Almost every hospital storage room I’ve seen uses one color of kanban storage bin. This makes it harder to find what you want unless you know where it is. What if hospitals used colored kanban bins for the their two-bin kanban system (one in use, one for backup)? Red for blood; yellow for urinary, blue for respiratory? Wouldn’t that make it much easier to find needed supplies?
Colored kanban storage bins for hospital supplies
Almost every time I purchase something online, I see a form that looks like this:
The Credit Card Type and Credit Card Number are redundant resulting in unnecessary duplication and processing
There is no reason to ask for both. The number will tell you what kind of card you’re processing. Every day, across millions of transactions, customers are asked unnecessarily for a Credit Card Type. This is a type of waste. It irritates me.
Continue Reading "Lean – Unnecessary Processing of Online Credit Cards"
The April, 2014 Harvard Business Review has an article about creating a culture of quality. The authors found that a culture of quality will save $13,400 per employee per year. Surveyed participants also said it takes two hours to fix a mistake. Joseph Juran often said that companies lose a quarter (25%) of their revenue finding and fixing mistakes and errors, so this gives us a benchmark and a reason to embrace quality.
“Companies that take a grassroots, peer-driven approach develop a culture of quality. Traditional strategies have little effect.”
Four Factors that Drive Quality
A QI Macros customer recently asked: ” What is a reasonable and productive ratio of Lean or Six Sigma expert (LSSBB, for example) to staff for a healthcare organization that is starting the journey?”
The general consensus I can find online about Six Sigma belts/employees is:
1 BB/100 employees
3 GB/100 employeesI think these numbers are designed to keep Six Sigma training companies in business.
Depending on the size of a Medical center, you could use one BB and some GBs to get started. You can’t fix everything all at once, so one BB ramrodding a handful of GBs to solve key problems would be a good start.
Continue Reading "How Many Green and Black Belts Do You Need?"
In Matthew May’s new book, The Laws of Subtraction (McGraw-Hill 2013), he outlines some key concepts refined from his years with Toyota:
At the heart of every difficult decision lie three tough choices:
The key is to remove the stupid stuff: anything obviously excessive, confusing, wasteful, unnatural, hazardous, hard to use or ugly. This is the art of subtraction.
Isn’t that the core of Lean?
The March 2011 Wired magazine article identifies a new trend in manufacturing: insourcing. An MFG.com survey found that 19% of companies had brought all or part of their manufacturing back to North America. US manufacturing added 136,000 jobs in 2010, the first increase since 1997.
While many small to medium sized businesses moved their manufacturing to China in the early part of the last decade, many are finding benefits from moving production back to the USA:
Last week, Toyota unveiled it’s multimillion dollar system for gather repair reports, complaints and safety concerns from dealerships, internet sites and other sources into one system and mine that data for problems beyond the doors of the factory. The WSJ reported that EVP Shinichi Sasaki said that Toyota had succumbed to ‘Big Company Disease’.
It happens. Big or small, companies shift their focus to bottom-line benefits or growth and drop the ball on quality. But, as I’ve predicted for awhile, Toyota’s quality culture is repairing itself and resuming the quest for quality; now on a global basis.
What are you doing to monitor your quality on a global basis?
Good insights.
http://www.shmula.com/marc-onetto-lean-six-sigma-at-amazon/8042/
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