Improvement Insights Blog

At Colorado Lean Network conference someone recommended Reset by Dan Heath. It’s got some interesting Lean and Theory of Constraints case studies. The first one involves accelerating hospital receiving and delivery.

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

“I was out at the… Colorado Lean Network Conference here in Denver, Colorado at the Children’s Hospital, and somebody recommended the book called Reset by Dan Heath. I’ve liked the Heath brothers books, so I went and got this out of the library. It turns out that this is a bunch of case studies about Lean and the Theory of Constraints. The very first chapter is about one hospital’s receiving department.

“It was taking them 3 days or longer to get supplies from the from the shipping dock to the right place in the hospital, which caused lots of people calling “Where’s my stuff?” and lots of rework. So they aggressively went after trying to 5S and then simplify, streamline, and optimize how they handled everything that came in. It took them a while, but they got it down to the point where at the end of the day, there’s nothing left in the receiving room. This sped up everything in the hospital, right? Everything. So that was a good story.

“Then later on, it talks about a Theory of Constraints [story]. Then later on, it says one of the things to do is map the process. That sounds like Value Stream Mapping. So, if you’d like some case studies about Lean covering different environments, go read Dan’s book. I checked it out of the library because I’ve found that sometimes some books are more feather than leather, so what I want to do is actually check out a book before I actually buy a copy.

“So, that’s my Improvement Insight. Let’s go out and improve something this week.”