LEAN Journey Part 1/6

I am walking the path to becoming a LEAN Expert. There is still a long way to go; however, I have already gained a few insights and learning that could make the path easier for someone else.?

I will share 30 lessons I learned when studying, practicing, and developing people in LEAN management. Here are the first five learnings:

L1. Language matters

I need to be sure that I know what I speak about and that the people I speak with have the same understanding. We need to be critics to see things clearly. The dictionary is a meaningful starting point - to get confidence in our criticism.

L2: The source of knowledge

"To spend three years looking for a good master is better than to train for three years with a bad one." If you want to save three years of searching for a good source of LEAN knowledge - check here.

L3: The five elements of production

In the book Zero Quality Control, Shigeo Shingo points out that we need to consider five production elements to engage ourselves in production. Even though this clustering of production mechanisms is to challenge the status quo and look for improvement, I realized they are also helpful in understanding production activities themselves.

L4: Production mechanism

Differentiating between operations and production processes helps us answer the question of where we are. To get from where we are to where we want to be, we need to distinguish product flow (process) from the workflow (operations) and analyze them separately.

L5: Learning to See

The first step to Learning to See is to master LEAN thinking. The second step is to believe in people's good intentions in developing production systems. The third step is to learn how to ask the right questions.

I'll talk to you soon with part 2 ;)

Cheers,

Marek