Improvement Insights Blog

Got an email from a QI Macros customer who read Lean Six Sigma Demystified and applied it at his hotel in Acapulco. Here’s what he learned and how it applies to healthcare too.

“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” and QI Macros [software].

“Recently I got an email from a gentleman who had read my book “Lean Six Sigma Demystified.” He was director of training at a hotel down in Acapulco. He started using what I was recommending in there to reduce wait times to check in, to reduce the cycle time to clean a room. Cleaning a room: doesn’t matter if you’re cleaning a room at a hotel or cleaning a nursing unit bed, it takes about 20 some odd minutes, right? The faster you can do that in the hospital, the sooner you get people out of the Emergency Room and into that hospital bed where they can get better care. Emergency Rooms are all about urgent care; hospital beds are about ongoing care. If you leave people down here in the Emergency Room… (they call it ‘boarding’; we’re ‘boarding’ patients in the Emergency Room) …instead of getting them someplace where they can get the kind of care that they need, that’s not going to be helpful.

“But anyway, he was talking about how he was starting to use what he’d learned from Demystified to improve delivery of hospitality right there in his Acapulco hotel. Many people in hospitality don’t think that Lean and Six Sigma applies to them. Well, guess what? Yes it does. You know, standard work. You can figure out ways to improve things. You can figure out a way to cut the cycle time to do a lot of things. This is entirely possible. A lot of people don’t think I mean… I find a lot of people don’t think that Lean or Six Sigma applies to their specific industry because “We’re special.” Nonsense, all right!? That’s just nonsense!

“You can use this anywhere, right? I don’t care what you’re doing. I don’t care if you’re a little mom and pop store; I don’t care if you’re a big city hospital or if you’re Alcoa or GM. You can use this stuff everywhere. I can tell you if you know how to do it and you start solving problems, people will notice and you’ll get promotions and raises that nobody ever thought you might get.

“So that’s my Improvement Insight for this week: Lean and Six Sigma can work anywhere. If you don’t believe me, just try it. If you have questions, you can always send me an email: jay@qimacros.com. I can help you figure out how you might apply it in your situation.

“So let’s go out and improve something this week, no matter what industry, what business, what… whatever you’re in, it just takes a little bit of effort not a lot.”