Stay current with monthly news updates on Lean 5S news: Lean Process Improvement, Lean Healthcare, Lean Office, Lean Accounting, Lean Construction, Lean Customer Service, Lean Public Sector, Lean Distribution Centers, Lean Manufacturing (Lean Manufacturing Definition, Lean Manufacturing Principles, Lean Manufacturing Training). The Lean news articles are taken from a number of RSS Feeds and sources throughout the Internet.

La-Z-Boy Tennessee Plant Grows in Spite of Furniture Industry Downturn The La-Z-Boy, Dayton, TN, plant now builds about 95% of its chairs and sofas to order, but lean manufacturing has reduced the wait time for customers from months to days even though customers can select from among 1,400 materials and 100 frame styles. Edwards said the conversion to cellular manufacturing throughout the plant should be complete by this summer. One advantage of moving away from production lines to production cells is the reduction in movement of parts and chair and sofa assemblies around the plant. Just in time inventorying also improves the company’s cash flow and reduces the amount of storage space required for parts. (Published by The Herald-News, Dayton, TN, April 7, 2008.)

Whatever Happened to Quality? Quality is more than just a statistical analysis tool for manufacturing lines. When done right, quality should encompass the entire enterprise. Some 50 years after the advent of the total quality management (TQM) movement championed by W. Edwards Deming, manufacturers of all different sizes and stripes are still being dogged by high-profile manufacturing quality defects. The list is long, and getting longer every week, and crosses every manufacturing vertical. At least a token "quality program" is de rigueur for U.S. manufacturers, but many are still at lip-service level agreement with the means required to reach the necessary ends. However, talk is cheap -- recalls are not. (Published by IndustryWeek, April 1, 2008.)

Tending to Improvements in Healthcare: ThedaCare among U.S. Leaders in Efficiency Efforts ThedaCare estimated that process improvements in 2005 and 2006 cut costs by $22 million annually, without layoffs or reducing quality, while reducing medical errors. It stopped tracking savings in 2007 after verifying the results. The sessions are an example of ThedaCare's commitment to rethinking every step in how it cares for patients -- from washing linens to heart surgery -- with the goal of simplifying, streamlining and standardizing. "They don't define their job as delivering health care. They define their job as improving health care," said Arnold Milstein, chief physician for Mercer Health & Benefits, a nationally recognized expert on quality and efficiency in health care. (Publishedthe Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, McClatchy-Tribune Information Services, March 31, 2008.)

Taking Care of Efficiency at MetroWest Medical Center To improve efficiency, officials at MetroWest Medical Center last month took a page from a company that's become a model for the practice - Toyota.A program called Lean aims to help the hospital improve processes, reduce waste and improve efficiency by applying principles developed by the car manufacturer."Lean is a term coined in the late '80s as a generic term to define Toyota's production system," said Kevin Frieswick, the hospital's Lean process manager. "It just means a business system that strives to identify and eliminate waste." (Published by MetroWest Daily News, March 21, 2008.)

Toyota Process Is Model: Boeing officials visit local Lexus dealership to see system that involves workers in decisions Boeing officials visited the Lexus of Richmond dealership in Chesterfield County yesterday to see the Toyota Production System in practice. The system stresses employee involvement in the decision-making process. Changing the oil on a 2005 Lexus GX 470 is not quite the same as building a 306,500-pound 777 transatlantic airliner.Yet that didn't stop a group of The Boeing Co. officials from visiting the Lexus of Richmond dealership yesterday to see efficiency practices first hand. The aerospace manufacturer and the Chesterfield County car dealer practice the Toyota Production System, a bottom-up management philosophy. (Published by Richmond Times-Dispatch, March 20, 2008.)

Lean Leadership Lunch This lunch event created by Evergreen Team Concepts to attract business leaders for an introductory session of Lean Leadership, while enjoying a nice catered lunch. The Lean Leadership Lunch is geared towards leaders and managers within companies wanting more information on Lean continuous process improvement structure, change implementation and philosophy. You will be seated with a table host who has completed the course and is willing to speak on our behalf concerning Lean and the benefits they have observed for their business. There will be a variety of industries represented from Lean construction/remodeling, Lean production/manufacturing, Lean distribution center, to Lean health care management. There will be materials distributed and Henry Beeland (click here for bio) will give an information-packed PowerPoint presentation on our approach to project-based Lean Leadership.

To build a better hospital, Virginia Mason Takes Lessons from Toyota Plants Beginning in 2000 Virginia Mason hospital began applying Toyota's lean concepts to healthcare. For example, the hospital and all of its campuses in the Seattle area use a kanban system to signal replenishment. When a nurse or physician sees the card near the bottom of a pile of items, he or she knows it's time to refill. They began looking for a better way to improve quality, safety and patient satisfaction. After two years of searching, they discovered the Toyota Production system, also known as lean manufacturing. Developed in part by Japanese businessman Taiichi Ohno, the idea is to eliminate waste and defects in production. Virginia Mason has tailored the Japanese model to fit health care. (Published by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 15, 2008.)

Will Toyota's Way Win on the Track? When the Formula One racing season starts on Sunday with the Australian Grand Prix, Toyota Motor Corp., which can practically do no wrong in the factory and the showroom, will be out to prove after years of disappointing finishes that it can finally turn things around in the world's top auto-racing circuit. "Money cannot buy success in F1," says Marcel Cordes, executive director of Sport+Markt, a sports-marketing consultancy in Cologne, Germany. "The lack of victories is becoming more and more of a problem. I think 2008 is the key year for them to show that they are not only part of the show but a noteworthy challenger." (Published by The Wall Street Journal, March 14, 2008.)

Trends and Innovations in Product Development Product-development planning remains crucial to organizations' survival and prosperity. Here we revisit some key trends in the process, based on a recent address from one of the world's leading experts in the field of engineered product development. Key product development trends identified in the article are:
-Development Speed
- Platform Flexibility
- Analysis of interaction networks permits complexity management.
- Outsourcing and Offshoring.
- Lean principles improves efficiency by applying lean production ideas to the design process.
- Customer Involvement becomes easier due to the internet. (Published by ThomasNet.com, March 13, 2008.)

Iowa Has Quickest ED Turnaround in Nation St. Luke's Hospital, a 560-bed community hospital in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, saw 51,632 patients in its ED last year and beat the state record by logging an average visit time of 2:10. To reduce waste and improve processes, St. Luke's conducted a comprehensive study of its ED using the lean process improvement method, which was adopted from the Toyota production method, which "leans" processes by removing the waste. Like Mercy, the hospital has implemented a quick registration and triage process. St. Luke's also has added a second computer to allow for two triages to take place at once, added a guest relations person to keep patients and guests apprised, built a second entrance to the ED to provide separate entrances for the public and ambulance services, developed a standard report form that both the ED nurses and nurses on the floor can use, and is in the process of remodeling the ED to add beds and design a more efficient layout. (Published by Nurse.com, March 10, 2008)

UMH Putting All Preop Testing at Domino's Farms The University of Michigan Health System will spend $1.85 million to consolidate all preoperative testing into one facility to improve patient flow and free clinical space in the hospital for more appointments. "This is indicative of the fact that our hospitals are not wedded to the idea of business as usual," said Brian Peters, senior corporate vice president, Organizational and Strategic Development at the Michigan Health and Hospital Association. "They see the need to re-engineer the process inside the hospital, and they found the need here. "We're seeing this all over the state: hospitals looking at manufacturers and the development of lean process and even working with lean process consultants and kind of re-engineering the way they do some things," Peters said. "That's absolutely the right thing to do and over time can only help to contain costs." (Published by Ann Arbor Business Review, Feb, 28, 2008.)

Driven by Project Management Demand at Standard & Poor's Since joining Standard & Poors as vice president for international business systems in 2006, Jora Gill has been applying Toyota's lean principles to software development. Noting that lean permits Toyota to develop products quickly with low levels of waste and high quality, Gill explained that traditional software development often creates obstacles to achieving such benefits. For instance, users demand broad functionality from the start, resulting in a massive development project. He described projects as having three months of development and only two weeks of testing, resulting in defects going into production. He suggested not developing every feature right at the start. "How could you possibly know what you want on day one? he said. Gill suggested developing short and medium-term requirements. He asks users what features would change their business today and that is delivered first. Traditionally the corporation saw a return after six months or a year. By delivering in short bursts with the highest priority needs at the project's front, the return is much sooner. (Published by CIO magazine, Feb. 11, 2008.)

Batesville Casket: Case Closed A good plant maintenance department, in some respects, is like a good professional football referee. "If we do our jobs right, nobody knows that we even exist." So says George Doll, the maintenance manager at Batesville Casket Company's assembly plant in Batesville, Ind. In that quote, "nobody" is truly somebody. For Batesville, it is the customer - a family who has ordered the final resting place for a loved one. The customer expects the Batesville casket, which has been manufactured and personalized specifically for the departed, to arrive at the funeral home on time and defect free. That is a challenging task considering the order was placed the previously day. Critical areas of the production process have 99% while less-critical areas have 96%. (Published by Reliable Plant, Jan. 2008.)

The Lean and Energy Toolkit This Lean and Energy Toolkit offers Lean implementers practical strategies and techniques for improving Lean results—waste elimination, quality enhancement, and delivery of value to customers—while reducing energy use, costs, and risk. The toolkit is also intended to introduce Lean practitioners to the extensive array of energy management resources available from EPA, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), and other organizations. The “Lean” methods discussed in this toolkit are organizational improvement methods pioneered in the Toyota Production System. Lean production and Lean manufacturing refer to a customer-focused business model and collection of methods that focus on the elimination of waste (non-value added activity) while delivering quality products on time and at a low cost. (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.)