waste elimination

Waste is insidious. No matter what plateau of performance we are able to reach, waste creeps back into our work in often imperceptible ways. It’s not just that waste hurts our productivity and our profits, but it squeezes out good work, whether value-adding work or other worthwhile endeavors such as

Whether it’s problem-solving, or kaizen, or process optimization, or waste elimination…no matter what you’re trying to accomplish, you must have a firm understanding of the current reality. This doesn’t mean just the results, but the process or work or causes that lead to those results. Every lean thinker understands this.

While I try to practice a lens for waste in all of my work and passionately eliminate what I can, I haven’t done an actual waste walk on my work in a while. So I thought I would do a waste walk on the part of my work that has

I have spent as much time on lean product development as I have on any other area over the past 10 years.  That’s largely because, for most companies, manufacturing products a little faster or cheaper is nothing compared to the overall business results delivered through a stronger product-development engine. I’ll

In Part 1 of this series (Going Beyond Lean Thinking to Define Value). I challenged how the lean tenet regarding delivering value to our customer has been practiced.  In Part 2 I wrote for Industry Week, I examine how clearly understanding what the customers value and why they value it

Everyone performs work, and everyone has the opportunity to improve how that work is executed. In my last 2 columns for Industry Week, I have focused on different aspects of value, the customer, and waste elimination. I continue that theme in this month’s installment of Lessons from the Road in

  My latest IndustryWeek Lessons from the Road column has been released. This month’s topic is hopefully a fresh look at an old lean topic: waste elimination. Despite the many definitions to the contrary, many of you know that my view is that lean is not “all about” waste elimination.

Review any company’s slide decks on lean and you’ll likely find a definition for lean. They’re all a little different, but almost all of them center around one common theme: the elimination of waste. So, at least by consensus, this is the definition of lean: the elimination of waste. Of

When is waste elimination enough? At what point do we run out of waste to eliminate? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this line of inquiry. Here is one of the many fundamental flaws in this belief:     Waste is always creeping back into our process

Waste elimination seems pretty straightforward, right? Of course waste elimination is good, so why do we need a purpose? Because when we free up waste, most organizations don’t know what to do with it. To be clear about this, you first need to be clear about the strategic direction or