waste

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

Recently I had a problem with Delta. Delta treats me pretty well, in part because of my extensive travel to our clients, but this day had me annoyed. It was a small thing that turned into a bigger thing. I had an outbound flight in the morning, and a return

This may be my favorite story about waste elimination…   As part of his company’s policy, Bill had to manually fill out his timecard each week.  On that time card was a column titled ARS.  When Bill started, he was taught to just put a zero in the ARS column

Yes, I am an engineer by training, and sometimes look to principles of engineering systems for lessons in organizational improvement. One of my favorite classes, believe it or not, was thermodynamics. I found to be an innate beauty and how thermodynamic systems worked. The second law of thermodynamics states that

Waste elimination has often been a central tenant in lean transformation. However, leave is not all about waste, as I wrote about on The Lean Edge recently. if you are going to focus on waste, then certainly the go almost be the reduction, and ultimately, the elimination of the waste

At the moment, I am teaching a Lean Experience at our Center for a group of mixed companies that include retail, transportation, micro-brews, and more. Recently, we delivered a private session at the company where lean blogger Matt Wrye works. Matt converted several of his lessons from the class into

Does your company pay as much attention to wasted time as wasted money? I doubt it. Sure, we can throw around the phrase “time is money” but usually in an attempt to tell someone that they’re wasting our time. We have financial reports, ROI, annualized savings, and mechanism after mechanism