdening of teachers.
lean work improvement
Our new, leaner Cancer Center
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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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FeaturesMay 2, 2019
FEATURE – The renovation of one of its departments gave a hospital in Italy the perfect opportunity to redesign his oncology care with lean healthcare principles in mind.
The energy to get things done
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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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FeaturesMar 7, 2019
FEATURE – When people become enthusiastic about improvement work, there's no limit to what can be achieved. Join the author on a visit to a Finland-based manufacturer, whose lean efforts range from production to customer service.
An ever deeper analysis of the work
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FeaturesFeb 16, 2019
FEATURE – As we progress on our lean journey, results seem to become harder to achieve: it’s because we need to become more granular in our analysis and improvement of the work.
Lean delivery
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FeaturesJan 15, 2019
NOTES FROM THE GEMBA – After re-insourcing its bike repair workshop, a distribution center of France's La Poste has begun to recover long-lost knowledge about the work of mailmen and using it to innovate.
The lean veterinarian
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InterviewsDec 11, 2018
INTERVIEW – A 22-people veterinarian hospital in Barcelona has recently turned to lean thinking. We caught up with the owner to learn how things have changed six months into the journey.
A bold lean experiment in one of our kitchens
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FeaturesNov 27, 2018
FEATURE – The lean mindset Legal Sea Foods has developed is allowing the company to run bold, aggressive experiments that might some day reinvent the way their restaurant kitchens work.
Can you standardize creative work?
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FeaturesSep 19, 2018
FEATURE – The belief that standardization kills creativity can be a severe hindrance in a lean transformation. The author discusses how he convinced his team of architects to give standards a try.
The experience of a value stream manager in a lean hospital
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InterviewsDec 15, 2017
INTERVIEW - What happens in an organization after a move from silos to value streams? In this video, a Value Stream Manager from a Brazilian cancer treatment center shares her experience.
Why real kaizen and innovation start with leadership
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FeaturesNov 21, 2017
FEATURE – Following a visit to a Toyota supplier in Japan, the authors reflect on the nature of kaizen and explain why we might be looking for it in the wrong place.
Fast and lean car servicing and repairs in Botswana
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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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FeaturesNov 1, 2017
FEATURE – You have never seen a workshop like this before: Halfway Ngami in Botswana has creatively transformed car servicing and repairs by making problems visible and introducing flow.
How the initiative of nurses transformed a whole department
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FeaturesJun 11, 2017
FEATURE – We can't go wrong when we trust our people to take the initiative that we will improve their work... that's how Siena University Hospital cut its procurement lead-time in Surgery by two-thirds.
Lean in higher education: improving Macquarie University
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Case studiesMay 24, 2017
CASE STUDY – An Australian university has been applying lean to streamline and improve its processes, discovering along the way how big a change the methodology can affect in the organization's culture.
Changing the layout of a nursery to improve neonatal care
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FeaturesApr 10, 2017
FEATURE – Another month, another story of a lean project told by the Siena hospital front-line folks. This time we take you to the Intensive Care Nursery, whose layout was transformed to provide better care to premature newborns.
Adopting lean principles to speed up blood donation
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FeaturesMar 10, 2017
FEATURE – In the second article of our series written by the front-line staff of Siena University Hospital, we learn how the lean principles of pull and flow have transformed the blood donating process.
Nurses and doctors tell us how they are changing their ward
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FeaturesFeb 3, 2017
FEATURE – Every year, Siena University Hospital runs a Lean Day to celebrate and award its best lean projects. In this new series, front-line people write about five of these initiatives: first up, Internal Medicine.
Using lean as a way to transform your business model
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InterviewsDec 5, 2016
INTERVIEW – Lean is making inroads in the Middle East! In this interview, a Senior VP of Gerab National Enterprises tells us how the company is using lean to reinvent itself as a project management firm.
The incredible lean turnaround of an engineering department
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string(1553) "This is another new frontier for lean thinking, not because lean efforts in engineering have only begun recently but because it wasn’t until the last few years that a systematic attempt to codify these techniques has been made. These techniques and ideas are loosely brought together under the concept of Lean Product and Process Development (LPPD).
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Interesting contamination exists here with improvement approaches like Lean Startup and Design for Manufacturing."
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FeaturesOct 20, 2016
FEATURE – A French automotive supplier has been applying lean principles to transform its engineering department with great results. In the process, they have realized they could put in place a really effective system to build innovation.