Posts Tagged ‘Operational Excellence’
Date: 18 May, 2011
Posted by: David Adams in: Leadership | Lean | Operational Excellence | Uncategorized
Dude, You Need Innovation! I just Googled (yep, it’s a verb now…) the word “innovation”. As of this date, there were “about” 201,000,000 results. You can discern something about a topic by the number of Google results there are. Innovation is a big deal these days. It may be a simple cloaking device for the real issue: organizations need to drive out cost without driving out people. To me, this sounds like a simple equation for Operational Excellence, at least the KCOE version of it. We aim for mutual trust and respect and the effect is this: costs drop. You win and your team...
Date: 04 Apr, 2011
Posted by: David Adams in: Leadership | Lean | Operational Excellence | Uncategorized
Give Those Tired Old Lean Tools a Rest… This is a picture of a process map where the different colors represent information and service (think product) flows as well as value-added or non-value-added steps in the process. If you were a casual observer watching me work with this multi-disciplinary team of engineers, detailers, leaders and craftsmen, you may think, “This guy is doing a Kaizen Event.” But, I’m not. In fact, this is a picture from Week 5 of a Quality Control (QC) Circle meeting. If you ask the team what they are doing, they’d simply reply, “Problem...
Do These Six Things to Improve Your Judgement S0, exercising some poor judgment, I missed last month’s installment in my resolution to write about the 14 leadership traits each month. Last month – February – was Trait Number Two: Judgment. In hopes of catching up, I am offering six practices that – if honed to a skill – will absolutely improve your judgment. One: Go and See for Judgment OK, so I’m not fooling anyone into thinking that these six practices are original. They are right out of the KCOE Operational Excellence System playbook. Now that I’ve...
Broken pdCa Cycles Abound! I’ve been ruminating on this article for a few days now. I am seeing broken pdCA cycles as the root causes for so many problems. I see it here in the Center and in the hospitals and factories where we coach. I thought I’d give my two cents or, rather, two tips, for strengthening your PDCA cycles. PDCA Weaknesses First, be aware of your personal weak areas. Many process problems stem from what I call shunted PDCA cycles. These weak cycles are usually the weakest at the “check” step. The check is either shallow or completely missing. If checking...
Date: 16 Dec, 2010
Posted by: David Adams in: Coaching Stories | Leadership | Lean | Operational Excellence
I woke up today with the notion that I needed to clear up or spread the word about the two daily leadership questions that we promote in our KCOE System for lean leadership | Operational Excllence leadership. I had a couple of clients thinking about this yesterday, so I thought I’d do some quick teaching on it. I posted the video on YouTube here: Leading in Lean | Operational Excellence Systems| The Two Leadership Questions
Implementing Lean | the “and OE” Problem (the “and Lean” Problem) In order to give us a background for this problem when implementing lean (or operational excellence in our case), I offer the following story, which formed my thinking on this issue. For more background on our assessment of the condition of “Lean” in North America, check out this post. In 2003, one of our regional health care product manufacturers won the coveted Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. It was the second time the company had been visited by the audit team. The first time...
